FNSR's Uncle Franks has continued to write his essays and I took today to udate....
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Several months of essays, here is the most recent....
May 01 2002
By Frank Levinson Frank's News Archive
One of the first columns I wrote for this Web site was entitled The Matrix and Software Demand for Gb/s Bandwidth. It is one of my favorite past columns because it presents an interesting insight about the movie "The Matrix."
In that column, we discussed a future where Web traffic growth was not driven by humans requesting Web pages or downloading music, but rather by computers contacting each other to do things that were only loosely related to their human owners. In subsequent columns, we have looked at the future of computing and high speed networks for home and business along with other technological developments.
Perhaps it's time to do some more speculating about the future of technology and an ever-expanding need for more bandwidth. To set the stage for this, please try to visit a terrific Web site with wonderful essays. The URL is Long Bets.Org.
Many of the Long Bets presented on that site are speculations about technology and its level of infusion into society on a large scale. One idea that interested me on the site was a video-on-demand service aimed at consumers that proposes to offer 10,000 titles to five million subscribers by 2010. This Long Bet predicts that it will take about eight more years until we see many video stores starting to close down due to a drop in business. I think this will happen much faster than many people expect (Sorry, Blockbuster).
There's also a site called NetFlix.com, a very well thought out online DVD rent-by-mail service. This still involves the delivery and return of physical media storing a desired program, but it beats the heck out running around town picking up and returning movies. And it gets people thinking about exploring alternatives to 5,000-square-foot video stores.
Killer Ap Seeks Killer Bandwidth
Here is my Long Bet on home entertainment technology. I believe that the most significant new killer applications will be built on platforms such as Microsoft’s XboX®, being marketed as a high end "video game". But the potential for XboX is much more than just a game machine.
A few years ago Microsoft introduced its Ultimate TV® personal video recording system. UltimateTV is a digital disk-based recorder tied to a satellite television receiver. Some people in Silicon Valley think that Microsoft borrowed this idea from TiVo, Inc. in San Jose, but maybe that’s just local boosterism. For sure, Microsoft built upon the WebTV platform that they acquired and converted it to a more powerful offering.
Content and software for the UltimateTV come over a single delivery channel. You can also get Web and email access if you connect a modem and phone line. I suspect that Microsoft has realized it is possible to build something even better than the UltimateTV. For the purposes of this column, I will call this possibility "XboX Plus."
Today's current Microsoft XboX is a game console with a full PC inside operating under Windows 2000, powered by an Intel Pentium III processor, lots of RAM, a hard drive, DVD player, Ethernet connection, game ports and USB ports. Except for the satellite receiver, XboX has everything that Ultimate TV has and more. I find it interesting that Microsoft used a Pentium III processor and not a Celeron. The Celeron is Intel's "low end" device while the Pentium III is extremely capable. This should be a hint that Microsoft has more in mind for XboX than meets the eye.
Rumors are that some Microsoft folks up in Redmond are already playing interactive games using headsets for voice communication between players, and this is very addictive. Just plug in this cool new gear into the USB / game port and magic can be added to the system. Every kid will be aching for one of these interactive voice game systems next Christmas, I'm sure.
Suppose Microsoft could sell an XboX with a bigger hard drive and a satellite receiver? This would be the XboX Plus. It would be an UltimateTV married with a current XboX. The bigger hard drive would store more movies, music and other media. The hard drive is the one thing that is painfully undersized in the UltimateTV.
These two additions would add very little cost, but with these enhancements, Microsoft would have an XboX Plus platform that would be extremely interesting. Instead of just every kid wanting one, every family will want one or perhaps two or three. Here is what this kind of appliance could do:
Play video games
Play voice interactive games with gaming partners located anywhere in the world
Play DVDs without a separate device
Record movies and programs off the air, even while you are watching another program or playing an interactive game
Using a head set, make low-cost telephone calls and even videophone calls with the right accessories. Aren’t voice interactive video games a kind of telephone service?
Provide email and net access including browsing the Web and all that implies
Allow the downloading of movies from a central source, eliminating the need for neighborhood video stores
Empower distance learning with courses broadcast over regular TV channels with students using headsets to talk with the instructor, ask questions, and take real-time tests
Doing the Math on Bandwidth Demand
It turns out that more than 15 million households today have either DSL or a cable modem and five million more homes per year are adding broadband access. A potential market exists for the vending of various services across these broadband connections. Of course, we will want more and more bandwidth as we get used to these types of services and that will drive even more bandwidth and the need for more fiber optics products such as those designed by Finisar.
If we assume that the downstream data rate for these services is typically one Mb/s, then we can calculate how long it will take to download a movie. Over today's one Mb/s connections, a typical two-hour DVD movie (three GB in size) would take about five hours to download. As faster, better connections become available, these times could be dramatically reduced. This will enable us to download DVD-quality movies and play them on our TV without going to the video store or having them delivered in the mail.
Every available movie could be accessible to everyone at all times. As a movie is sent over the Internet, it would be copied to the user’s storage device for later replay. This scheme, if properly managed with a device like the XboX Plus, might motivate content owners (movie studios, music company executives and their shareholders) to make all of their content widely available over the Internet. Nothing drives a market better than profits rolling in.
According to home video rental statistics, there are about 100 million rental transactions per week in the USA. Let's do some astronomy-level mathematics with these numbers. The average movie is roughly three Gigabytes in size. Multiply that by 100 million movies per week and this means that 300 million GBs in movie traffic could travel over the Internet each week if everyone started downloading their movies this way.
Video downloads would thus represent 300 x 106 x 109 x 8 = 2.4x 1018 bits/week. Timewise, there are ~6 x 105 seconds in a week. So the total traffic offered to the Internet by video downloading is 4 x 1012 b/s or 4 Tb/s (Terabits per second). But this traffic is bursty and not well mannered so it is likely to be offered in a way that we periods where the sustained demand is more like 10x this or 40 Tb/s. The Internet was believed to have a total capacity of about 15 Tb/s sometime last year but it is growing fast. Perhaps it has grown to 40 Tb/s by now.
This means that the bandwidth needed to download movies over the Internet is about as big as the whole Internet today. It is still very big even if only ten percent of the people who physically rent videos today adopt this approach.
Interactive Games and Voice Over IP
The first mission for the XboX was to be a gaming machine. Today, literally millions of players participate in large-scale games on scalable, hosted servers. The size of these gaming universes can also be measured in terms of their needed bandwidth and this too could approach, at peak periods, the overall total bandwidth of today’s Internet. This is especially true when the games add voice and video transmissions to the already bandwidth-intensive communications of real-time game states.
When game consoles are enhanced to enable gamers to speak live with each other, then anyone with compatible hardware could use the Internet like a telephone. Today, the amount of data transferred for voice conversations over the public telephone network is about equal in size to the total amount of data sent over the Internet. If we were to use the Internet as a primary means of carrying voice traffic (voice over IP), this would essentially double the current bandwidth requirements of the Internet.
The Bandwidth Revolution is Not Over
We have identified at least three new applications for high-bandwidth communications and we've described one potential new multimedia device that might be arriving later this year that can serve up all of these new uses.
It's not a stretch to believe that the Internet can and will continue doubling in size every year for the next few years. Video downloads, interactive gaming and interactive videophones are likely to drive other new human-centric applications for the next four to five years. After that time, the revolution of machines talking to each other will begin to dominate Internet traffic.
People who study markets call this kind of growth "viral," because markets grow like a virus in a food-enriched test tube. In such an environment, the virus doubles in number in some period of time. I believe that the annual doubling in the size of the Internet will continue to occur as more people encourage others to engage in interactive gaming, movie-watching and other forms of multimedia communications.
Do you agree with these premises? Please write me at flevinson@finisar.com with your feedback and comments.
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