Re: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?

[doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)]

"Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com> said:
>A single fiber optic strand has enough capacity in theory to carry the
>equivalent of every call made in the U.S. during the peak capacity
>utilization period on Mother's Day.

This is a nice reduction to theory; the current optical modulation rates
fall vastly short of the theoretical limits, but yes, at their maximum
it would be something on that order.

>I don't know about you, but I personally can't produce more than 750
>simultaneous videos at once for network distribution, so I suppose I'm
>uninteresting, but even the people who can do more than that are
>likely going to be fine. If they aren't, well, I suppose they could
>get TWO fibers coming into their home, or maybe even TEN or ONE
>HUNDRED if necessary.

Heh. Well. By today's standards, theoretical-capacity fiber optic will
be indeed be overkill; there would be plenty left over.

Keeping in mind that we're talking about the medium to long term future
rather than the immediate future, though: needs tend to grow easily
as fast as does capacity to meet needs. In the past one can point to
1950's quotes about how many computers would ever be needed worldwide,
or to 1970's arguments about why GUI interfaces would never be realistic,
or even to Bill Joy's late 1980's Nanotech Conf. talk when he coined the unit
of VAX-MIPS-Millenia, which he thought would be useless even if available.

Counterexamples to Joy's thesis are trivially found in cryptography,
and less obviously in things like computer generated holography. The latter
might easily become a GUI standard of the future, and will indeed require
VAX-MIPS-millenia of computation to compute in real time.

They would also require similarly astronomical amounts of bandwidth to
transmit. By today's standards, that's ridiculous to assume. But by the
standards of 10 years hence, two dimensional video may well appear as
primitive as 110 baud text transmission does to us today.

Judging the future by today's standards tends to leave one's predictions
high and dry.
	Doug