Darren, Thread, re: bandwidth glut
Demand tends to run out of control, quickly, with incremental measures taken
in unlikely places. Here's a clip from an article I read last year concerning
advancements in lasers and optical bandwidth. I think that it makes some
poignant points (see bold) concerning enterprise LANs and WANs which
we should be able to apply to the last mile, as well.
From an InternetWeek article from July, 1998 titled:
The Next Wave Of Lasers Promises Speed And Light
by Jeff Caruso
techweb.com
It's unclear who needs all this bandwidth, however. It doesn't make sense to put
10-gigabit connections on servers if clients are struggling to fill 100 Mbps each.
"If you raise the bar in one part of the network, you have to raise it
everywhere," says Reinier Tuinzing, director of strategic marketing at Intel.
If servers will be going to 10 gigabits in five years, will users start bringing
Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop?
Most industry watchers say that will only happen if the copper implementation
of Gigabit Ethernet-still under development-takes off. Companies are not about
to install fiber optic lines unless there is a really pressing need. Right now, it's
hard to imagine what that need might be.
"You need to have Gigabit Ethernet over copper to make it a viable solution for
the desktop," says Rakefet Kasdin, vice president and general manager of
Ethernet products at 3Com. That will enable 100/1000-Mbps Ethernet cards,
paralleling today's 10/100-Mbps Ethernet devices, in a few years.
At that time, copper Gigabit Ethernet may not be any more expensive than Fast
Ethernet, points out Brent Bilger, vice president of marketing at MMC
Networks.
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