The Myth of Bandwidth Scarcity

One of the biggest lies being told by Bell apologists these days is the myth of bandwidth scarcity. (I decided a picture of water scarcity, from AmericanRivers, would make a nice analogy.)

Someone identifying themselves as Doc McClenny put this out while answering a post on Nicholas Carr’s Roughtype blog:

Cna you explain to me how limited bandwidth on broadband hurts the US economy?

Can you explain how "telcos hoard bandwdith"?  What, do they keep it locked up in a closet?

Do you have any idea how small the backbones for major ISPs are?  How tiny the internet bandwidth is?

You do know that the speeds quoted for Far Eastern broadband is the
physical speed of the link and not the sustained bandwdith? I.E. that
100 Mbit/s link is shared between a lot of people before it get’s piped
to the 1 Gbit link to an upstream switch that only has the capability
for handling a few Gbit of switching?

There is no free lunch….

There’s a lot of myth here, a lot of lies. McClenney is ignoring what I called, in The Blankenhorn Effect, Moore’s Law of Fiber and Moore’s Law of Radios.

The technical term for the first is Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). The non-technical term is colors. In the late 1990s, engineers learned how to send multiple colors through a single optical fiber, multiplying its carrying capacity at a stroke.

The mother of the latter was the actress Hedy Lamarr, who figured that, by coordinating changes in the frequency used to send data over the air, you could break German jamming. Lamarr used piano rolls. After her patent expired, computer chips were used, which is how this gained Moore’s Law effects. You can see those impacts by looking at the 802.11 standards. The first standard, in 1997, ran data at 1 mbps. The second, a year later, moved data at 11 mbps. The latest version of the standard, 802.11n, moves data at 100 Mbps — over the same frequency bands.

Organizing all this bandwidth into coherent networks is made easier by optical multiplexing and a single standard, TCP/IP.  As a technical discipline, in fact, network management is no longer difficult. The complexity lies in areas like security, where the ability to use software and hardware effectively can get you a good job.

The final proof?

The final proof is that big corporations no longer depend on the Bells to provide their networks. They build their own.

Companies can save a lot of money, gain a lot of control, and deliver a lot of bandwidth to their workers by running their own wires and radios, then buying backhaul in bulk from a competitive market.

This is why Verizon actually pushed through its networking exemption yesterday. It wasn’t done solely so Verizon could screw consumers, although that’s one result. It was done so that Verizon could match prices with backhaul competitors such as Level 3, and win contracts to manage these corporate networks.

Corporations have options. There is competition for their business, so they get the best rates from vendors. Consumers don’t have options, and thus are going to be screwed.

The only way this changes is when consumers are given choices to match those corporations have. That is the challenge.