On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Mike Leber wrote:
Hmmmm, router and optical gear capabilities are growing faster than the market. Can you say "permanent state of affairs".
Do you have any facts to back up this statement, as I am of another opinion. We're seeing doubling in traffic growth each year and the optics seem to quadruple every 3-4 years. Of course if equipment cost goes up the vendors will have more resources to make more expensive gear, but I believe the price per bit has to come down rather than the opposite.
moores law > market growth
Well, speaking of that, the performance increase in harddrives and CPUs seem to have degenerated over the past year and the hefty price per bit decrease in harddrive space we saw 1999-2003 seem to have stopped in 2004.
A better (healthier? more sane?) metric is revenue per customer.
Increase in usage is of course driven by the price of bandwidth going down. Let's say for the sake of argument that by 2010 we want to give every household 5 megabit/s on average. How could this be done with technology today seen on the radar? Remember that the households should want to pay for the bandwidth as well, meaning they might be willing to pay $30 per month for the bandwidth part (this is kind of high, but let's go with it). 5 megabit/s at $30 is $6 per meg, with no oversubscription. It also means that for a large city with a million households we need to shuffle around 1M*5M=5Tbit/s in that city alone. We probably need 10Tb national backbone to handle it, how do you do that with 40G or 100G links? That's a lot of parallell DWDM links :/ So the distributed p2p networks of the future will probably have to wait, and instead we'll do regular 1-many broadcasting via these networks and we'll be an interactive cable TV distribution instead. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se