Then we talked about the impact on the

social -

political -

economic and general

future

Then we talked about how the technology will develop

packets.htm

We talked about the

network computer and how the information utility will take shape.

Now what's next ?

One way or another - enough bandwidth will be provided to inexpensive and tough enough boxes so that all the hard complex stuff will be pushed upstream and voice, video, data and new applications can work the channels to provide news, entertainment, communications, commerce in dramatically different ways.

The big question is how and by whom ?

May 5, 1998 - John Sidgmore
outlines his vision for the
future of global
telecommunication in this

NetWorld+Interop Keynote
speech

Global tele-communications utilities linked by satellites, then ground stations, then optic wires, cables, broad band, wide band, DSL - a global backbone providing service to all of humanity - with solar charged instruments from anywhere to anywhere.

The first world has a billion ready clients, the global market place has a million firms ready to go, the second and third world can add a 100 million new clients a year and a million new firms, local governments, missions and schools, gaming centers and market players as fast as the bandwidth and prices allow.

The global requirements are different from America and the European community. While part of the world is wired - much of the world is not.

The Global communications network must be based on wire-less standards - that will work on wires but do not require them.

Dark Fiber Capacity

By acquiring dark fiber, PSINet will benefit as improvements in the optical-electrical equipment are developed over the next 20 years. By lighting the fiber using currently available wave division multiplexing (WDM) equipment, each fiber will support one OC+192, or four OC-48 fiber loops.

The ten fibers will carry 96 gigabits/second of Internet traffic (or 96 billion bits/second).

Expected improvements using dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment within the next five years is expected to yield throughput of approximately eighty OC-48 circuits per fiber, providing total potential bandwidth on PSINet's east coast Internet ring of approximately 2 terabits/second (2 trillion bits/second). PSINet plans to light the fiber gradually, as needed, using the most current state-of-the-art equipment, and to upgrade the fiber to the maximum speed as bandwidth is needed.

The Bandwidth Tsunami... Last week we explored the exciting (or disturbing) possibility that Moore's Law may turn out to be a piker compared to how bandwidth is now growing -

http://www.digital.com/rcfoc/980504.htm#

The_Bandwidth_of_a . Today, we continue down this road by looking at WorldCom's (the company purchasing MCI) huge Internet backbone.

Their bandwidth capacity isn't "merely" doubling every 18 months (like the semiconductor price-performance which has driven our industry to date), their bandwidth capacity is doubling every 3.5 months!! And WorldCom has experienced this bandwidth growth rate of 1,000 percent per year for the past three years! According to WorldCom COO John Sidgmore in the May Upside (

http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=3512c4520),

"

There's never been an industry or a technology or anything that's had that kind of growth curve." So on one hand we have Internet demand growing at 1,000 percent per year. On the other hand, Sidgmore tells us that WorldCom's voice traffic is growing at 8 percent per year. Following these trends, by 2000 half of all bandwidth will be used for Internet traffic! By 2003, that will grow to 90%. And this growth is neither science fiction nor overly optimistic.

According to Sidgmore, "...[that is] the growth rate today," and "... it could speed up.

The growth we've seen so far in the Internet has been driven completely by adding new subscribers. And we haven't seen anything from audio and video and multimedia yet." In fact, by 2004, Sidgmore expects that the Internet will consume over 99% of the bandwidth in the world.

There will be so much Internet traffic (which will include today's fax and voice traffic) that, "You could argue that we won't even know voice is in there." How is this possible? In the same way that our semiconductors have gotten smaller and faster each year, the bandwidth capacity of a single wire or fiber has been dramatically increasing over the past few years, from T1 (1.54 Mbits/second) speeds, to DS3 (44.7 Mbits/second), to OC+12 (622 Mbits/second). And with the recent introduction of Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing - DWDM, (currently) up to sixteen full-speed data streams can be carried simultaneously on a single fiber by making each stream of light a different color (frequency) -- one fiber can now carry 9,952 Mbits/second (OC+192) worth of data!

But can this possibly continue? According to Sidgmore, to keep WorldCom's economic model moving forward, "We've got to continue to get huge leaps every year, but so far, we've been able to get there." If we consider that Lucent is already experimenting with DWDM systems capable of carrying 100 separate 10,000 Mbits/second data streams on a single fiber (that's 1 terabit/second - enough capacity to carry all of today's Internet traffic on a single fiber -

http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19980302S0058), it seems likely that a world of continuously increasing bandwidth is here to stay. Is this continuously accelerating growth in bandwidth capacity about to make us pine for the "good old days" when Moore's Law "only" doubled things every 18 months? If you believe George Gilder last week and John Sidgmore this week, it does seem very clear that the combination of Moore's Law plus dramatically increasing bandwidth will continue to accelerate the rate at which the Internet changes how we work, how we live, and how we play. Why? According to online music pioneer N2K's Larry Rosen (

http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=351acdc70), "[High bandwidth is] going to happen... It's gonna happen because everybody realizes there's a gold mine in this process.

There's a huge gold mine, and the faster you can get the pipes, the faster you can do the mining."