"Filling the pipe" is the tag line for this year's Fiber-to-the-Home Conference, being held this week in Orlando. With a decided focus on content, the show is focused on which services will drive consumers to make the most of their fiber broadband connections. So what are some of the things that will fill the pipe?

In one panel discussion, Sheldon Sitter, GPON program manager for Canada's Telus Communications, said some applications will restore our sense of community, like high-definition videoconferencing to keep in touch with friends and family -- like a residential version of Cisco's big screen "telepresence" app. "It will be always on," Sitter said. "So you'll come through the door and say, 'Anybody home?' And your father, who lives 400 miles away, says, 'Yeah, I'm home.'"

I can't believe I'm alone in thinking that that is the creepiest thing I've heard in a long time. How much would you pay to let your virtual parents (or in-laws, for that matter) move in?

I don't know what applications will fill the broadband pipes of the future. But my bet is that they won't be the ones we think they'll be. I heard plenty of speeches in the late 1990s about the applications that would be driving bandwidth consumption today, and I don't remember anyone saying, "A half-decade from now, millions of Americans will use these fast pipes to watch a tubby 14-year-old Canadian kid jump around in his high school with a golf ball retriever. The image will be grainy and glitchy and poorly framed. But, well, you'll just have to see this kid. It's kind of funny. By 2010, it will have been viewed about a billion times."

How will broadband change our lives in the coming decade? I have no idea. My guess is that some 14-year-old kid is doing it right now, just to goof around. Probably in Canada.

E-mail me at ed.gubbins@penton.com.