If you think back several years, you can easily remember how broadband internet access was touted. The basic idea was that with the increasing rate of transmission offered by broadband access connections, people would become far more productive creatures than they ever had before. They would make massive leaps in research, telecommuting would become an everyday occurence, and the home and workplace would merge forever. Well we've had some time to review. Has this broadband vision become our reality? While broadband has clearly emerged as the leading product for both home and business users, much of the promise of high speed internet has not yet been realized by the average American consumer. Yes people use broadband access more than ever, but its arguable that productivity has been increased.

When businesses originally pictured a popular internet, they expected applications such as video-conferencing to be the big winners. In reality, no one could have expected the true bandwith hogging applications such as music downloading and file sharing would become as millions of people found the power of peer to peer networking. As the advent of broadband spread, more and more users became increasingly affected with virii and spyware. With broadband and always-on connections, the security risks are truly enormous. More resources than ever are now spent policing the internet of the many foul actions that can only occur because of relatively cheap broadband connections. All forms of spam have been able to proliferate over the relatively generous broadband connections, as tightly monitored bandwith became less of an issue than ever in the past.