Some Musings on the Future of Broadband

[Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we had dinner with Frank Levinson and his wife, Monika. As we got into all sorts of interesting conversation threads, I invited Frank to write a Guest Column. Below is Frank’s piece on Broadband, which he calls somewhat whimsical. Enjoy!]

By Frank Levinson

In a series of web essays (1), (2), (3), I have written about how delivered bandwidth is growing at a rate that exceeds Moore’s law – basically the rate at which bandwidth (measured in terms of delivered Mb/s per person on earth per month) is deployed grows about 10x every 5 years!

It is easy to think of this only in terms of being driven by that master drummer, Moore. But this really is a bit too simplistic. What really drives innovation everywhere are opportunities and needs, markets that can be fully empowered by that next breakthrough. We see this in the fact that there are so many technologies that are common in the average person’s life that simply did not exist 20 years ago – cell phones, DVD players, MP3 players, thumb drives. Honestly, I laugh every time I remember floppy drives and compare them to today’s thumb drive. 1000x the capacity at less than 10% of the physical size, universally compatible and so easy to carry.

So what drives bandwidth growth today? Video on demand. Soon NetFlix, Blockbuster and all video distribution channels will feel the pressure of this more flexible delivery. And we will be able to store and replay and archive 100s of videos in a console if we wish … it will only be a few TBs of data, it will fit on a single hard drive.

But what will drive the next wave of storage, computing and bandwidth? We have delivered text, audio and video to the edge of the network down to individual users. Each of these had their predecessors in newspapers, radio and television. This pretty much fills up the human senses that are used for rich communications, except for touch. (Taste and smell are related and both are relatively low bandwidth in terms of what they communicate.)

Communicating a tactile experience will require the invention of tactile read in and read out devices like those that already were invented for hearing and site. I wonder at the general value of this. [Yes it has been done for some forms of remote surgery and work in hazardous environments.]

Perhaps this comes next but I suspect not. We technologists have been midwifing now for probably 70 years hoping that something we create will be cleverly designed enough to just say “hello” and mean it. Our brains do this with the ability to compute at a much lower level than today’s computers. But with an ability to communicate that is far greater than today’s networks. It seems likely that the drive for ever more broadband is a critical element of success for this birthing process.