Netflix CEO: In Ten Years, “We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home”

"All" is just a wee bit hyperbolic.<p>I live in a rural county outside of Lawrence, KS. The fastest 'net connection I can get is Verizon 3G. In a decade, I'll be lucky if WiMax has made its way out that far, but there's absolutely no reason why a telco would run a physical pipe out to me. It'd be miles of cable/fiber with me and my chickens on the other end of it.<p>People who live in cities and tech hubs forget the fact that there's a <i>lot</i> of open space in this country. Much of the population may very well might have gigabit in a decade, but there'll always be a portion of the population who just live too far out in the sticks.

How odd to see a prediction like this on the same day that AT&#38;T announced new bandwidth caps for its residential broadband services. Which some industry watchers speculate is partly intended precisely to impair streaming video services. Like Netflix.<p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/03/technology/att_broadband_caps/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/03/technology/att_broadband_cap...</a>

Fast internet does very little good when we have 250 Gb/month transfer limits imposed on us by Comcast (Xfinity) and AT&#38;T. Those companies are preventing progress with such caps.

I see a future where the country is increasingly segregated in terms of bandwidth and connectivity... we're already seeing this in some areas, but expect it to accelerate.<p>Large cities will be wired for gigabit connections in the home and LTE wireless while rural areas will be increasingly left behind with connections averaging in the single megabits.<p>As computing power and bandwidth requirements accelerate, these areas of the country will be affected disproportionately.

Maybe if Comcast goes bankrupt and gets replaced with set of small companies. Otherwise, I doubt it is in business interest for large cable and teleco companies to increase bandwidth. Profit and increasing bandwidth don't go together when you have monopoly.

I live in an area (not far from Sacramento) where half of the residents are still on dialup because there's nothing else available.<p>Just a data point.

He's off by an order of magnitude. It took about 10 years for my cable internet to go from 100KB/s to 1MB/s where it stands now (this is in Canada). That's a 10 fold increase in 10 years, not 100 which he is predicting. So by 2021 I expect to have 10MB/s, not 100ish. And unless some anti-UBB legislation gets passed I also expect my bandwidth cap to still be where it is today (90GB/mo).

I seriously doubt it. Perhaps 50-100Mbit/sec which is obtainable using the cable/telco infrastructure already in place. I don't see any killer apps on the horizon that will actually require a gigabit of bandwidth into the home. Even today you can get pretty good HD video over most residential broadband connections. Even if we double or triple the resolution/bit rate the math still doesn't work out. Other than people lusting over a bigger number what's going to justify anyone spending tens of billions of dollars to make this happen in the next 10 years?

At the Verizon store today, their "Blazingly Fast" connection was 0.2mbps on speedtest. We all know technology exists to go much faster than that, but it is the politics of the companies involved that is slowing everyone down. Consider the other news story submitted to HN recently about 1Gbps coming to Chattanooga not Verizon, not Comcast, but the community-owned EPB. Whether it is here in 10 years will depend not on the tech, but on the companies so it could come sooner than 2021 if there is a shift with the sources' understanding.

Moore's law is an observation, whereas Shannon's law is basic physics. Shannon's law dictates the maximum bandwidth over a physical communication link. Telephone wires and over-the-air solutions aren't going to cut it. The only two was to get Gigabit Ethernet to the home are optical fiber and coaxial cable. Most communities won't be able to afford fiber installations, so Netflix and other streaming sources will be 100% at the mercy of Comcast and Cablevision. The future of home entertainment is the cable companies, not Netflix.

Netflix, of course, needs this (or some fraction of it) to be true. Meanwhile, all the current (lazy, inept, consumer-hostile, mediocre) bandwidth providers are going to try to fuck them out of the game.<p>So a big part of me wonders what Netflix is working on behind the scenes to secure their future from a bandwidth perspective. This is a company that has always been so proactive – I have a hard time believing they're twiddling their thumbs and hoping that AT&#38;T, Comcast and other telecom companies will be menschy guys.<p>What <i>could</i> they do? I know very little about large scale networking. Is there some supply-side critical path that a company like Comcast <i>needs</i> that Netflix could buy for leverage? On the consumer end, is it reasonable to imagine them reselling bandwidth to end-users under terms that favor their business, thus spurring competition?<p>Everyone who controls the consumer side of bandwidth seems to be an asshole of one flavor or another – perhaps Netflix's needs could align with consumers in such a way as to change that.

As has been mentioned, there are many communities who still are only served by dialup, or slow-ish cable/dsl connections.<p>I wonder if the telecoms are waiting to roll out fiber optics to the everybody, and potentially skipping over installing the intermediary fast dsl/cable connections for the rural communities.

Sometimes it feels like we don't even have a Gigabit to our <i>country</i>, even if we were allowed to use Netflix...<p>(New Zealand)

How many servers will it take to push everyone data to a billion people all trying to pull data at a gigabit per second?

I'm confused whether to feel elated, sad or hopeful at the 10 year timeframe.

Canadian ISPs say: You can already download 1 Gigabit. 2 Gigabits are $25.

In Australia we may have it some time in the next 30 years after our multi-hundred-billion dollar FTTP program is complete (I include modest 400% time and cost overruns in my prediction).

This is what I love about Netflix, both their CEO and from Adrian Cockcroft.<p>They are visionaries who are really thinking in terms of 5 and ten years out.<p>Their business model WRT IT is fantastic, they KNOW that computing is a commodity utility that Netflix has no business being in - they are a content provider.<p>They are effectively and very successfully both consuming cloud computing <i>and</i> driving its direction.<p>If you look at Adrian's presentations on the subject - they clearly have a solid understanding of their technical needs to support a visionary content delivery model.<p>This is why Netflix will succeed and dominate in the future.<p>They can focus on the way that content is successfully delivered via IP -- they are already YEARS ahead of other players in this perspective, where CATV broadcasters have lots of legacy debt.<p>We have already seen the first small battles in the space with respect to net neutrality/QOS manipulations from carriers such as Comcast.<p>Further, the added benefit is that companies like Amazon benefit from the input and partnerships with Netflix allowing both offerings to co-mature through situations like last weeks outages.<p>What will be interesting is to see the product offerings from Netflix expand.<p>Wait till we hear they bought a movie studio. They are doing a show - other content creation ventures are sure to be close behind as the biggest issues they have are licensing.<p>When they own the license to content delivered over their amazingly efficient delivery infrastructure a new content era exists.<p>Wait until they offer content hosting and delivery via enterprise accounts. Imagine when they can host and deliver content for channels with a whitelabel service -- or they create a video CDN for content.<p>They should, if they already are not, work to foster and host indie movie/docu content and in return get a better voice on the licensing models of such content.