The price of hardware is a red herring. All the other ethernet hardware was also pricey at start and then with volume became cheap. The cost and volume normally develop hand in hand (into opposite directions).
And yes, our apps adapted to working with less bandwidth. We don't know what kind of apps and computing we would have in the alternative universe where the norm would have been 10G connections 10 years ago.
For example lots of P2P stuff has been badly hampered by performance problems resulting in the centralization of the net in hands of big players.
There are lots of hard problems resulting from bad connectivity that result in big $$ tech funneling traditional net uses onto their services, by investing engineering efforts (and complexity) into heroic engineering feats to work around the bad connectivity. The complexity means high barrier to entry to compete with them. Codecs yes but also clever distributed caching, cloud storage, UIs that predict what the user does next, video calls have to go through corporate encoding/multiplexing proxies instead of p2p, file sharing has to be of the hard "sync most likely needed needed files" variety with proprietary server side smarts, instead of just "mount remote share", etc.
And yes, our apps adapted to working with less bandwidth. We don't know what kind of apps and computing we would have in the alternative universe where the norm would have been 10G connections 10 years ago.
For example lots of P2P stuff has been badly hampered by performance problems resulting in the centralization of the net in hands of big players.
There are lots of hard problems resulting from bad connectivity that result in big $$ tech funneling traditional net uses onto their services, by investing engineering efforts (and complexity) into heroic engineering feats to work around the bad connectivity. The complexity means high barrier to entry to compete with them. Codecs yes but also clever distributed caching, cloud storage, UIs that predict what the user does next, video calls have to go through corporate encoding/multiplexing proxies instead of p2p, file sharing has to be of the hard "sync most likely needed needed files" variety with proprietary server side smarts, instead of just "mount remote share", etc.