Everyone knows the key clue of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is the dog that did not bark. (Notice how Basil Rathbone doesn’t get star billing in this poster for the original film, from Art.Com. Now that’s a mystery worth chewing on. But I digress.)
Journalists often miss this key Clue. The danger that does not become reality doesn’t seem to be a story. But sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s the more important story.
Take all those stories you’ve read about the Internet running out of bandwidth. Usually video or peer-to-peer technologies are blamed for the demand. In fact, it’s crime that’s to blame. Spammers, scammers, and pirates are sucking up huge amounts of Internet bandwidth and not paying for it.
Yet the Internet remains fairly stable. Prices remain steady. The fact is, they should be going down, fast. They’re being held up by Bush Administration support for landline duopoly and cellular oligopoly, which is another way of saying you don’t have many choices and thus "competitors" don’t have to compete.
The reason for all this is Moore’s Law works. It continues to work. Not just Moore’s Law as Gordon Moore envisioned it, the number of circuit lines drawn on silicon doubling every 18 months. I’m talking here of Moore’s Law as I conceived is several years ago, exponential improvements continuing across a range of technologies, faster and faster going faster and faster.
This is just the latest example. It’s
a prototype optical transceiver chip from IBM. It runs data at 160
GBPS, that’s 160 billion bytes per second or a complete full-screen
Hollywood movie every second.
Over the last few years companies like
IBM and Cisco have solved the key problem of the Internet core, which
was multiplexing data between the electrical systems we create it with
at home and the optical fibers it runs on within the network.
This has occurred alongside advances in DWDM which mean that the
fibers carry exponentially more data than they did before, as diodes
are created which recognize more-and-more discrete colors of light,
each one carrying its own traffic within the same strand of glass.
(Cool, huh?)
IBM will likely OEM this technology to product makers who will first
build it into products that run at large digital switching centers. The
technology will then spread outward, to large cities, then to smaller
cities and neighborhoods. By 2010 it will probably be commonplace.
The dog which does not bark says there are plenty of bits for everyone.
If we were able to take the scammers’ traffic off the Internet it’s
likely big ISPs would be starving for traffic. Some already are. The
actual cost of transmitting a bit between here and there continues to
fall toward zero. And the same advances we’re seeing in optical
switching are happening in basic computing, in magnetic storage, in
optical storage, across the spectrum of technology.
If we can just build competitive markets, then throw even a few of the
largest computer criminal gangs into jail, bits can be practically free.
“The dog that did not bark” is from “Silver Blaze”, not “Hound of the Baskervilles”
“The dog that did not bark” is from “Silver Blaze”, not “Hound of the Baskervilles”