For more on the potential of broadband in general and the National Broadband Network in particular, the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society's Annual Report and Symposium presentation is well worth a look.
Three slides from the presentation caught my eye. They capture the importance of concurrency (multiple simultaneous accesses to multiple applications, something I've discussed in this previous post) very well, and also nicely illustrate the wide range of applications that next generation access can support:
"The killer application is...all the applications" - a great quote. The next slide shows the 2007 vision of the connected home, together with its cumulative bandwidth requirements:
...while the next predicts what the same home's requirements will be in 2015:
Interesting to see both increasing requirements of 2007 applications (for example, video streaming requirements are predicted to increase from 400kbps in 2007 to 12Mbps in 2015) as well as new applications and technologies like e-education and femto-cells driving up bandwidth requirements too. This advice from the Info-communications Development Authority of Singapore shows what'a already possible today where higher bandwidths have been deployed.
Some of the new applications next generation access will support we know or can guess about, others we don't know about yet. Social networking is an example of an application which few foresaw, made possible not only by increased bandwidth but also the "always on" nature of broadband connections, as opposed to the days of pay per minute dial up connectivity. Some current applications provide a good signpost for what increased bandwidths will deliver, in terms of making possible ever richer layers of data and interactivity; Google Earth is one such example. However, I'm sure there are plenty of interesting surprises in store for us ahead.