Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Predicts 1 Gbps to the Home in 10 Years

Back when modems operated at 56 kbps, Netflix took a look at Moore's Law and plotted what that would mean for bandwidth, over time.

“We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits per second to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get,” says Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO.“If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home."

Of course, Moore's Law applies to a part of the access business, and not the bigger part of it. If the access business were primarily subject to Moore's Law, bandwidth would be doubling every 18 months, and most would say access bandwidth keeps growing, but not that fast.

Of course, Netflix also is betting its business on continued bandwidth growth, as is Google, and both businesses benefit directly if bandwidth grows fast, and stays highly affordable.

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