"Whereas unspent gas can be stored, electricity and bandwidth are consumables that depreciate at the speed of light, use it or lose it, so to speak."
What is this "it," exactly, that is lost? I'll get mildly semantic here, but it's good for clearing the air around some of these terms that we kick around every day.
"It" all comes back to electricity and capital outlays for transmission systems, i.e., hardware equipment and software, no matter what medium we're discussing.
Even so-called "all-optical" systems derive their excitation from electricity at the root. So do micro-wave radios and infrareds. All forms of so-called bandwidth are abstractions of electricity, in one way or another. So, in this manner, bandwidth is already tied in a material way to one of the other commodities you mentioned: Electricity. Does it follow, then, that if we can store electricity in batteries and other storage cells, that we could also store bandwidth? Yes, except for the depreciation of the battery itself, which is a losing proposition if you don't at some point use it, too ;-)
"Bandwidth" is one of the most abused terms in hi-tech discussions today, save, possibly, for one of its derivatives: "broadband." There are no bits that one collects in a bucket. Decibels don't flow. Gigabits dissipate in a light bulb (dummy load) as readily as they are read by a system processor card.
All bandwidth derives from a system of transducers, converting electrical energy to usually-very-high frequency alternating current, and from there any number of interactions and waveform manipulations are possible that result in the effect known as electronic information transmission.
But it's the capital depreciation and efficiencies of electronic systems, not bandwidth, per se, that we measure. The resulting number of bits derived from the system is a measure of its efficiency. Assuming, of course, that those bits can be sold, which was your point.
In terms of total capital divided by 60 (months), we see how much a system has either begun to pay for itself, or how heavily it weighs on the wrong side of the balance sheet. It's about the number of bits that can be produced and delivered per depreciated dollar. And in that respect your adage, "use it or lose it," applies.
Depreciation is measured by the second, here. But bandwidth is, well, only the width of a band, as a measure of the range of frequencies between the low- and high- frequency cutoffs of a channel. If a channel begins at 2 MHz and tops out at 2.5 MHz, its bandwidth is 500 KHz. It exists whether it is used or not. One can't say the same for data, which is measured in bits, or throughput. Now, whether I can monetize "it" as a provider, if no one is buying "time" on my "system," even if said time is sporadic and on demand, then that's another story. Even if the term "throughput" were used here instead of bandwidth it would also be suspect, and probably semantically incorrect. In fact, when it comes to the adage use it or lose it, "throughput" would be an oxymoron, if it were used, because you could not have throughput and still not use it. |
