You probably have broadband Internet access at home, and as it turns out, you’re not alone. In fact, according to a Consultancy Park study, half of all American households have broadband, explaining the popularity of YouTube and other bandwidth-heavy Internet content. It’s a small wonder that the likes of dial-up will soon be nothing but memories.
While it’s great that you can get a 6MB pipe to your house via Cable, though, it becomes a double-edged sword, because of the sheer glut of traffic it creates: when the Internet was designed, the engineers did not have anything like the diffused network we have now in mind. Thus the innards of the Internet do indeed get overloaded from time to time. Not that it’s a big problem, backbone operators are taking strides in fixing the problem, but it is something to think about next time you get mad at Comcast because it’s taking a whole 22 minutes to download the latest episode of Heroes. Just something to put into your brains on this day off.
Half of all US households will have braodband this year [Ars Technica]