The Inevitability of Bandwidth Growth

All too often, we think of increased bandwidth as a matter of speed. It lets us do things faster. Send an e-mail message. View a Web site. But the real value of bandwidth is that it lets us do entirely new things with our computers, cameras, televisions - with our network. What are these new things? We have the beginnings of glimpses of many of them. In the past few years, we have seen such new products and services as:

• Video on the Web, and on mobile devices.
• Telemedicine, allowing the elderly and disabled to live in their own homes longer. Allowing doctors in larger communities to examine patients in remote areas of Alaska, from hundreds of miles away.
• User-created video so grandparents can see the children, or so a budding comedian or musician can develop an audience.

Entirely new and unforeseen product successes have dazzled, bemused and annoyed us. YouTube appeared in February 2005 - and quickly became one of the five largest users of bandwidth on Earth.

We have every reason to think the innovation will continue and that our need for ever more bandwidth will grow. Only fiber to the home will be able to deliver it. We have absolutely no reason to think innovation will stop.

When Thomas Edison built the world's first central-station electrical generating plants, electric lighting was the "killer app". Although Edison would later invent hundreds of products that use electricity, he was not thinking about air conditioning for private homes when he built the first electricity distribution network. Nor was he thinking about dishwashers, refrigerators, computers, or those rechargeable batteries for your iPod, mobile phones and cameras.

The least expensive desktops today come with 100 GB hard drives, because everyday users need the file space. And if they need the file space, they also need to send files of comparable size. And what about those digital images? Users get annoyed when the network's speed doesn't come close to the speed at which their own computer handles things. Using your computer's USB port, it takes about half a minute to move a 2 GB memory card's worth of digital pictures (or an hour of TV-quality video) to your hard drive.

Think about the speeds fiber to the home (FTTH) makes possible. TV manufacturers have. New sets just coming onto the market in 2007 can display wide-screen high-definition video from the local cable or phone company - and also from the Internet. And users don't have to "think Internet" to get the TV show they want. They just check out what's available using their TV remote. Think hundreds of thousands - even millions - of fiber-enabled TV "channels" from all over the world.