On Mon, 17 May 1999, Vadim Antonov wrote:

Prabhu Kavi <prabhu_kavi@tenornetworks.com> wrote:

Well, free bandwidth and QoS-free networks are different notions.

Absolutely, bandwidth is always going to cost something. This does not mean its rationing is desirable or economically (and technically!) feasible.

It seems that most of the support for the argument that bandwidth is plentiful and a lot less expensive than bandwidth management costs are ignoring two key issues: (1) demand for bandwidth has not caught up with the supply, so by widely-accepted economic theory the bandwidth is going to be inexpensive and (2) the current glut of bandwidth has largely been installed over a 3-4-year period as companies do the first-time build of their networks. I think it is naive to assume that just because there is an over-supply of bandwidth today that it will be that way forever. Eventually there will be at least three forces that will change the economics: (1) the infrastructure companies will have to get profitable or close (you can only lose $100MM+/yr for a while before it catches up with you), which means that they will be forced to stop building/expanding and/or raise prices; (2) consumption of bandwidth will catch up with what's out there and (3) technology will hit some practical limitations on expanding the bandwidth (too expensive to add more DWDM stuff, company can't afford to lose investment on old equipment, company can't afford to undercut itself again with lower prices, DWDM can't support more colors without better fiber, etc). This argument actually has some (vague) similarities to the ones used in discussions about finite energy resources. Just because there's lots of petroleum today doesn't mean that there won't be a market for electric cars in the near future. Though it would be cool if we could double the oil reserves of the world for a couple billion dollars. Who knows when this will happen. With every dial-up customer moving to DSL, cable and wireless, and stuff like voice and video moving to IP-based networks, seems like it'll happen sooner rather than later. At 1000% annual growth rates (according to Lord Sidgemore) in bandwidth usage, seems like it'll be only a matter of a few years, even with yet-to-be-deployed and yet-to-be-developed DWDM enhancements. Pete.