The internet is already considered by many people to be an essential part of everyone’s life and not having access to it can put you at a great disadvantage.

In recent years governments in the western world have gone to great lengths to connect all of their populaces to a high speed internet connection, even in the remoter regions, as people have come to demand access to the internet, in much the same way as they demand running water.

As well as connecting to the internet through their phone lines, people can now access the internet on mobile devices like their smart phones and tablet devices. The internet has become ubiquitous and essential.

Every year people are demanding faster and faster connections, as people look to the internet more and more as a reliable source of entertainment and business. Fibre optic broadband is heralding a new age of superfast broadband into people’s homes and offices and with it may come an even more essential utility, remote processing power.

In the future processing power may become a utility just like electricity. In this brave new world you would access this processing power through cheap, low-specification terminals; all of your documents and data would be securely stored externally, online; and all the operations on them will be carried out by software provided, run and upgraded by online application providers, perhaps Google. Like any other utility, the more processing power you use, the more you will pay for it - and vice versa.

This future is not as far away as you might think, you probably already store a lot of your data online, be it in email inboxes, drop box accounts or new services like Apple’s iCloud. The concept of running software remotely is something familiar to anyone that has ever used the remote desktop function in windows and running software remotely is already being commercially sold by video games companies like OnLive.

What will be essential to the development of this technology will be the necessity to connect everyone to fibre optic broadband, as a large bandwidth would be essential in ensuring that computers could communicate rapidly across the internet.

The possibilities of this new technology could be astonishing. Imagine just a simple, small, basic computer terminal connected through fibre optic broadband to an online network of supercomputers. You could call upon as much processing power as you need, to run whatever program you want, from the latest computer games to modelling your own weather forecast.

Fiona Roy writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.