MFS WorldCom/WilTel/LDDS

Thu Aug 29 21:03:16 UTC 1996

Vadim Antonov writes:
> Perry E. Metzger <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
> 
> >Raw bandwidth is inherently cheap. Undersea lines are even fairly
> >cheap, except nasty government price fixing keeps them
> >expensive. Switching equipment is expensive right now but Moore's Law
> >takes care of that over the years.
> 
> Excuse me, but bandwidth demand doubles in about half year,
> while Moore's law is that semiconductor capacity doubles every
> 2 years.  There's no indication that this will change any time
> soon.
> 
> Nice brick wall :)

I doubt it. The curve is racing upward now because of all the people
who are suddenly connecting to the net. Once a large fraction of them
are on the curve will slow dramatically -- demand for bandwidth will
continue to increase, but only as fast as the customers can eat it,
which is by definition related to how fast their equipment runs.

This whole thing is very reminiscent of what happened with fax machine
production a decade or so ago, and what happened with phone installs
about a century ago.

There will be some problems between now and the time things slow down,
but...

Perry