ArsGeek

Today I stumbled upon an essay about infinite bandwidth while checking my feeds. Then I wondered what would happen if it was indeed possible to have an infinite amount of data going to and from my computer in a single instant. Here’s what the essay has to say about it:

So, in my mind infinite bandwidth is possible. Some thoughts about what we could do with it include: unlimited High Definition two-way video streaming (not like little YouTube screens, but to video walls), immersive and lifelike collaboration environments (think Second Life on steroids), limitless file transfer and backup (no more burning data to DVDs), real-time photo sharing (grandmothers will love this), and complete data mobility for both personal and work information (regardless of what type of data you have, you can access it from anywhere).

The idea of instantaneous backup transfers is quite interesting. But there are some bad consequences that are currently not thought of, your storage space is not infinite. In my case, I would certainly fill my hard drive and every of my external storage spaces from anything I could find on the web, be it the content of wikipedia, the whole series of shows I want to watch, many pictures or even people playing guitar under the shower (nsfw)¹. Until the idea of infinite storage is there, the infinite bandwidth won’t be as useful as it should.

Anyway, it doesn’t mean that infinite bandwidth should not exist. It only means that either be it really large or infinite, we won’t see the difference. I will let you meditate on this question: “Is our universe really large or infinite?”

_{1. Readers of xkcd will understand.}

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