It's not the bandwidth, it's the ports and the processing. You can have all the bandwidth glut in the universe, and you still couldn't connect to the candy store across the street, unless you have ports into the network.
Box ports 'n processing are expensive. Bandwidth itself, as a function of optical depth, is dirt cheap. But bandwidth is useless without the box ports.
Yes, if you want to get down to a semantic view, bandwidth couldn't even exist without the ports. Actually, bandwidth receives many of its attributes, its definition and "width," at the port level. But that's my whole point. Today, fiber optic spectrum itself represents a veritable ether which is near-free, and accessing that ether is key. You access the ether through box port$. |
