Essay: The Myth of Infinite Bandwidth
Back in the late 1990s I was often asked what I thought would happen if Internet bandwidth was infinite — what would that change about the Internet itself? Level 3’s (LVLT) recent decision to slash prices on its content distribution network and rumors of new multi-terabit cables across the Pacific have me wondering if we are actually getting closer to having infinite bandwidth.
But when replying to the infinite bandwidth question I was prone to posing a return question — what does infinite bandwidth actually mean? As an example, I would often say that infinite bandwidth meant that I could personally consume terabits of bandwidth at any location on the planet at any time without loss or jitter. And, since bandwidth would be infinite, it would be the ultimate commodity and free.
I have often found that people who talk about infinite bandwidth lack a basic understanding of what bandwidth is — many think that if you have infinite bandwidth you can have instantaneous access to every computer around the globe. People often forget that the speed of light is very fast (around 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum) but nevertheless a constant. As an example, if you have infinite bandwidth between two points it’s like having a freeway with infinite lanes but your car can only go a finite speed. There is no congestion or traffic jam, but it still takes time to travel from source to destination.
On the Internet, a bit of data does travel quickly over fiber optics, but there are many different mediums and pieces of equipment between any given source and destination to slow things down. For example, from here in San Francisco it takes a bit of data around 320 milliseconds to travel to Bangalore and back, and about half that for a bit to make a round trip between here and London. Of course, on today’s finite Internet, these travel times vary with the time of day, the exact path taken and a thousand other networking variables, but I believe that these latency times are in the ballpark for most networks. Infinite bandwidth would not have this variability but would still be hampered by the pesky issue of speed of light between any two points on the planet.
Other than the speed of light issue, when people talk about infinite bandwidth they contend that accomplishing this on the backbone of the Internet (across network providers and between exchange points) is definitely feasible, but true end-to-end infinite bandwidth is hard to imagine given the constraints of the last mile in many locations. While I agree that the last mile is clearly a current constraint to infinite bandwidth, I have some hope that some high-speed variant of Ethernet or a wireless technology will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future — just look at what’s happening in Tokyo and Seoul.
So, in my mind infinite bandwidth is possible. Some thoughts about what we could do with it include: unlimited High Definition two-way video streaming (not like little YouTube screens, but to video walls), immersive and lifelike collaboration environments (think Second Life on steroids), limitless file transfer and backup (no more burning data to DVDs), real-time photo sharing (grandmothers will love this), and complete data mobility for both personal and work information (regardless of what type of data you have, you can access it from anywhere).
As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” So we need to know that bandwidth will be infinite and we need ways to necessitate this technology soon. How do you think infinite bandwidth would change your behavior on the Internet, either personally or for your company?
Allan Leinwand is a venture partner with Panorama Capital and founder of Vyatta. He was also the CTO of Digital Island.
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It would certainly be nice if the ISPs would stop complaining about those of us who like to download 500 gigabytes of data every month.
Torgrim on October 10th, 2007 at 4:19 am - Permalink
What is happening in Seoul?
I’ve lived here for 3 months now and think it is totally over-rated. Unless you speak Korean, there are no useful webservices for English-speaking expats.
Besides that, lifestyles are no different than any large western city. I’m from Dallas and there were just as many people attached to their cell phones and media players.
The same goes for PC Bangs, unless you speak Korean, it is a major disappointment. Besides do you really want to sit in a smoke-filled noisy room filled with unemployed starcraft players? It’s not nearly as romantic as Wired magazine paints it.
Here’s a piece I put together detailing the economics of this situation: http://www.mises.org/story/2661
Tim Swanson on October 10th, 2007 at 5:12 am - Permalink
Infinite bandwidth would be infinitely expensive to build unless every element was free to build. Did I miss Cisco’s merger with Oxfam…?
While a number of elements are considered here, the article does not cover the whole distribution chain (note link is uk specific).
Consider for example the electricity required to power an infinite amount of bandwidth and serve an inifinte amount of content. Do we have inifinite energy reserves? Nope, sorry.
Bandwidth has never been free, and it never will be. Perhaps 14.4kbps is “free” (to a number of significant figures) but just as the price of that declines, so the the bar gets raised… The net result is that you pay about the same for an ever increasing amount of capacity. You will never get an inifinite amount unless you get infinitely old… :-)
Jeremy Penston on October 10th, 2007 at 6:00 am - Permalink
Wow !! I just learned that the light has a speed limit.
What’s the point of sensational headlines without content? Do you think it increases circulation? I would say you will loose some.
Satish Sharma on October 10th, 2007 at 7:01 am - Permalink
Tim – in Seoul I was referring to the technology advances on WiFi and WiMax. From what I’ve seen in Seoul the government and various companies are working on some interesting last mile technologies. That being said, I am well aware that the end result does not match the hype yet….
Jeremy – I’m not sure I agree that only getting old is the answer :) If an enterprise can get a 1Gbps of capacity from A to B for $10/month is that close enough to free? Granted, it’s not $0, but I think we’re getting reasonably close in the coming years.
Satish – I was not trying to be sensational or content-free. Rather, I was trying to provoke a discussion on the uses of infinite (or nearly infinite) bandwidth. Any thoughts what you would do with infinite bandwidth?
Allan Leinwand on October 10th, 2007 at 7:23 am - Permalink
yes, extrememly boring post…. i would have expected more from this site…
Dean on October 10th, 2007 at 7:38 am - Permalink
Infinite bandwidth would be nice, for sure, but it is a dream, and it will remain a dream for years.
Here in France, and generally speaking in Western Europe, we benefit of very interesting broadband offers : Living in Lyon, I have an ADSL access with 16 Mb/s downstream + 2 Mb/s upstream + unlimited volume of data exchanged for not much than 15 € per month (OK, about 20 $ because the € vs $ is higher than ever. And within less than a year, thanks to FTTH deployment, I’ll have not less than 100 Mb/s downstream AND upstream, unlimited volume, for 70 € per month, about 100 bucks :-)
BUT ! when I want to buy and download movies from VOD platforms, I still have to pay at least 4 € per film. It is twice the rental price of a DVD at the shop around the corner, despite the fact that I pay for the PC and the broadband access and the VOD platform does not have to pay for the shop, the DVD stock and the guy behind the desk. And as you imagine, the emergence of HD movies is a real issue for VOD platforms…
WHY is VOD so expensive?
BECAUSE of bandwidth cost!
A company operating a VOD platform, serving a huge amount of terabytes per month, either through regular download, either through streaming, has to pay a very expensive fee to the telco providing the Internet connectivity to its VOD servers. The bandwidth costs a lot because telcos have to increase their network capacity as much as they increase the bandwidth of end-user access, for millions of households : they buy tons of core fiber network equipments from Cisco, Alcatel or Huawei, and they will continue to have to invest a lot within the next few years…
The cost of the bandwidth and network capacity for content providers is one of the reasons explaining why our company is working on a new system, allowing to distribute movies as “nomad files”, circulating freely on IP networks, using every protocol (HTTP, FTP and more interesting P2P) to dramatically reduce the distribution cost of digital movies…
The other reason is to provide a smart answer to this question: “How to allow Internet consumers to easily find interesting contents (movies, music etc), to freely discover a movie or a music album with a preview, without any piracy risk for the right holder?”
DRM technologies are a huge mistake: they lock the content on a device, whereas the Internet is a way to share and recommend the content from a consumer to another. Why not let the consumer be a part of the distribution channel?
Some solutions are emerging to replace DRM by “DUM” – “Digital Usage Management”: files can be freely copied, shared, redistributed among users, but their use remains under control…
Pierre Col - UbicMedia on October 10th, 2007 at 7:57 am - Permalink
Hi Allan – $10 per Gbps might be ok for today’s applications, but the point is that by the time most people are using 1 Gbps because they can afford the $10, there will be some requirements that need Pbps, like the CERN particle accelerator. Even at $10 per Gbps, that’s still $10m per month for one of those.
It will never be free because price only comes down as demand goes up (not the other way around) ;-)
It may be that there is infinite demand – machines will use everything they can, even if there is a point at which people can’t. Mike O’Dell (Chief Scientist at UUNET way back) referred to the machines as cockroaches – he was bang on. P2P and collaborative computing are two examples today…
Supplying this demand (whatever it is) means glass and it means silicon and it means power. All of which costs money, so the limits, once the infrastructure is in place, are commercial.
Lets say the low end pays $10 for 1 Mbps today and the high end pays $10,000 per Gbps; when you get to the point where John Smith is paying $10 for 1 Gbps home broadband, XYZ Co is still going to be paying $10,000 but now they will be getting 1 terabit per second.
I agree that much of it is artifically constrained – do you sell 1 Mbps for $10 or 1 Gbps for the same price? The trick for telcos is to price it so that people don’t think about downgrading – you need to keep Mr. Smith paying his $10 per month and XYZ co their $10k. You don’t want them to think, “I’ll just get 100 Mbps for $1 per month, I don’t meed more than that…”
Jeremy Penston on October 10th, 2007 at 8:04 am - Permalink
Jeremy – I agree that today machines greedily consume all of the bandwidth that is deployed and technology like p2p does help in the process. That being said, I’d still contend that in the not so distant future bandwidth will be nearly infinite (or consume a trivial amount of opex). Just over a decade ago it cost $250K/month for 45Mbps between the US and Japan. Today, the prices I have seen are a small fraction of that price. Tomorrow, it will be even less and will have CDN services too.
So – what do we do with this bandwidth? Personally, I’m looking forward to installing my HD video wall at home and being a part of an immersing, life-like social network.
Allan Leinwand on October 10th, 2007 at 8:39 am - Permalink
I agree with previous poster, this was a very tricky tactic of posting on GigaOm, redirecting me here, and then serving up an article devoid of anything of real value.
Andrew Schmitt on October 10th, 2007 at 9:07 am - Permalink
@Jeremy: You are right, and we are seing that in Europe: when the market shifts from 100,000 Joe Smith downloading video at 1 Mb/s to 10.000.000 Joe Smith dowloading video at 10 Mb/s, XYZ Co is really paying more and more to deliver the videos, despite peering agreements, CDN infrastructure etc etc.
Pierre Col - UbicMedia on October 10th, 2007 at 9:35 am - Permalink
Right! Infinite Bandwidth is not about to arrive anytime soon. There is a whole wide world outside Silicon Valley and the few technology and bandwidth hotspots, that still use dial-up.
For heaven’s sake …
Sramana
http://www.sramanamitra.com
Sramana Mitra on October 10th, 2007 at 11:20 am - Permalink
Even if BW were to somehow become free & infinite, I wonder if it would still be practical for the mass market to watch HD videos online, unless we use some distributed delivery system. Wouldn’t the relevant bottleneck become the server/datacenter capacity as opposed to speed (or speed of light)?
kumar subramanian on October 10th, 2007 at 3:46 pm - Permalink
Kumar – yes, maybe you are right about that bottleneck. I have some hope that p2p or CDNs will help in this regard.
As some folks have pointed out, if the bandwidth bottleneck is removed for any given application it does open up the door to many interesting possibilities and exposure to different application hurdles.
Allan Leinwand on October 10th, 2007 at 4:52 pm - Permalink
With tons of bandwidth, why bother spending extra time making your software work through a web browser?
Just build agile desktop Apps and pull data from anywhere anytime.
Steve on October 10th, 2007 at 5:38 pm - Permalink
While the speed of light is a limiting factor, I don’t think that is the draw of ‘Infinate Bandwidth’.
Yes, it’s like a car with a maximum speed on an empty freeway with an infinate number of lanes. The real value of this is when you can break up a large file into packets, and send all packets simultaneously using all of the lanes.
Getting from point A to point B can never take less than the time to go the speed of light, but in that instant, you could recieve a small text file, or a 2 hour High Def movie.
That is the power! Loading software applications from a hard drive will be slower than the 300ms it takes to load it out of memory from a server in Bangalore. Local storage of files will be a thing of the past.
Joe on October 10th, 2007 at 5:58 pm - Permalink
doesn’t sound good to me..
when you say that there will be an infinite bandwidth, then many companies will suffer massive DDoS attacks, or probably more.
shadow on October 10th, 2007 at 5:59 pm - Permalink
I was wondering if we really could have infinite bandwidth
wouldnt it be impossible to deal with the hackers who are already prevalant with the current badwidth in todays world?
how about real time sharing? wont infringement of copyright laws be overruled easily? since P2P sharing is now at real time and everything could be accessed with immediate effect.
Is it really possible if we really could obtain the means to infinite bandwith that telecommunication companies would be likely to release it to the public? at the cost of jeopardising the intellectual properties of so many software companies?
Bryan on October 10th, 2007 at 6:10 pm - Permalink
back when we studied communications/information theory,
we were told that bandwidth was limited by the signal-to-noise ratio of whatever transport mechanism you were using.
we were taught that a signal of infinite bandwidth would be indistinguishable from pure noise. (all the bits, all the time…)
maybe modulation theory has changed. good luck.
old tech guy on October 10th, 2007 at 7:22 pm - Permalink
I love your essay, it brings the point across very well and gets people to realize, there is a limit.
Heiroglyphics on October 10th, 2007 at 7:41 pm - Permalink
I’ve been working for years on a combination of wireless technologies wherein each node can provide as much bandwidth as it can consume. That’s not “infinite” bandwidth, but it’s as close as is reasonable.
I’ll be unveiling more about the technologies over the next few months as I gain people’s attention and develop interest. I’m going to give the ideas away free, but I want to ensure I have an audience first.
Read more here
chaosmotor on October 10th, 2007 at 7:52 pm - Permalink
This article was stupid. For one, you lack and understanding of what it means to be infinite. It would be impossible to have infinite bandwidth because you would either need infinite infrastructure to run the connections. In this article I think you assume that recent bandwidth improvements are somehow approaching infinity. This is not the case.
The fact is, internet speeds are getting faster, but they are by no means approaching infinite. Even if speeds were to increase by 10 fold each year and mankind lived for the next trillion years, not even then would infinite bandwidth be attainable.
I think this article has no substance, and it would be like me saying “Well since food production has been going up, what if I had infinite food and could feed the entire world?” Although it is a nice thought, it is impossible, just like this.
Max on October 10th, 2007 at 8:23 pm - Permalink
quantum communications has recently been demonstrated which breaks the speed of light for information transmission.
Ponder that.
Ryan F on October 10th, 2007 at 8:29 pm - Permalink
You really don’t need infinite bandwidth what users want is adaquit, lower cost bandwidth.
AT&T is charging me $200.00 a month for 6mb down (actual speed is more like 4mb down) and 768. up.
For that kind of money I would expect 100mb up and down.
AT&T offers fiber, kind of… 6mb up and down for less money if you don’t mind having dynamic ips.
The bandwidth is there.. company’s just like over charging for it and doing what ever they can to keep you from using it.
If I were in japan I can get 100mb up and down fiber for $45 a month.
The trouble with company’s is they want charge you a high price for something and they then want you to not use it.
Look at Internet over cable. They list there system as high speed and unlimited but if you take them to there word that it is unlimited they will cancel your account.
What I want is 10mb up and down and i’ll pay $50 a month for that…
Thats a good balance I feel between high price and high speed.
zbeast on October 10th, 2007 at 8:45 pm - Permalink
“Any thoughts what you would do with infinite bandwidth?”
Oh, that’s easy: download all the porn in the world.
Next question?
:)
bwanderson on October 10th, 2007 at 8:46 pm - Permalink
how close to “infinite” is “reasonable?”
are you getting better speeds over wireless than over fiber?
old tech guy on October 10th, 2007 at 9:10 pm - Permalink
Agree, there is no infinite bandwith. Its like a water flow in a pipe. There is a pipe boundary, the water can’t flow infinite.
dora on October 10th, 2007 at 9:27 pm - Permalink
While the speed of light is finite, quantum entanglement would provide for instantaneous communication between two or more locations. This would still not be infinite bandwidth due to the limits of the two machines communicating. Quantum entanglement coupled together with quantum based computers, and a way of automatically storing and updating dns-like ( address ) info of every other computer would make the internet as fast as possible, and close enough to infinite bandwidth that it might as well be.
Jacob Buck on October 10th, 2007 at 10:15 pm - Permalink
The point is moot. The more bandwidth people have, the more they will consume.
I’d love to be able to send a 1.3GB DivX rip to a friend on AIM.
If I had infinite bandwidth, I would just send the film in high definition.
The same holds true for storage. ;)
Ryan on October 11th, 2007 at 5:06 am - Permalink
@zbeast: you wrote “AT&T is charging me $200.00 a month for 6mb down (actual speed is more like 4mb down) and 768. up.”
Where in the hell are you ? Is that a regular cost for bandwidth in the US, for instance in SF, LA or NYC ?
You are welcome in France: due to competition, regular price is about $20-/month for ADSL access with 16 Mb/s downstream + 2 Mb/s upstream + unlimited volume
Within less than a year, thanks to competititve FTTH deployment, it will be about $100for FTTH access with 100 Mb/s downstream AND upstream, unlimited volume :-)
Pierre Col - UbicMedia on October 11th, 2007 at 6:22 am - Permalink
@Ryan and Pierre: If we all believe that we’ll consume all of the bandwidth that we have, are you currently consuming 16Mbps down and 2Mbps up 24×7? Do you plan on consuming 100Mbps 24×7 next year? If not, do you now consider your last mile bandwidth infinite?
Allan Leinwand on October 11th, 2007 at 9:04 am - Permalink
I think infinite bandwidth is a bit of a hyperbole, theres no such thing as infinite bandwidth, just like you could never present me with an infinite list of numbers.
Communications via quantum entanglement has the very real possibility of creating a practically latency free network, with no notable lag communicating from the us to australia, or even to other planets when we get there.
Additionally, because distance would no longer become an issue, running cables being a thing of the past, the throughput would be operating near the theoretical maximum of the technology employed to enable quantum communications… that and the speed of the backbone.
With wires and radio frequencies no longer needed, communications would become a problem easily attacked with massive parallelism.
End users might have a quantum network interface with a maximum throughput of x megabits/sec… adding a second interface would be trivial and double the bandwidth, because the infrastructure would be easier to deploy.
How would it change the network? Well, offsite redundant storage could become standard, because there is no latency to communicate with an external drive. Not only could you access your storage and computing resources remotely as easily as you would at home, but you may never even end up being in physical possession of the physical storage or computing devices themselves… the manufacturers may find it easier to give you a code to access them rather than ship them.
Parallel processing could become physically distributed, and may form large pools to be shared to eliminate processors going unused needlessly.
A latency free network with relatively unlimited bandwidth could shift our view of computers further towards being one very very large network, accessed through progressively dumber terminals.
CPUs and other discrete components may never end up being installed, just interfaced over direct quantum communications.
Thats all a bit far fetched, but the potential is developing.
Allan, as for your question, I do not use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time, but there are times when I do use 100% of my bandwidth, so no, I do not consider my current bandwidth to be infinite. I especially find I am limited by the upstream bandwidth. Even if I were allowed to ‘roll over’ my upstream when it isn’t being used, to be spent at a faster rate when needed, I would still find my current capacity to be limited.
Long winded. sorry.
Ryan F on October 11th, 2007 at 10:34 am - Permalink
@Ryan – thanks for the reply. Great thoughts on how the network and Internet could change – this is the discussion I was hoping this post would inspire :)
Allan Leinwand on October 11th, 2007 at 11:49 am - Permalink
Even if we had infinite bandwidth, there would still be limits, I’m pretty sure no PC in the world will take advantage of it, let alone provide infinite bandwidth, I guess what I’m saying is you’re limited by your own PC, the ability to process all that data and storing all that data would be the limiting factor.
Nicholas D. Wolfwood on October 11th, 2007 at 11:52 am - Permalink
The BUSINESS QUESTION is not What would you do with infinite bandwidth? In all the years spent in systems development, mission critical networks and mission critical applications, the argument against new applications was and still is – we do not have enough bandwidth to implement that type of application.
The BUSINESS QUESTION is = What could you do if bandwidth was not an issue? If bandwidth is NOT a constraining factor – what applications could you do that you cannot do now?
For example, downloading a 90-minute video would take hours on DSL but on a 1Gbps line it would take less than ten seconds. On a 10Gbps line it would take less than one second.
If you have that kind of multi-Gbps bandwidth at the subscriber level, what creative applications can you envision AND implement that you cannot do today?
These are the questions to be asked anad answered on approach to the issue of bandwidth.
One reader had it right – the more you have, the more you will fill it up. Just like when you buy a 2-car garage house, You fill up the garage with your cars and junk and say you need three car garage house. You think it is enough but you outgrow that and wish you had a 4-car garage.
JAMES CARLINI on October 11th, 2007 at 2:03 pm - Permalink
a) not possible
b) i couldn’t afford my data bills, the commodity is data used, not speed/latency
c) you could do all the obvious with video, 3d worlds and things today that are constrained by speed and latency
d) unless I misunderstand ‘essay’ – this is not one – maybe Rhetorical Question might have been a better title?
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