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