Sometimes, what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls the “ever-increasing rate of technology” is scary. (Who, exactly, wants to live forever? Or grant robots the same rights as humans?) But when singularity—the theory that technology will improve exponentially until it reaches a state of unprecedented progress—quickens the Internet’s pace by a hundredfold, I will gladly drink Kurzweil’s Kool-Aid. Scientists from the University of Sydney have inadvertently demonstrated this theory by making the Web 60 times faster than current top-notch speeds, and promising to raise that to 100 times in the near future.
This seldom gets mentioned but the dirty little secret is that bandwidth for most ordinary web sites is controlled by how much the site wants to pay for it. Every webhost has a pay-per-gigabyte per second plan. Notice how even though you often can download large files from selected sources at speeds around 500 to 1000 kbytes/second for a typical cable connection (those sites who pay the likes of Akamai to handle such feeds) the actual loading of most sites is often limited to a couple of hundred kbytes per second at most. It gets worse for sites that are dynamically constructed, namely just about any media outlet, e.g. the New York Times, or anyone using a content management system, since the server has to build the page and then the web server has to send it out. That all takes a lot of horsepower and that's where the real bottlenecks are. On top of which sites with heavy advertising have to fetch that third party stuff and send it along too. Vast improvements in network delivery speed will really be felt for the those downloading huge files, or using streaming video from Akamai, et al.
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