PDF of this tutorial| You think computer prices are plummeting? Wait till you see what happens to bandwidth. Infinite processing power will get you only so far with limited bandwidth. But the coming era of nearly free bandwidth will liberate the computer to fulfill its powers. —Andrew Grove, CEO, Intel |
While computing power and affordability are expanding at a dramatic rate, they are doing so in a relatively steady fashion. On the other hand, advances in telecommunications promise even greater change of a discontinuous nature—we will see an explosion of bandwidth in coming years that will dwarf anything seen in the past.
Improvements in bandwidth had been slow and steady, but, driven by powerful market dynamics, quantum advances in the delivery of broadband services are emerging. While fiber-optic lines marked a dramatic increase in the backbone capacity of long-distance networks, recent advances in dense wave multiplexers, digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, and cable modems herald a paradigm shift in the types of information that can move across networks. A fitting analogy for this explosion in digital transport capacity can be seen in the development of the PC industry. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates founded his company on the keen observation that computing power, once prohibitively expensive, would become cheap. The resulting shift from centralized to distributed processing created a paradigm shift in the computer industry. When similar improvements are created in the price/performance ratio of bandwidth, parallel shifts in the communications industry are inevitable.
As a result of anticipated growth in telecommunications bandwidths, some observers predict a reversal of the recent decentralizing of computing power. When the network runs faster than the processors and buses in the PC, the computer hollows out. The network becomes the bus, and any set of interconnected processors and memories can become a computer regardless of their location.
Through improvements in technology, computer speeds will rise about a hundredfold, while bandwidth increases a thousandfold or more. Under these circumstances, the winners will be the companies that learn to use bandwidth in combination with (and sometimes as a substitute for) computer processing and switching.
