A few thoughts from a lurker on the bandwidth glut in 2003:
IMHO that the perception of a bandwidth glut and the reality of an ever-increasing bandwidth availability are both necessities in order to move toward or achieve the "dumb as a stone" network concept.
I feel that the perception of more bandwidth soon becoming available at the same time as technological and economic realities make it possible to make use of that extra bandwidth which has just previously become available, are the necessary impetus to further reduce costs, to make bandwidth even more of a "commodity item", to force development of new systems (hardware and software) that allow more flexible uses of bandwidth, and to then self-perpetuate this cycle.
As the cycle continues, the implication is that not only will more bandwidth be used (and needed), but that its uses will become inseparable from each other, thereby resulting in a network that starts to become more and more oblivious and knows less and less of the detail of what it itself is doing at any particular time or point in physical or frequency space, resulting in transmission technologies that don't care what is happening at any particular time or point, resulting in a dumber and dumber and more serviceable and more serviceable network.
The expansion of the voice telephone network's traffic levels as a social and business phenomenon came not only from better technology (call quality and ease of use), and not only from lower prices, but also from the availability of apparently surplus capacity (a capacity glut) so that it became people's perception that it was now so much easier to place a call, rather than communicate in any other manner.
I would also suspect that as bandwidth and communication capability move toward this perception of "beneficial glut", and the cost of carrying and moving information recedes toward zero, we will not only see an appetite for new services such as those that Clark has enumerated, but that we will also see a migration of our concepts of where major IT functional capabilities become resident; e.g., huge information storage utilities, specialized processor utilities accessible through the network to many individual PC's and terminals, "dumber and dumber" terminals or "information appliances" that rely more and more on other items at other points along the "edges" of the network and not having to be terribly concerned about the ability to access them through the network, etc.
Just my $.02.
Steve |
