Technology Futures

Numerous ISPs, including Google, have begun to advertise and market Internet bandwidth speeds higher than 1 Gig. The availability of faster speeds is not new; some networks began making 10Gig service available several years ago, but it was marketed and priced as a premium service.

What has changed more recently is the cost of 10Gig PON network equipment. Anyone building or expanding a fiber to the home network today is very likely installing the 10GPON equipment because it does not cost appreciably more than the "old" GPON network switches.

Not all ISPs are marketing a full 10Gig connection. Many are offering incremental speed increases over 1 Gig, including 2 Gig, 2.5 Gig, and 5 Gig.

The bigger question is who needs all that bandwidth? For normal residential and work from home use, symmetric Gig Internet is entirely adequate, but we are now in a marketing race to sell faster connections because it sounds "better and faster."

If you have one of those faster fiber connections, you will also have to upgrade the router or switch in your home or business to support those faster speeds. There are now some moderately priced switches that can provide those higher speeds over Cat5e or Cat6 Ethernet cabling. Where this increased speed really becomes useful is going backups to a local NAS (Network Attached Server) and/or large backups to cloud-based services.

Thirty years ago, a salesman from a major network switch company laughed in my face when I told him that every home would be using high speed Ethernet networks....he left my office and never returned. It's amazing how fast the technology has changed and matured.

So Comcast has hilariously complained to the FCC that it is just too darn hard to list all their prices. The "problem" is the mandated broadband label requirement. The label was part of a 2021 Federal law that requires ISPs to use a standard format, similar to what is used to disclose the contents of packaged food, to make it easier for consumers to see what they are paying for (e.g. speed of service) and how much it costs.

The real problem is that Comcast really does not have any published prices. Anyone that has ever called Comcast to try to change or cancel their service knows you can easily spend 45 minutes on the phone with a Comcast rep, who will propose *many* pricing options. Comcast will charge as little or as much as they think a customer will pay.

Here is an interesting article from Ars Technica. A senior software developer has quit and written a lengthy critique of what he views as some challenging internal problems at Google. The Ars Technica article is an interesting summary by itself, but if you follow the link in the article to the original blog post, there is even more detail about Google's challenges. One might infer, after reading this, that Google may not always be the top dog in the Internet world. There was a time when IBM seemed invincible, but the company was near collapse in the early 1990s.

Microsoft's chatbot, rolled out as part of the Bing search engine, seems to have the same program logic as the spaceship computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tom's Hardware has an article with screen shots of several questions and queries that were posed to the AI chat software, and the responses are described as "an existential breakdown."

People are posting so many wrong answers, nonsensical answers, and just vague "press release" style information that I think many people will quickly recognize that the software cannot reliably provide correct and accurate information.

The idea that a piece of software can "think" is regarded by many computer scientists, including me, as a bit silly. It's just code; very complex and sophisticated code, but code nonetheless. We don't even know how are brains really work and store information, so the idea that we can just create some "smart" code is arrogant, to say the least.

The Dreyfus brothers, in 1986, wrote the book "Mind over Machine. The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer." They were skeptical then of the capabilities of AI, and I suspect they still would be today.