Is the (US) Internet Really Slowing? – On my Om

Are we seeing Internet adoption finally get to a saturation point?

More than a decade ago, I wrote an essay about media's future, pointing out that the ubiquity of connectivity would lead to a plethora of choices and demands on our attention. Fast forward to today, that future has come to pass. I have always believed that despite all the hoopla, we live in a world of finite attention, and no matter how much we multiplex our attention with various activities, there is a certain cognitive limit and, more importantly, physical constraints. As Netflix co-founder and former CEO Reed Hastings once famously quipped about competing with other companies: "We actually compete with sleep."

I think the next steps of bandwidth usage will be less about our time and usage, but the devices and capabilities in our homes using much more to serve us. Consider the use case of an LLM that is running in your house, or your own blockchain consensus servers. I run a Gnosis Chain validator and the minimum bandwidth I use is 10 Mbps.