The Internet Marketing Success Ezine

FIBER KEEPS ITS PROMISE

BY

GEORGE GILDER

"Today, I await the death of television, telephony, VCRs,
and analog cameras with utter confidence as Moore's law
unfolds." Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, John Malone, are
you listening?"

Get ready. Bandwidth will triple each year for
the next 25, creating trillions in new wealth.

Editor's note: Four years ago, Forbes ASAP published its first issue with
a stunning prophecy by contributing editor George Gilder. Fiber optics,
said George, had the potential to carry 25 trillion bits per second down
a single strand. This represented a ten-thousandfold leap in carrying
capacity over the 2.5 billion bits "barrier" long assumed by most experts
in the field. What did George see that others had missed? One, a
little-recognized (at the time) breakthrough called an erbium-doped
amplifier, which keeps optical signals pure and strong over long distances.
The other was a deep technical shift, with roots in the 1940s-era work of
information theory pioneer Claude Shannon. If you believed Shannon, his
logic dictated a new messaging scheme called wave division multiplexing.
Though scorned by the experts four years ago, WDM now is emerging as the
winner George had prophesied.

The real winners will be all of us, as the coming world of cheap,
unlimited bandwidth unfolds and at last fulfills the true potential
of the information age. Here is George with an update.

IMAGINE THAT IN 1975 YOU KNEW that Moore's law–the Intel chairman's
projection of the doubling of the number of transistors on a microchip
every 18 months–would hold for the rest of your lifetime. What if you
knew that these transistors would run cooler, faster, better, and cheaper
as they got smaller and were crammed more closely together? Suppose you
knew the law of the microcosm: that the cost-effectiveness of any
number of "n" transistors on a single silicon sliver would rise by the
square of the increase in "n."