Like many of my ilk, I devote a few quality minutes every day moaning and griping about bandwidth. I just never seem to have enough of the stuff. I see you are nodding. You feel my pain. Good. We will get along famously.

Bandwidth, like Irish weather, is a veritable bottomless pit of disappointment. From babbling baud rates to mighty megabits, it's all a bit of a let down really.

It's always slow. No. slower than that. Like this:

Sloooooowwwwwww.

Now you're talking.

I have selected three possible reasons for this which I will now sally forth through the medium of Emacs for your viewing pleasure.

Reason the first: Bandwidth only appears slow because the market is constantly over-hyping the current technology. Every few months sees some new-fangled form of broadband that promise untold riches in bandwidth 'really soon now'. The market always over-promises and under-delivers. No wonder we spend our time disappointed.

Reason the second: Bandwidth only appears to be slow because the average size of transmitted files has increased so dramatically over the PC boom years. When the rate of bandwidth increase goes beyond the rate at which file sizes are increasing, we will see dramatic improvements in the user experience of bandwidth.

Reason the third: Bandwidth only appears to be slow. It's actually very fast and getting faster all the time. You don't really notice it, but you are getting so much more done now then you used to thanks to increases in bandwidth at your disposal.

There is an element of truth to each of these I think. The second one really worries though. The size of files...how big does a file need to be before you say to yourself "hang on, this file is too big to e-mail?".

In my case, I would have to admit that the answer to that question depends on the ambient bandwidth. For example, if I am on a fast link - a link on which 5M-byte files whizz in and out of the mailserver - then I will send 5M-byte e-mail attachments. I will not give it a second thought. If I'm on a slow link, I don't.

So here is the problem. Our concept of "reasonable size for an e-mail" is greatly influenced by the time it takes to send/receive an e-mail. Conclusion? Well, it appears that we humans have magic transmission speed figures in our heads - mine is about 1 minute 30 seconds. If I can send an e-mail in 1 minute, 30 seconds, it is small enough to go on e-mail. Regardless of its physical size. If I had twice the bandwidth, my psychological figure would still be about 1 minute 30 seconds but now I would send files twice as big.

Do you see what I'm getting at? If all/most of us think like this then bandwidth increases are most likely doomed. We will just send bigger and bigger files up to the limits set by the magic numbers we set for ourselves in our heads.

I hope I'm off base here because if not, today's bandwidth is, in terms of the human experience of it, as good as it gets.

ITworld.com, Ebusiness in the Enterprise

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