While Internet carriers may fret about Netflix, Hulu and other streaming media services saturating their bandwidth, Internet forefather Vint Cerf has a simple answer for this potential problem: Increase bandwidth exponentially.

Is this satire? Like telling people who want to lose weight to eat less? I mean, it’s a no-brainer solution…

"When you are watching video today, streaming is a very common practice. At gigabit speeds, a video file [can be transferred] faster than you can watch it,” he said. “So rather than [receiving] the bits out in a synchronous way, instead you could download the hour’s worth of video in 15 seconds and watch it at your leisure.”

“It actually puts less stress on the network to have the higher speed of operation,” he said.

Beyond this use, Cerf mentioned no other possible uses of gigabit-rate home broadband, but stressed that people will “find new ways of using capacity that you never thought of."

If the movie is downloaded as opposed to streamed where does the download sit? On your Home Media Server (TiVo, other DVR, etc.) it’s not more convenient for you. The classic case of starting to watch something in one place on one device and then carry on from another gets fucked with this model. Streaming media content is a sensible idea, and is a prerequisite for VoIP and live events.

Overall, do we need better and faster Internet? Yes—but mainly in the core, not as much to consumers (10Mb should be fine for most home users for now)—but the routers and infrastructure at the ISP’s needs to get upgraded and made much more intelligent (the proposal of GBe to the home is akin to helping traffic problems by putting an on-ramp at the end of every street: just doesn’t work).

And “stated no other possible uses”—you kid, right? That one thing of getting a movie that you need 180 minutes to watch downloaded in 15 seconds is -it-? How about making working from home more realistic? Allowing distributed tasks in large projects to be handled virtually? IP telephony and VC stuff? Shared storage pools and multicast and IPv6?

SIgh. The one thing he can think of is the one thing no-one needs. That’s kinda sad.

/rant