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Technology Stocks : George Gilder - Forbes ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Fleming who wrote (1360)	4/28/1999 12:05:00 PM
From: DMaA	Respond to of 5853

Reminds me of what a forward thinker said about the telephone. When NY. can talk to FL. will NY. have anything to say to FL.? Turns out they do - a lot.

To: Mark Fleming who wrote (1360)	4/28/1999 12:08:00 PM
From: Mazman	Respond to of 5853

Mark, What most of these bandwidth glut commentators fail to recognize is the situation beyond the US borders. This is where the true bandwidth bottleneck will be, trying to connect to U.S. sites from outside the U.S., or to connect from Europe to Asia, etc. Much less fiber backbone in place outside the good old USA. Regards, mazman

To: Mark Fleming who wrote (1360)	4/28/1999 12:11:00 PM
From: Joe Wagner	Respond to of 5853

>>>It's my personal opinion that it's ridiculous to say that we won't find ways to use up the coming bandwidth. It's like when people said that PCs would never go into the majority of homes, or when IBM said that the worldwide market for computers is a total of three. I remember when Pentium 60's first came out and I bought one. A business friend, that only thought of computers for spreadsheets, asked me what in the world would I need all that computing power for? As the computing power picks up speed and the bandwidth expands (the cost of replicating the real and imagined world plunges), I think there will be many new ideas coming online to gobble it up. JW

To: Mark Fleming who wrote (1360)	4/28/1999 3:57:00 PM
From: Clarksterh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5853

Re - Bandwidth glut in 2003: I think not. Until the networks can handle video on demand through the last mile for 50% of the population I think that it is unlikely that we will suffer from a glut. And the bandwidth required for such capability is many orders of magnitude above what is currently available. (For instance, although Cable modems allow very high temporary data rates, they won't support 1/5 of the households getting video on demand at any one time.) JMO Clark

To: Mark Fleming who wrote (1360)	4/29/1999 12:09:00 PM
From: John Stichnoth	Respond to of 5853

Maybe a distinction on bandwidth should be made between raw throughput capability of the fiber and holdups along the way. Where will the bottlenecks be? It sure seems that the backbone is getting big enough and fat enough that it won't be the cause of congestion in the medium term (2003?). But, getting onto the highway may be a problem. The video on demand that some talk about, real-time 3D animated imaging, natural-voice voice recognition over the web, all require bandwidth that is not close to being fulfilled today. What kind of speeds will these applications require in the "first mile" and the "last mile". I have seen estimates ranging from 10Mbps to 45 for the last mile, and tend to favor the high end of that range as a medium term goal. If you multiply this estimate by multiple lines coming into the CO--which isn't even on the edge of the network!--you very quickly get to gigabyte speeds needed before you even are aggregated at the edge. Another way to look at it is by looking at all the "nodes" a packet must pass through. Those each represent a delay in message transmission (which must be dealt with). Most also represent aggregation points, where some multiple of a previous node's bandwidth is needed. And that brings us back to the first mile. And Intel's server farms--mentioned in several of the replies. All of these people demanding such things as video on demand will greatly increase the raw server processing power requirements. (How many servers will it require to provide downloads of the next Star Wars movie, when LucasArts decides to make it available for realtime, one-view only download for $2.25 on the Web? With everyone who wants it ordering it at a slightly different time? Yikes!)

To: Mark Fleming who wrote (1360)	4/30/1999 8:41:00 PM
From: George Gilder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

You guys have already given the answer in your telepresence thread. The only caveat is that companies that lag in deploying bandwidth or in reducing its cost will believe that there is a glut. Just as the DRAM companies that failed to make the turn to the next generation, reducing cost per bit 80 percent, did not get some small share of the market; they got virtually none of the market. A clue to the winners and losers, I believe, is their attitude toward complex quality of service. The ones that stress QoS through ATM and other digital differentiators will not only fail to deliver QoS but will lose the market to companies that deploy massive dumb bandwidth, which incidentally will translate into superb quality of service. That's why I like GBLX (Global Crossing--check out www.globalcrossing.com!) better than any of the other companies out there. They are not trying to compete with AT&T. They are trying to displace AT&T on a global stage.