More on internet bandwidth increasing faster than demand:
In SGI's summer issue of its product magazine, Ed McCracken said:
"There's no question that network bandwidth is a major issue. We see computer performance increasing one thousand times between now and the year 2010. Unfortunately, the network hasn't been increasing at that same rate, but we believe that will change, and that network performance might actually start increasing faster than computer performance. We think that network bandwidth will increase dramatically in the next five years due to the application of digital technology to the Net, the effect of competition, and because of the breakdown of monopolies."
Add to his statement the following:
(1) Uniphase uses all sorts of tricks with light, fiber optics, to increase capacity currently by 16 fold, and soon by 40 times.
(2) Intelligent digital compression can be enormously parsimonious with bandwidth. For example, MPEG-2 compression could save enormously with teleconferencing due to the constancy of background. Similarly, first consider transforming voice to word-code, sending the word-codes spoken along with a speech synthesizer specific to the speaking individual, then reconstructing speaker-specific speech on the receiving end. Bandwidth requirement: almost nill.
(3) 3D models running on the client (using Java for example), have extremely reduced bandwidth requirements. Once the model geometry is transmitted, only light, camera, and animation sequence needs to be transmitted. The rendering can be accomplished on the fly on the client.
These are some of the reasons bandwidth will be keeping up with demand, forming the basis of the missing equivalent to Moore's Law.
Incidentally, McCracken also said, "The telecommunications industry is going through a major transformation from analog technology to digital technology. As they do that they'll be spending hundreds of billions of dollars for a variety of improvements to the infrastructure."
A portion of this spending boom will go to WIND as the vendor of choice providing deeply embedded RTOS functionality in just about anything associated with telecommunications. This should help put in focus the importance of WIND's press release today about all the enhanced communications services now being shipped with VxWorks.
Allen |
