See our new report “Into the Exacloud” . . . including analysis of:
> Why cloud computing requires a major expansion of wireless spectrum and investment
> An exaflood update: what Mobile, Video, Big Data, and Cloud mean for network traffic
> Plus, a new paradigm for online games, Web video, and cloud software
Have we utterly deluded ourselves? Are we in a technological Dark Age? Here is my analysis in Forbes of Tyler Cowen’s new e-book essay The Great Stagnation, which argues we’ve eaten all the low-hanging fruit and maybe we’ll have to settle for less.
New numbers from Cisco allow us to update our previous comparison of actual Internet usage around the world. We think this is a far more useful metric than the usual “broadband connections per 100 inhabitants” used by the OECD and others to compile the oft-cited world broadband rankings.
What the per capita metric really measures is household size. And because the U.S. has more people in each household than many other nations, we appear worse in those rankings. But as the Phoenix Center has noted, if each OECD nation reached 100% broadband nirvana — i.e., every household in every nation connected — the U.S. would actually fall from 15th to 20th. Residential connections per capita is thus not a very illuminating measure.
But look at the actual Internet traffic generated and consumed in the U.S.
The U.S. far outpaces every other region of the world. Read the rest of this entry »
See our new CircleID commentary on the China-Google dustup and its implications for an open Internet:
China is nowhere near closing for business as it did five centuries ago. One doubts, however, that the Ming emperor knew he was dooming his people for the next couple hundred years, depriving them of the goods and ideas of the coming Industrial Revolution. China’s present day leaders know this history. They know technology. They know turning away from global trade and communication would doom them far more surely than would an open Internet.