A river runs through it

I am currently sitting in the press room at Intel`s Developer Forum in San Francisco, typing out a few e-mails and downloading some MP3s in the background (those freeware MP3s, of course). I`m checking and sending mail, sharing files, getting Linux drivers, and downloading apps from Download.com.

These people are drowning in bandwidth. There`s too much to appreciate it. There`s too much to even comprehend it.

Jason Norwood-Young, technology editor, ITWeb

The great thing about this is that my laptop does not have a single wire coming out of it. I can wander around the press room, nabbing the comfy couch when it opens up or cruise over to a table to do an interview without ever losing my connection. In fact, the entire conference centre is wired for wireless, and I love it.

The wonder does not end there, however. Over this wireless network, I have been able to download files at over 300kb a second. Web pages open up instantaneously. Music and video both stream perfectly. A 100MB file is no barrier; it only takes a few minutes to download. Most files have downloaded before the dialogue box is displayed. According to the chaps running the network, there is a 45Mb pipe out to the Internet, and the LAN is an 11Mb 802.11b set-up. It represents speeds that you are unlikely to have ever seen in SA.

It`s like living in a desert all your life, and then coming upon the sea. At first you`re amazed, then you`re jealous, then you experience it and become accustomed to it, and finally you don`t only want it, you need it.

This type of experience is an eye-opener for a South African who praises the gods of the Net when he hits 1kb, and 300kb is the stuff of myths and legends.

Talking to delegates from the UK, US and UAE, one starts to realise how incredibly cheap bandwidth is everywhere else in the world. One journalist from the UAE spends about R600 on her permanent DSL connection. All of the German journalists work from here on their home machines, using remote desktops hooked up to ADSL. The performance is impeccable.

Yet in his keynote yesterday Intel CEO Craig Barrett lamented the abysmally slow performance of broadband to the home. Intel gave some great multimedia demos which require 1Gb pipes to the house, as though this was a common practice. These people are drowning in bandwidth. There`s too much to appreciate it. There`s too much to even comprehend it.

I was speaking to a fellow South African about it, and he commented: "You know, we`re being screwed."

It would be nice if we could expect a little river in our bandwidth desert in SA.