Recently Verizon announced the debut of a new speed of service for FiOS customers called the 20/20 plan promising 20 Mbps downloads AND 20 Mbps uploads.

This came as a shock to many because this completely annihilates the closest broadband competitor whether it is Cable or DSL as 20/20 Mbps is honestly much faster. This means major changes in the coming monthsyears of Internet usage.

Awhile back I was having conversations surrounding the coming Internet boon of bandwidth given the amount of fiber that was not being used in the US and across the globe. Everyone knows that Google has been buying up dark fiber over the past few years as well, all leading towards what I consider SuperBand speeds.

What are the implications of such speeds?

Some things to consider of course are piracy and accountability. What if on a 100 Mbps download connection an entire copyrighted film is available on a website. Simply by loading the website you have inadvertently broken copyright laws simply by following a link, or navigating to the site directly. The same goes for multiple MP3′s being available on a site. By simply visiting the page you may have cached the data on your machine ready to be played. (Some would argue that you would have to take some form of action to download the file but bear with me here:) This would of course be unintentional – but who is to blame?

If the RIAA or MPAA went after the user they could blame the site owner. If they went after the site owner, they could simply blame the ISP for allowing backup storage. If they went after the ISP they may point blame back at the user. This endless loop tells us a few things; Copyright may be broken, accountability becomes harder to pin down in a SuperBand environment, and the future of file, music, video, and all digital material is about to change dramatically.

What does this mean for advertising?

Imagine for a moment that instead of a part of movie being available on iTunes – you could watch it right away in a mouseover banner. What would this mean for video distribution in general?

Could hyper rich media ads be in the near future? Ads within video are already a reality today. Imagine if a flash banner held the entire contents of a Car showroom in a virtual mouseover space. Would a new car minisite be necessary? Maybe minisites will become so portable, they may live in multiple places on the web.

“Embedability” becomes a real term.

Currently there are 93,000+ results for “embeddability” in Google. I expect this number to skyrocket.

What is “Embeddability”?

It is the act of embedding a clip, video, sound, or other form of content within a snippet of code to be presented elsewhere, most likely within another website. The “Embeddability” of content will determine how effective and how portable it will become. Think of Embeddability as a synonym for Viral Campaigns or Virility .

These are just my preliminary thoughts on such high speed data transfer rates and I would love to hear what others thoughts are as well…

Continue to watch this space for more discussion surrounding Superband.

[tags] Verizon, Marketing.fm, Marketing 2.0, SuperBand, Verizon 20/20, Fiber Optics [/tags]