Re: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?

["Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>]

Doug Merritt says:
> I understand. I think that we're looking at different sides of the same
> coin. I'm taking the long view, where you're taking the short view. For
> the next several years, I agree that bandwidth will continue to increase
> even as cost-per-bit-per-second continues to fall.
> 
> My previous comments were directed at the long term view, which may
> be inappropriate to discuss at the moment, since naturally the long term
> has no immediate pragmatic import.
> 
> Just keep those comments in mind 5 or 10 years from now. ;-)

Just one question, Doug -- in what sort of "Long Term" do you envision
individuals needing to be able to send MORE than several thousand
video signals worth of data simultaneously? Even if you put a camera
facing every corner of every nook of your house, transmitted high
quality audio from every square meter, wired every square inch with
strain gauges and other sensors and was simultaneously transfering the
entire contents of the library of congress over and over and over, you
couldn't exhaust the potential bandwidth of a single fiber. If you
need a bit more, you get two fibers. What applications do you envision
that would require more bandwidth than this, even in twenty or thirty
years?

This is not to say that I don't believe that we won't eventually need
something better -- if humans upload into computers and start
operating billions of times faster such links will seem slow -- but at
that point you aren't really talking about humans any more. What I
want to know is what sort of applications do you envision that HUMANS
might want more bandwidth for.

Perry