Just Like the Internet You See in the Movies

Marty Kaplan
HuffPost

No Web sites that choke your browser. No waiting for YouTube clips to buffer. No email attachments too big to send. No files that take forever to download. No "Loading - please wait" messages, or spinning beach balls, or slowwwwly lengthening bars meant to tame your mounting impatience.

That's how the Internet works in the movies. On laptops and cell phones and the rest of the small screens we watch on the big screen, the Internet is a tantalizingly perfected version of the hiccupping marvel we know now.

In a handful of years at most, the blinding speed and reliability we see in the movies will be available here in reality. Too bad it won't be available on the Internet.

Last week, Google and Verizon announced their plans for the future. Their message was that if you want to do the cool stuff in real life that Tom Cruise and Matt Damon do online in the movies, you're going to have to buy a subscription to the other Internet, the superduper one that the telecom and wireless giants are going to build next.

(More here.)