Lower costs per bit for mobile bandwidth as well as fixed network capacity have been the trend for decades. Slowly, those advantages will accrue in rural areas, even if the bandwidth gap between urban and rural areas does not completely close.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Moore's Law Matters for Rural Internet Access
Lower costs per bit for mobile bandwidth as well as fixed network capacity have been the trend for decades. Slowly, those advantages will accrue in rural areas, even if the bandwidth gap between urban and rural areas does not completely close.
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Non-Linear Development and Even Near-Zero Pricing are Normal for Chip-Based Products
It is clear enough that Moore’s Law played a foundational role in the founding of Netflix, indirectly led to Microsoft and underpins the development of all things related to use of the internet and its lead applications.
All consumer electronics, including smartphones, automotive features, GPS, location services; all leading apps, including social media, search, shopping, video and audio entertainment; cloud computing, artificial intelligence and the internet of things are built on the foundation of ever-more-capable and cheaper computing, communications and storage costs.
For connectivity service providers, the implications are similar to the questions others have asked. Reed Hastings asked whether enough home broadband speed would exist, and when, to allow Netflix to build a video streaming business.
Microsoft essentially asked itself whether dramatically-lower hardware costs would create a new software business that did not formerly exist.
In each case, the question is what business is possible if a key constraint is removed. For software, assume hardware is nearly free, or so affordable it poses no barrier to software use. For applications or computing instances, remove the cost of wide area network connections. For artificial intelligence, remove the cost of computing cycles.
In almost every case, Moore’s Law removes barriers to commercial use of technology and different business models. The fact that we now use millimeter wave radio spectrum to support 5G is precisely because cheap signal processing allows us to do so. We could not previously make use of radio signals that dropped to almost nothing after traveling less than a hundred feet.
Reed Hastings, Netflix founder, based the viability of video streaming on Moore’s Law. 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.
The point is that Moore’s Law enabled a product and a business model that was not possible earlier, simply because computation and communications capabilities had not developed.
Likewise, Microsoft was founded with an indirect reliance on what Moore’s Law meant for computing power.
“As early as 1971, Paul (Allen) and I had talked about the microprocessor,” Bill Gates said in a 1993 interview for the Smithsonian Institution, in terms of what it would mean for the cost of computing. "Oh, exponential phenomena are pretty rare, pretty dramatic,” Gates recalls saying.
“Are you serious about this? Because this means, in effect, we can think of computing as free," Gates recalled.
That would have been an otherwise ludicrous assumption upon which to build a business. Back in 1970 a “computer” would have cost millions of dollars.
The original insight for Microsoft was essentially the answer to the question "What if computing were free?". Recall that Micro-Soft (later changed to MicroSoft before becoming today’s Microsoft) was founded in 1975, not long after Gates apparently began to ponder the question.
Whether that was a formal acknowledgement about Moore’s Law or not is a question I’ve never been able to firmly pin down, but the salient point is that the microprocessor meant “personal” computing and computers were possible.
A computer “in every house” meant appliances costing not millions of dollars but only thousands. So three orders of magnitude price improvements were required, in less than half a decade to a decade.
“Paul had talked about the microprocessor and where that would go and so we had formulated this idea that everybody would have kind of a computer as a tool somehow,” said Gates.
Exponential change dramatically extends the possible pace of development of any technology trend.
Each deployed use case, capability or function creates a greater surface for additional innovations. Futurist Ray Kurzweil called this the law of accelerating returns. Rates of change are not linear because positive feedback loops exist.
Each innovation leads to further innovations and the cumulative effect is exponential.
Think about ecosystems and network effects. Each new applied innovation becomes a new participant in an ecosystem. And as the number of participants grows, so do the possible interconnections between the discrete nodes.
So network effects underpin the difference in growth rates or cost reduction we tend to see in technology products over time, and make linear projections unreliable.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
Bandwidth Growth: Nearly What One Would Expect from Moore's Law
But it would take a brave forecaster indeed to argue that bandwidth growth will not continue at substantial rates, for the foreseeable future.
If current trends continue, people will need, and use, connections of a gigabit per second by 2020.
That might seem wild. It is not, and simply reflects a continuation of existing trends.
This really should shock you: consumer Internet access bandwidth has grown about as fast as Moore’s Law would suggest, according to Jakob Nielsen, Professor Rod Tucker and Phil Edholm, former Nortel's CTO.
Consider a 2004 prediction (remember that in 2000 most U.S. Internet users were on dial-up connections).
“Edholm's Law says that in about five years (that would have been 2009) 3G (third-generation) wireless will routinely deliver 1 Mbps, Wi-Fi will bring nomadic access to 10 Mbps, and office desktops will connect at a standard of 1 gigabit per second.”
Historic Growth of Internet Access Bandwidth, Microwave Journal |
Nielsen's Law is similar to Moore's Law. You might predict that computing capabilities would increase faster than access bandwidth, simply because access networks are construction intensive.
Moore's Law suggests that computers double in capabilities every 18 months, corresponding to about 60 percent annual growth. Nielsen’s Law predicts bandwidth will grow at about 50 percent a year.
It isn't clear how ISPs in rural and remote areas will keep up. It certainly will not be easy. Still, history suggests that speeds, affordability and coverage will continue to progress in tough-to-reach areas, even if not fully at the pace of the urban areas where supplying bandwidth is easiest.
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
Comcast Boosts Home Broadband Speeds, Has Been Doing So at Moore's Law Rates for Two Decades
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.
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Thinking the Unthinkable: What if "Cars" Were Free? What does the Business Model Look Like?
source: NBN |
source: Wikipedia |
Friday, December 8, 2006
Why Content Prices Rarely, If Ever, Drop
Not that media is the only endeavor that is not seriously aided by Moore's Law. To be sure, content creation is supported by Moore's Law. It's just that such costs are a small fraction of the total cost of producing content good enough to create an advertising, subscription or on-demand business model. Education is another business whose costs are marginally affected by Moore's Law, because production of the service ("teaching," for example)tends not to be scalable. To add another couple of classes at a college, one pretty much has to hire another teacher. Sure, you can grow class size, but at some point the "buyer" logically assumes that "quality" is destroyed as the scale increases. That's why small graduate seminars are generally considered "higher quality" than undergraduate "101" courses. We can argue about whether this is really a measure of quality or not, but the fact remains that most buyers of higher education seem to buy into the notion.
Content production tends to operate in much the same way. Digital special effects can apply Moore's Law in very compelling ways. But digital effects don't seem capable of replacing the very analog and non-scaling efforts of writers, directors, actors and producers, simply because the "product" is so wildly dependent to the particular skill some people seem to have in these areas. So, to an extent not seen in communications, where Moore's Law attacks the cost structure of a key input, digital technologies do not aid us as much in the creation of media products. Again, one can argue about how user-generated content might affect the model.
But experience suggests that we will see the same sort of "quality filtering" emerge in virtually all user-generated content as well. Most of it will not be broadly appealing, even in the niches for which it is created, for all sorts of reasons, just as the vast majority of "professionally produced" content these days, and the huge number of projects that never are produced or distributed widely, are filtered as well.
The upshot is that video services will not materially be subject to Moore's Law, and ever-decreasing retail prices. Producers and distributors are going to love that aspect of the business.
Friday, April 17, 2015
50th Anniversary of Moore's Law (Which Shockingly Applies to Internet Access Bandwidth)
AI Will Improve Productivity, But That is Not the Biggest Possible Change
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