I assume some people who read this column need some background on the bandwidth issue, and the refrain needs to be sung occasionally to cut through the silly hype about the future of the internet. Bandwidth is a beautiful thing. Rather, having enough of it is. Of course, it's not that simple.
Several factors contribute to the net's latency.
No one questions, however, that having T1 capacity bandwidth for each individual home user would allow us to greatly enhance the online game experience. And since speed is a necessary component to playing many games on the net, we'll also buy the fastest modem available. Decreasing the lag time between issuing a command to a game server and receiving a response is of paramount importance to us. That is probably more than most modem users ever wanted to know about that particular piece of equipment. For all intents and purposes, speed is what they see or don't see on the internet, and the difference between what they do see and don't see is all they really care about.