| jfttad |
Just a load of wasted fibre The "Industrial Age" was all about "power" -- the price of a kilowatt of electricity dropped from $4,000 to 5-cents (except in California...) The "Digital Age" might be all about "switches" -- the on/off transistors that power our computers. Similar to the trend of the price of electricity, the price of a transistor dropped from $5.00 in the mid-1960s to the point where you can now by millions of transistors (in an integrated circuit) for about that same price. Today's computer programs think nothing of "wasting processing power" (consider how many "idle" cycles a typical PC's operating system wastes every day, just waiting to do your bidding.) So where to we go next? It may be that we'll begin "wasting bandwidth." We currently
have more fibre buried and strung across the oceans, than the distance
between the Earth and the Sun! And according to the June 25 TheStar.com
(http://thestar.ca/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/ This glut of fibre has dramatically reduced the cost of moving data -- "a 10-year contract for a phone line that can carry nearly 600 conversations has fallen to $1.8 million, from $12 million in 1999." Of course this is very hard on many telecommunications companies (http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/invest/2001-06-25-dot-com-fallout.htm and http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-6435677.html?tag=dd.ne.dht.nl-hed.0), but this level of competition, with prices for bandwidth falling ten-times in less than two years, is providing us with a new resource just waiting for someone to figure out how best to "waste" it -- the "killer app," if you will, for the next round of opportunities. By the way, it seems likely that we're going to be able to pack MUCH more data into each and every one of those tiny fibre strands. Recent research from Bell Labs suggests that the theoretical limit for the amount of information that can be carried by one fibre is 100 terabits/second. One hundred terabits per second, on every hair-thin glass fibre. It boggles the mind. (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-6403460.html?tag=dd.ne.dht.nl-hed.0) Now, if we can only extend this bulk bandwidth across the "last mile..." So -- with backbone bandwidth capacity exploding (though additional fibre, and by making far better use of each fibre), and with the cost for such bandwidth sinking, will the next round of innovation revolve around "wasting bandwidth"? There's precedent -- we saw this first with electricity, and later with compute cycles -- we do always seem to find ways to consume whatever we have in "oversupply." We've experienced how "wasting" power, and then transistors, has changed the world -- how might "wasting bandwidth" further change how we work, live, and play...? Jeffery R Harrow This is exclusive to it@tt. Excerpted from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing", a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy Group at Compaq Computer Inc. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc. Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2001, Compaq Computer Corp. All Rights Reserved. |
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