I agree completely. We just need more bandwidth to more homes. I think a lot of people would like an email appliance that someone else administers. Some place where their data will be cared for by professionals. Sure they will have less freedom to do whatever they want including shoot themselves in the foot but I bet there are a lot of people who would happily make the trade. We keep hearing about all of these people who want their ocmputer to "just work". Once we get more bandwidth I think we are going to see a lot more net based services. I would like to be able to sell a dumb piece of hardware that would boot off the net and run everything off of my servers in my datacenter leaving as little as possible to go wrong on the client end.
Here in KC, Time Warner has 5Mb coming into the house, Everest offers a tiered system that can provide up to 3MB, and of course the normal DSL offerings. I am not sure what the 3 other cable companies are offering in their service areas, but TW dominates the metro. I know that the pipe may not support that outside their network, but they could make such an offering. As a matter of fact I am surprised that with AOL on their name, TW hasn't started doing this. This is exactly the market AOL has always satisfied. They leased a wireless setup for $5 a month. My dad used this, and was happy with the price. I showed him how much it would cost, and that even for an expensive setup, the costs would be recouped in around a year. He explained that he liked being able to call TW with his problems, and save his calls to me for more personal or technically challenging problems. He didn't want me to cringe when the caller id had his name on it. I would venture that he is not alone in wanting to avoid harassing his technically knowledgeable friend of family member. He likened it to this. "Would you expect a friend who was a real estate agent to sell your house for free." I have to admit I was shocked when my wife's stepmother came over to our house a week after we bought it, and handed us an envelope containing her commission on the deal. I never expected her to do that. She gets free computer help without any complaints, well at least not within ear shot.
-- "If the fans don't come out to the ball park, you can't stop them." --Yogi Bera -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
