It should come as no surprise that Comcast is activating home broadband speed increases this week across its entire footprint. Comcast has increased home broadband speeds at Moore’s Law rates--doubling about every 18 months--for two decades.
“Comcast has increased speeds 17 times in 17 years and has doubled the capacity of its broadband network every 18 to 24 months,” Comcast says.
That is one reason why cable operators continue to hold between 65 percent and 70 percent share of the installed base of home broadband accounts in the United States. Telcos have simply not been able to increase bandwidth at Moore’s Law rates, though that should change as more of the network is converted to optical fiber access.
The original insight for Microsoft was the answer to the question "What if computing were free?" Keep in mind the audacious assumption Gates made. In 1970 a computer cost about $4.6 million each. Recall that Micro-Soft (later changed to Microsoft) was founded in 1975.
The assumption that computing hardware was going to be “free” would have appeared insane to most observers. In 1982 Gates did not seem to go out of his way to argue that hardware would be free, but he did argue it would be cheaper and far less interesting than software.
Gates made the argument in 1994. Gates was still saying it in 2004.
The point is that the assumption by Gates that computing operations would be so cheap was an astounding leap. But my guess is that Gates understood Moore’s Law in a way that the rest of us did not.
Reed Hastings, Netflix founder, apparently made a similar decision. For Bill Gates, the insight that free computing would be a reality meant he should build his business on software used by computers.
Reed Hastings came to the same conclusion as he looked at bandwidth trends in terms both of capacity and prices. At a time when dial-up modems were running at 56 kbps, Hastings extrapolated from Moore's Law to understand where bandwidth would be in the future, not where it was “right now.”
“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." So far, internet access speeds have increased at just about those rates.
Both supply and demand are part of the equation, however. Perhaps the driver of supply is Moore’s Law.
But the fundamental driver of bandwidth demand is multiple users and multiple devices, more than the bandwidth required by any single app, any single user or device, even if some apps--such as video--increase bandwidth demand by at least two or three orders of magnitude compared to narrowband apps.
The point is that home broadband bandwidth now is shared by multiple users, apps and devices. And that is why bandwidth demand keeps growing, aside from the use of more bandwidth-intensive apps and devices.
“The number of devices connected in Xfinity households has skyrocketed 12 times since 2018, and the need for fast, reliable, and secure Internet will continue to grow,” said Bill Connors, President of Xfinity, Comcast Cable.
The net effect is that every household now acts as a “multi-user” location. And that matters because any amount of bandwidth X is divided by the number of users, connected devices and apps in simultaneous use. In principle, that means Comcast customers require an amount of bandwidth that is X/12.
We should look for continued increases in capacity, at about a Moore’s Law pace, for the indefinite future.
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