Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com> wrote:

...

Excuse me, but bandwidth demand doubles in about half year, while Moore's law is that semiconductor capacity doubles every 2 years. There's no indication that this will change any time soon.

Nice brick wall :)

I doubt it.

I doubt it too, but for entirely different reason.

The curve is racing upward now because of all the people who are suddenly connecting to the net. Once a large fraction of them are on the curve will slow dramatically -- demand for bandwidth will continue to increase, but only as fast as the customers can eat it, which is by definition related to how fast their equipment runs.

Ah, you forgot that Internet is not a single-technology medium. It is not a single wave of customers, it is going to be waves after waves following customer acceptance of newer technologies -- watch Internet telephony, video telephony, 3-D videocom, or whatever bandwidth hog of tomorrow it will be.

There will be some problems between now and the time things slow down, but...

There is a very strong suspiction that Internet is not going to slow down, as new bandwidth-intensive technologies will keep popping up. There's already 20 years of growth fueled by introduction of e-mail, USENET, Web. In a sense it's very much like Moore's Law -- nobody knows what new technology will sustain the trend tomorrow, but the trend is pretty stable. --vadim