There was a lot of talk at the recent shop.org Annual Summit about how broadband has finally achieved critical mass and how this supposed web 2.0 revolution is poised to take advantage of this trend. 50% of internet homes are now broadband, and on average more than 80% of online purchases are made via broadband connections.

One of the conference’s keynote speakers suggested that the broadband penetration would increase to at least 80% of all internet homes by 2010 (perhaps a conservative estimate as moderate-speed DSL can already be had in many markets for around the same price as dialup). This statistic was used to suggest that the time has finally come to get agressive about targeting broadband customers.

I, however, see a different situation on the horizon; in 2010 when those dialup holdovers are finally embracing what we currently consider to be broadband, the speeds us early adopters will be using will be far, far faster than what we considering today.

Already, Verizon offers a 768k DSL product and a 15MB FIOS product, and Comcast just announced a 16MB product called Blast!; if trend continues this gap will continue to grow. Applications, graphics and videos that we currently consider for the top of the line “broadband” users will become the lowest common denomenator, and perhaps HD imagery and video will be the expectation of “high” broadband users (the early adopters).

Surely we should embrace the broadband of now and continue to monitor its progress, however as the details change, we also must keep in mind that although the details may change, the challenges may remain the same.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 11:46 am and is filed under events, Shop.org Summit '06, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.