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To: jghutchison who wrote (9347)	7/13/2000 8:30:33 AM
From: jghutchison	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12623

Excessive Bandwidth Back in February, I posted a white paper here on this site, where I emphatically stated that there would be no bandwidth glut, at least during my lifetime. A few people take issue with that point. Some may have been reading George Gilder's philosophy on the matter which presupposes a bandwidth glut and technology following that scenario. The following article by Lightreading excerpts a report from Professor David Payne (coinventor of the erbium doped optical amplifier) which has some profound thoughts on the matter. All in support of my initial thesis. Jack Hutchison PREVIOUS NEWS ANALYSIS JULY 12, 2000 Bandwidth Bonanza "Won't Happen" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Developments in DWDM in recent years have given the impression that the cost of providing bandwidth will soon be so low that there’ll be no point in making a big song and dance about using it efficiently. Guess what? That’s dead wrong, according to a leading light in optical research, Professor David Payne, head of the Optoelectronics Research Center at the University of Southampton in the UK. Payne says it’s vitally important to use bandwidth efficiently because we’re going to run out of it surprisingly fast. “Bandwidth is like health care. You can never have enough,” says Payne, one of the inventors of the Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier. Payne bases his argument on supply and demand calculations that illustrate that growth of Internet traffic will overwhelm telecom infrastructure within the foreseeable future. On the supply side, he sees the following developments boosting bandwidths: - the average cable will have 128 fibers rather than 8 - the number of wavelengths per fiber will rise from 1 to 512 - the bandwidth per wavelength will increase from 2.5 to 40 Gbit/s - mesh will replace ring topologies doubling effective capacity When all of these effects are multiplied together, they add up to a 204,517 fold increase in the overall capacity of the average telecom network. More than enough for anything? Not so, says Payne, who reckons all of that huge amount of extra capacity will be used up within four years if Internet traffic volumes continue growing at their current rate. Right now, volumes are doubling every 100 days in English-speaking countries, according to Payne, who says its every 150 days elsewhere. There's a strong likelihood that the this rate will increase in the future, as broadband access technologies such as DSL (digital subscriber line) and cable modems become more widely deployed. It’s tough to believe that merely doubling Internet traffic every 100 days would create such a problem, but Payne has a way of illustrating the effect, using an example of grains of rice and a chequer board. If a single grain of rice was put on the first square and the quantity was successively doubled on each subsequent square, the last square on the board would have to accommodate more than 18 million, million, million grains of rice, enough to cover the whole of the UK to a depth of more than 30ft, according to Payne. Payne notes that future developments in telecom aren’t likely to put off the capacity crunch for very long. The latest fiber developments from Lucent Technologies, Inc, for instance, might mean that DWDM systems can be cranked up to deliver another four fold increase in capacity – equivalent to a mere 400 extra days of Internet traffic growth. Hogwash? It sounds like it if you consider how much extra bandwidth an individual could use. If, say, the number of people using the Internet increased 100 fold - which might exceed the population of the Planet - then the average person would see a 2,000 fold increase in available bandwidth, according to Payne's supply side calculations. As it happens, that's the rough difference between a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connection and a dialup modem line. It's hard to believe that everybody will be wired up like that within a few years. By Peter Heywood, international editor, Light Reading lightreading.com .