> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat.<p>Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I predict the opposite. I think we have hit the diminishing returns on bandwidth. People don't even know what to do with residential internet in the 100mbps. We can stream HD video (both up and down)...what else is there. If there are no applications straining at bandwidth limits now, im not sure improving them will make new products. If anything i think the best gains are going to be in latency and in mobile bandwidth. Cheap high speed, no data cap, internet for cell phones would be pretty great. But still i'd consider that incremental. I think its unlikely the next big technology enabler will be the same as the last one.<p>> In 2001, we imagined a 100 Mbps future — and we got Google, a nearly trillion-dollar company.<p>Google was founded in 1998, and that was still the dial-up era. At the time, I was probably thinking a 1mbps future sounded pretty grand and couldn't imagine 100mbps. Heck my internet right now isn't even that fast.