All of my life in the industry I have been watching interminable discussions and debates on one major topic - bandwidth. Back in the 1960's it was, 'why would anyone want 2Mbit/s', later that became 8Mbit/s and then 32Mbit/s and then 140Mbit/s followed by 565Mbit/s, 2.4Gbit/s and then 10Gbit/s. Today it is clear that 40Gbit/s systems are viable and we have 160Gbit/s and higher on the horizon, but at each epoch the debate rages - why do people want bandwidth? The demand appears to be insatiable and the industry response irrational. Suppose for a moment a telephone operating company was to sell cars. First of all you would look in the show room and see something exciting like a BMW 7 series and decide that is what you want. The salesman would come over, he would be very nice to you, he would tell you all about the vehicle, he would take you for a drive and you would be convinced this is what you want. But at the moment of signing the cheque he would stop you and ask a fundamental question, "what do you want the vehicle for?" and should you reply, "I will be using it to go to Sainsburys on a Friday night to collect my shopping", he will push you over to the other side of the showroom to try and sell you the latest Smart Car for a fraction of the price, with of course, a fraction of the space and performance. No car salesman in a real garage asks you what you want a car for and what you are going to use it for, but the telecommunications industry habitually want to nose into your business and ask you what you want. It really is nothing to do with them, they really do need to take the attitude - if someone asks for 2Mbit/s, you sell it to them, if they want 8Mbit/s you sell it to them, you give them what they want, what they do with it is their business.

Of all the things we can manufacturer bandwidth happens to be the cheapest. Our productivity with software is still only around 5% pa; on hardware it's well over 60% pa and for bandwidth it's in excess of 85% pa. The cost of bandwidth falls exponentially every year, but the price tends to come down rather more slowly. So why do we need this bandwidth? Where does it all go? I look at it like this, when we communicate we do so through our eyes, ears, skin and olfactory senses, all of which are surface area related. The flow of information itself is to do with surface area, in contrast our processing of information, our thinking abilities, our reasoning is to do with the volume of our brain, it is volumetric. Now from your high school days, I hope you can remember that surface area is related to radius2 and volume is related to radius 3 when we are dealing with something that is spherical. For the purposes of argument and simplification I am now going to assume the human head and entity is spherical in nature. Given that we are head dominated from an I/O point of view this is not a bad approximation! So here we have it, information flow going up is R2 and creativity going up is R3. As an intellectual exercise you might like to plot those two functions on a piece of paper and you will find that for R less than or equal to 1, R3 is smaller than R2, but once R is greater than 1, then R3 goes up much faster than R2 and the two function have crossed over forever. Why is this important? What can we infer? Well it goes like this - there comes a point when our communication ability limits our creativity, in effect our creativity becomes bottled-up and constrained inside our being. This applies to all intelligent entities and networks when the volumetric thinking capability is far, far greater then the ability to communicate.

About 20 years ago, and to some extend even 10 years ago, we were waiting for the next slice of technology as our abilities and our thirst for change were limited by technology. Today the converse is true; the technology is waiting for us. Waves of new technology are now arriving faster than we can subsume and adapt, we have become the limiters of progress, not the arrival of technology. This can be traced directly to a lack of bandwidth. If we were to put in a 20second delay in all human conversation, how stilted it would become and how worthless. Our rate of thinking is directly related to our rate of communication, slow down communication and you slow down thought and you slow down creativity. Today that is what is happening to industry, it is what is happening in the home and it is beginning to cripple society. As I compare the society and industry of different countries and cultures I find remarkable differences, and they are, by and large, down to a lack of bandwidth and the availability and speed to adapt to new technology.