Doug Merritt says:
I hate to disagree, considering that I prefer to agree with the philosophy here, but it *can't* work that way, regardless of what we wish.
The problem is that bandwidth is a highly limited resource, just like real estate is a limited resource. Eventually we will complete saturate network bandwidth no matter what technology is used.
Lets see whether this is reasonable. 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. A single fiber can carry more data than can be transmitted by the entire radio spectrum from low frequency AM to Ku band satelite. Thats bandwidth for literally thousands of simultaneous video signals. Using switching technology rather than shared access LAN style technology, every person in the world could concievably be sending and receiving that much at once. 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.
These days it's easy to be optimistic, because bandwidth is growing geometrically. The problem is that there is no way in hell that that trend can continue indefinitely. One or two decades hence we will saturate theoretical limits.
I suspect that we have a wee bit longer to go than that. When people start faxing themselves regularly we may have to go to slightly more exotic technologies. Perry