Beyond the Telechasm

...Yet most of Metcalfe's floods do not now flow because missing still is the needed broadband link between enterprise exabytes and the Internet core...

...Most of the new systems are merely turbo-coded versions of ordinary file transfer software...

...As photos become digital, then reverberate their petabytes in video some 24 times a second and begin beaming to the giga-gaggle of new-millennium teenagers and grannies, image traffic on the Internet will swamp everything else...

...When it is stolen by millions of otherwise honest customers, you have a marketing problem...

...As Nicholas Negroponte predicted eight years ago, the bulk of Inter-net transmission will be store-and-forward...

...But for identifying a preset pattern--a menacing face in the crowd, a missile in a crowded sky or a WDM array of closely packed channels— analog optics is far faster and more capacious...

...Then came the explosion, with a set of synergies in platter quality and flatness, thin-film fabrication, magneto-resistive drive heads, fast servo motors, digital signal processing and related software, all rushing forward in parallel tounleash a miracle in hard drives...

...By 2002 most were, and mean-while total storage capacity has mounted to 20 exabytes or more—275 times growth in less than a decade...

...SEE ME, FEEL ME The telecosm's ultimate parallel resource is human vision and cognition...

...Based on a new "holographic" algorithm invented at Berkeley by mathematician Mike Luby, a company called Digital Fountain offers a system for downloading files without interruptions, "jitter" or lost packets...

...And it gets worse...

...At the same time, urban business customers are turning increasingly to gigabit Ethernet services...

...What has happened is a manifestation of the pace of bandwidth advance...

...At the time I had no clear notion of what an exabyte was, so I looked it up...

...Amid all this portentous noise, Charlie would not consign his once-in-a-lifetime scoop to so shaky a channel as a high-frequency carrier wave...

...By the end of this year, ONI will intro-duce wave-division multiplexing gear that offers a tenfold increase in cost effectiveness, a rate of advance equivalent to the 79 percent decline in bandwidth costs estimated in 2001...

...What makes that possible are 10,000 Linux PC servers in parallel, each linked to Maxtor 80-gigabyte drives...

...Nevertheless, the human eye canreceive no more than one gigabit a second of information...

...Encompassing this will be an infrastructure of servers, archival storage, data-mining facilities and other technologies that will originate the product, protect its intellectual property, maintain archival libraries and support and complement its use...

...But hidden in its recesses and speleological mazes, in its caves and cages, disk farms and tape racks, are the vast potential resources for an information economy...

...By the beginning of this year, Napster's successors were handling close to double its peak volume, 9.6 petabytes in February 2001...

...But this abundance of content is valuable chiefly to the degree that users can share it...

...In 2001, the record king's lawyers shut down Napster's free music-sharing service...

...Slowly, but rather surely, the information industry is learning to waste bandwidth...

...But the history of the Net reveals a pat-tern of nonlinear spikes and swells, followed by the kind of reversion to the mean we see this year...

...The crash has concealed the accelerating advance of real world optical technology and Internet traffic...

...While a CD-quality song averages 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 around a megabyte a minute, a high-resolution video consumes a hundred times that...

...Its growth continues unabated...

...In 1995, 95 percent of storage was analog—films, tapes and microfiche—and therefore unsuited for trans-mission on the Internet...

...Prices plummet and vendors of high-priced spreads howl in pain...

...Larry Roberts of Caspian, one of its prime inventors, polled the 20 leading carriers in the industry and learned that traffic has been rising at its usual pace, doubling every year...

...What if they should burst through to mighty coaxial cables orT-1 lines and pour their contents into the then little "T-3" 45-megabit backbones of the Net...

...Back in 1995—in the antediluvian age of the 14.4 kilobit-per-second modem, the 2-megabit shared local Ethernet network and the 40-megabyte disk drive—Bob Metcalfe pointed to the ultimate source of this Inter-net traffic...

...But let me point with an exclamatory wave of my arms to these numbers...

...If you can use the image as a pro-gram to process other images, you can do massively parallel processing in real time, overlaying one image over another and canceling out all redundant information...

...If you want to do streaming audio or video, you break up the file into segments and send each of them to be buffered at the other end...

...Nor do TiVO or Replay television customers who download their favorite programs into increasingly sizable multi-gigabyte drives...

...The spread of cable moderns and DSL may have conferred similar gains on up-market households and small businesses...

...As the disk drive industry continues its advances, the Listen.com strategy naturally morphs into Watch.com, usable for films, games and multimedia—the chief difference being the hundredfold greater size of the files...

...The collapse of the price per bit of bandwidth is exactly the con-summation that I have been seeking and predicting and explaining for the last 10 years...

...But carriers see cheaper systems...

...Digital is what you want if you don't know what you are doing and need to program it later...

...Ruling on Wall Street, however, has been an entirely different fear, based on the belief in a continuing glut of bandwidth that permanently dooms the entire "next generation" of "Chapter 11" networks such as Global Crossing, Williams and MFN with their millions of miles of fiber...

...At the carrier level, price elasticity of demand for bandwidth continues to register at a rate of between four and six—a 50 percent price drop yields a 200 to 300 percent increase of quantity demanded...

...Metcalfe's 15 Ethernet exabytes would thus mean more than 15 trillion big books...

...Designed for a world of storage and bandwidth abundance, where the prime impulse is sharing experiences, Reid's model can spur the Net to new heights and create a new arena of profitable commerce...

...In the telecosmic scheme of abundances and scarcities, bandwidth is indeed the canonical abundance...

...The "Napster" effect has roughly quadrupled the number of songs used in a year, expanded dramatically the range of music heard and potentially enlarged the industry...

...It would drown...

...tomorrow it will be video, measured in gigabytes...

...At that point, Listen.com transmits a secure, real-time activation strip ("essential audio"), with the crucial remaining bits...

...The plummeting price of bandwidth and connectivity is not a problem for the paradigm—it massively confirms the telecosmic regime of abundances and scarcities...

...When your product is stolen by thieves, you have a police problem...

...That means 50 billion songs a year, the equivalent of 3 billion CDs of music or more than three times the 850 million real CDs sold annually...

...JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...

...Launched with support from Garage.com and yours truly, and backed by Sony and Cisco and an array of top-line venture capital, Digital Fountain is transforming the parameters of file transfer on the Net...

...New inventions vindicate the paradigm and expand the potential of the telecosm...

...By 2002, 95 per-cent of storage was digital...

...In tow he had a new company, Narad Networks, which proposes to open the channels between enterprise and Inter-net, unleashing the exaflood through cable TV systems, previously regarded a broad-band option exclusively for homes...

...So Charlie chugged into my office in per-son to disclose in unmodulated phonons the latest shocking news: The Internet lives...

...85 percent of it is said to be random, redundant or obsolete...

...Transmitting music files in unplayable form—residual audio is the technical term—Listen.com makes no move to inhibit the use of them until they are played...

...For rural areas, satellite companies such as Hughes and Echostar will tend to dominate, because despite limited total capacity, they offer spanwidth:Three geosynchonous birds can cover the entire globe...

...The ultimate promise of the telecosm is to integrate a global optical Internet with billions of light processors, all working in parallel to accomplish the business of the world...

...The telecom industry's capex—capital expenditures—slump in 2001 was concussive...

...Overwhelming all tricky customized solutions, Ethernet moving to 10 gigabits per second, Infiniband unleashing fast servers on industry standard platforms, cheap storage multiplying into the terabytes per drive all will advance on their parallel paths...

...The music industry's answer—Press-Play from Sony and Universal and Music.Net from EMI, Warner Brothers, and Bertelsmann—is to try to compete by offering less...

...Today the dominant mode is music, moved across the Net as files of anywhere up to five megabytes each...

...Like most big books the data is seldom opened or read...

...The 6 million "cones" and 120 million "rods" of the human retina initiate this process, enabling the eyes to accept a range of brightness with a fabulous 15 orders of magnitude—a factor of a thousand trillion...

...With continued growth in traffic, demand for optical technology will re-emerge inexorably...

...No one knows much about what the information is or why it was stored, or where it resides in what bloc, file, logical unit, disk array, rack, data center, warehouse, bitmine, cache, cave, cage or other mnemonic device...

...Metcalfe by contrast was an Olympian inventor and entrepreneur...

...As home storage mounts, a peer-to-peer paradigm—computers in the home and business sharing resources across the network without a top down structure—is inevitable...

...62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 terabytes per month of Internet packets on the public network amounted to a mere burble of noise beside the potential of 15 exabytes per month coursing through the LANs of the nation's businesses...

...At the time, I was a lowlander who eked out my living by puffing self-importantly into the sails of the Net's then meager vessels of Usenet news and e-mail and bulletin-board twaddle, and declaring them an armada that would soon overthrow the television empire...

...Nor will the millions of users of multi-gigabyte home storage...

...It is 1018 bytes, an inconceivable vastness, best measured in LOCs...

...Distributed across the globe, 10 exabytes translates into 10 billion bytes of digital information--some ten thousand big books of data—for every man, woman and child on the face of the earth...

...Parallelism is what makes Google's search engine sort through 3.6 billion plus Web pages and bang out the search results in less than one-fifth of a second...

...FUN WITH NUMBERS For gauging the current potential overhang between private networks and the public Internet, the best measure is storage capacity...

...These reports signify a pace of advance in transport and switching technology that may be fairly described as stupendous—triple Moore's law, the defining curve for semiconductor advances...

...Rather than optimizing processors to deliver huge amounts of delicate data, these parallel systems allow us to exploit the abundance already in place, in the PCs of the world...

...Combine traffic data with SG Cowen's data analysis of carrier capital-equipment expenditures, and you get a drop in the cost of bandwidth of 58 percent per year—roughly a hundredfold decline in five years...

...Since images are inherently analog, these "light" computers will be analog too, working with interference, refraction and diffraction among intersecting colors of light...

...Now aiming to become one himself, he has launched a company called Listen.com...

...Adjusted for JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 increasing cost effectiveness, actual band-width deployment or real capital spending continues to soar...

...Its usable spectrum is a hundredfold greater than the 50 MHz of twisted pair and more convenient than microwave wireless, with its line-of-sight limitations...

...Numbers so large invite skepticism...

...Online storage of all the some 52 billion photos snapped annually would require 26 petabytes...

...Multiple streams can be sent in parallel...

...Back when Metcalfe raised his exaflood alarm in 1995, total digital storage was some 73 petabytes, a vasthoard signifying 10 kilobytes for every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth...

...The secret is yet another form of parallelism: Rather than sending the content itself, Digital Fountain puts it into a mathematical blender that homogenizes the packets...

...And that's just a single household or office desktop...

...But Napster's 65 million registered customers unleashed a tsunami of digital music onto the Net, with no such centralized functions at all.A Bear Stearns study on Internet infra-structure by analysts Chris Kwak and Robert Fagin calculates that if Napster had been built on a centralized model, it would have had to purchase over 5,000 F840 6-terabyte enterprise filers from Network Appliance, at a cost of some $666 million, plus bandwidth at $6.7 million per month...

...Optical fiber was the new Heart of Darkness, with United Artists reissuing Apocalypse Now for the telecosm era, with glum playmates undulating amid what appeared to be the gaseous fumes of Enron...

...Sight itself—the actual ability of the brain to absorb and interpret words or images—remains intractably at around 25 bits a second...

...Even as the Inter-net core slowly transforms into an ultra-quiet all optical fibersphere, technologies like Digital Fountain will provide a cheap and effective way to get the most out of the noisy storewidth jungle...

...The storewidth paradigm dictates wasting the increasingly free resources of bandwidth and storage, to bypass the slow, costly costive snarls of bits and wires, routers and servers, silicon and copper, switches and buffers, queues and protocols that currently populate the Internet...

...Even the current doubling, however, means another hundredfold surge in under seven years...

...Doom-star Wall Street analysts Ravi Suria and Susan Kalla were dirging and devaluing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and the International Telecommunications Union was said to be meeting in Geneva to downgrade the speed of light...

...To stop them, the music industry must outlaw the basic structure of the Internet...

...But capital is not money...

...All visual reality is coded as oscillations and waves of neural excitation, washing back and forth across the brain and enabling identification of edges and contrasts in an image...

...We would see it no more...

...If you want to filter a file through the troposphere from a geosynchronous satellite or bounce it around the globe through 25 routers that routinely relieve congestion by dropping packets, you need no back channel to assure a perfect transfer...

...At the current pace, that will happen in less than five years...

...In his 1996 book, Packet Communication, the Ethernet inventor and 3Com founder opined that the then-estimated 15 George Gilder is editor of the Gilder Technology Report, editor at large of The American Spectator and author of Wealth & Poverty, Life After Television and other books...

...The financial world has undergone an acute deflation that put every indebted company—and country—through the wringer, requiring that loans and bonds be paid back in dollars that have appreciated at least 40 percent over the last five years...

...Parallelism and peer-to-peer processing and computing technologies are everywhere changing the face of storewidth...

...Shocking was his image of these kiloLOCs looming over the frail defenses of the Internet like a vastly swollen North Sea pressing against the dikes of Holland...

...In the past, in order to pump gigabytes of data onto the Net, you needed a $50,000 server with multiple ports and processors, queues, "threads" and buffers, and with costly specialized disk facilities and databases...

...Late in 2001, how-ever, help arrived from this very same Bob Metcalfe, now a venture capitalist at Polaris in Boston...

...Metcalfe wanted to know: What if all those Ethernets then only trickling onto the Internet through dialup modems seriously began to leak...

...In effect, we all possess a broadband antenna—the eyes—and a slow, narrowband but profoundly intuitive processor, the human brain, that is yet to be understood fully by science...

...While all of us still wait impatiently for our information to show up, evidence from high-end users surveyed by Keynote indicates that, in the face of a 3000-fold traffic surge since 1996, Internet performance has actually improved overall, from a 12-second delay four years ago to a three-second delay this year...

...Charlie Burger calculates that to sustain this year's Internet traffic with the communications technologies of five years ago would have cost $39 trillion—four full years of U.S...

...In 1992, a 40-megabyte drive cost $150.As I write, IBM's 60-gigabyte GXP is on sale at Fry's for $99.The 120-GB model is $179—less than half of what it listed for when introduced a few months ago...

...Users of Apple's iPod MP3 music player do not worry about disrupted links...

...Doubling every year—compared to a Moore's law cycle of doubling micro-processor capability every 18 months—a high-end PC drive will have jumped from 100 megabytes in 1992 to 100 gigabytes by the end of this year...

...At present, music lovers daily download 150 million songs free over the Internet...

...While the laws of entropy prohibit reseparating scrambled eggs, the laws of mathematics—and Luby's algorithm—allow the receiver perfectly to reconsitute the original files...

...And the rate of advance is sharply accelerating...

...and investors see new opportunities...

...Put them in 100 million households around the globe five years hence and you have 10 exabytes of capacity...

...Unlike the twisted-pair copper owned by your local telephone company, coax is inherently broadband...

...it is capability...

...Now the challenge is to make it into a viable business...

...After a hundredfold burst between December 1994 and December 1996, the Net did face political and legal obstacles and dropped from its runaway pace...

...BEYOND THE TELECHA B Y G E O R G E C I L D E R ers, with 37 big bankruptcies and stock prices As I was finishing the revised paper-back version of Telecosm this spring, our optics sage, Charlie Burger, rushed into my office with another shocking tale from the topsy-turvy world of telecom, where paradigms withered, fiber glutted and tech shorts became the shamans of the sea-son, strutting their stuff down the beaches of the Hamptons and on the casting couches of the money shows...

...A factor of one million, for non-techie Spectator readers...

...Narad (see "Copper Killers," TAS May/June 2002) bores through the "last mile" conundrum...

...Direct fiber connections to homes and small businesses are still scarceand expensive.A$licted by regulation and the meager capacity of the twisted-pair copper medium, DSL struggles to provide sub T-1 bandwidth at typical distances...

...Most of that was in drives not connected to the Net...

...The price of long-distance bandwidth has dropped 500-fold since 1996, while traffic has increased 3000-fold, yielding a crude elasticity number of six...

...DEFLATING DOLLARS Painful as it has been for companies and their investors, the telecosmic collapse is mainly a monetary event...

...At 20 million megabytes, the LOC has found favor as a unit of measurement: roughly the contents of the Library of Congress translated into digital form—20 million big books...

...I do not use exclamation points...

...An exabyte is 50,000 LOCs, which comes to a trillion big books...

...In these apparent "end times," telcos were tumbling like trade tow-lower than Japanese interest rates...

...Here's what a 120-gigabyte drive can do: hold 60 full-length MPEG 2 movies or 24 thousand MP3 songs or 100,000 high-resolution digital photos or scores of downloaded TV programs and home videos...

...VINI, VIDI, VIDEO I n 2005, just three years from now, will begin the terabyte era, when a few hundred dollars will get you a terabyte drive—big enough to hold 480 films, or 200,000 songs, and so on...

...Was Metcalfe mad when he proposed that the real threat to the Net was too little capacity rather than too much...

...But at the point where they're actually played, a user must pay...

...This model now collides, however, with perplexing issues of copyright and intellectual property...

...Free space optics from Terabeam offers chiefly an urban high-rise solution...

...But as renaissance visionary David Gelernter ofYale and Mirror Worlds gently reminded me in a review and in a recent interview (TAS, Jan/Feb 2002), bandwidth is only one side of the solution...

...Offering a more promising scheme is Rob Reid, author of the first definitive book on Internet conunerce, Architects of the Net...

...Leap Before You Look" is a law of enterprise, which cannot burst ahead through incremental look-before-you-leap maneuvers.You cannot see anything truly new from an old place.You must ride the light...

...This article is adapted from the new afterword to Telecosm, published in paperback this summer by Touchstone Books...

...Promising an increasing spread of digital voice services as well, this new competition from cable, glass and air will drive the telephone companies to accelerate their move toward fiber to the curb and household...

...Who could tell what would befall the bits as they were levered through some Ponzi scheme of JDSU lasers, Merrill Lynch junk bonds and Nortel add/drop multiplexers, before flying down a light wave flicker on a glass thread from Metromedia Fiber, only to overrun the buffers on a line of credit and die a miserable death in the dark at a sepulchral Exodus dot-corn debtor-center...

...Both in court and in the marketplace, the current strategies of the music industry are doomed to failure...

...Over the short hop between your disk and your display, or your basement and your entertainment room, songs and images, films and games will stream forth effortlessly...

...And all those rods and cones link to the optic nerve through the only one million ganglion cells--a compression ratio of 126 to one—that further reduce the information flow to just seven megabits a second...

...New inventions drastically enhance the cost effectiveness of the technology and ensure its more rapid deployment...

...The key to expanding that will be computer architectures that exploit what David Nolte portentously calls "the parallel advantage of light and image...

...However, as Gelernter observed,"Industry has yet to learn how to squander storage creatively" MOORE'S LAW MADNESS Throughout most of the computer age, storage of all kinds has been oppressively scarce...

...Glug, plug, gurgle, gurgle...

...For many crucial functions—including rapid simultaneous downloads from high traffic sites—such architectures remain indispensable and will proliferate with Metcalfe's flood...

...Imagine a tower of tomes 200 million miles high, reaching twice as far as the sun...

...A world of images will entail both storage and bandwidth roughly a hundred times greater than today's...

...The reason is simple...

...customers see cheaper connectivity...

...Archiving was done on tape, and much of it remained stolidly analog...

...I have long celebrated these feats of bandwidth abundance...

...Reid's strategy is to allow users to do whatever they like with their files: store, list, file, exchange them...

...Until the early 1990s, hard drives advanced far more slowly than Moore's law, with storage densities increasing only 27 per cent per year...

...They bar the sharing of music files, lists and combinations that are the focus of current music users on the Net...

...The emergence of digital video disks (DVDs) and the dominance of CDs make movies, music and photographs increasingly digital and Web-ready...

...Instead, it used the disk drives and Internet connections of its millions of customers and paid essentially nothing...

...Since the distant depths of the early 1990s, my favorite residential access medium has been coaxial cable used for cable television...

...s "Leap Before You Look" is a law of enterprise...

...It has created a system for distributing songs that both accommodates the current users and lays the foundations for a heavily profitable music business on the Net...

...Dealing at once with a tsunami of new traffic and crunch of economic deflation, the bandwidth stars of the telecosm have per-formed a job far more in line with the stock prices of the so-called "bubble" of the year 2000 than of the crash that followed...

...At the heart of this are images, themselves serving as programs to process other images...

...Making these yet more valuable is a new method of sending flawless files through noisy channels...