Overall network efficiency is relevant to UFB uptake. I have X GB of media. With ADSL I cannot practically upload this to the "cloud". With fibre or VDSL I can. You can claim this will not be a driver for UFB uptake all you like. I can tell you from personal experience that it is.
Compression technology is of little value unless it is standardised. The work is not going on in the browsers, it's going on in standards working groups. I never said improvements couldn't be made. But if you think improvements to compression algorithms will be equivalent to a 10x increase in upload bandwidth then you are naive or delusional or both.
FireFox is open source. Point me to the Bugzilla entry where they are working on improved compression.
I never said we just need a larger pipe. I do however say we absolutely do need a larger pipe. It doesn't matter how good your compression is or how clever your code is there are absolute minimum bandwidth requirements for transmitting data. It is important to note that improvements to software are largely out of our hands - no compression algorithm is useful unless it is supported at both the source and the destination. What use is a new compression algorithm if YouTube still requires you to upload files in mpeg4 format? Network infrastructure OTOH provides immediate benefit to all users and does not require cooperation from the other end.
It is accurate that increased computing power enables the use of algorithms that have higher compression ratios. It is misleading to imply that the relationship is linear or unbounded. There is an absolute limit to the amount of compression that can be achieved for a given domain of source data. See Shannon's source coding theorem.
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I have a masters degree in computing and mathematical sciences. I have worked in the industry for 15 years. You speak like someone who is self taught, has a incomplete understanding of what they are talking about, and does not have a strong understanding of information theory. You have an incredibly unrealistic idea of what software development in the real world is like.