What would happen if network speed was driven by usage rather than fixed provisioning?
That’s the question on the floor of the Berkman Center Fellows meeting I’m attending right now. (Or the ceiling, which is where I am, via teleconferencing speakers.) We’re so used to thinking of connectivity, and bandwidth, as something entirely controlled by the supply-side.
But what happens when we actually respect the power of the marketplace? What happens when the supply side listens to, and responds to, and provisions against, individual customer demand? Instead of broadband, call it…um, flexband.
The supply side would get a lot more business, wouldn’t ya think?
Rather than the few uses suppliers can imagine (TV, voip, downloads), there would be an infinite variety of uses (games, offsite storage, business services, whatever).
Obviously, this requires VRM equippage.
What would that be?