Andrew Grove, Titan of Intel, is widely known for his belief, born in the vortex of the Hungarian Revolution and honed in the trenches of Silicon Valley, that “only the paranoid survive.” If so, the Intel chief may soon need to resharpen the edges of fear that have driven his company to the top. Looming on the horizons of the global computer industry that Grove now shapes and spearheads is a gathering crest of change that threatens to reduce the microprocessor’s supremacy and reestablish the information economy on new foundations. Imparting a personal edge to the challenge are the restless energies of Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Tele-Communications Inc.’s John Malone, providing catalytic capital and leadership for the new tides of the telecosm.

Grove’s response is seemingly persuasive. “We have state-of-the-art silicon technology, state-of-the art microprocessor design skills and we have mass production volumes.” These huge assets endow Intel as a global engine of growth with 55% margins and more than 80% market share in the single most important product in the world economy. Why indeed should Grove worry?

One word only may challenge him and with him much of the existing computer establishment. Let us paraphrase a 1988 speech by John Moussouris, chairman and chief executive of the amazing Silicon Valley startup MicroUnity, which gains a portentous heft from being financed heavily by Gates and Malone: If the leading sage of computer design, in his last deathbed gasp, wanted to impart in one word all of his accumulated wisdom about the coming era to a prodigal son rushing home to inherit the business, that one word would be “bandwidth.” Andy Grove knows it well. Early this year he memorably declaimed: “If you are amazed by the fast drop in the cost of computing power over the last decade, just wait till you see what is happening to the cost of bandwidth.”

Eric Schmidt, chief technical officer of Sun Microsystems, is one of the few men who have measured this coming tide and mastered some of its crucial implications. His key insight is that the onrush of bandwidth abundance overthrows Moore’s Law as the driving force of computer progress. Until now progress in the computer industry has ridden the revelation in 1979 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the density of transistors on chips, and thus the price-performance of computers, doubles every 18 months. Soon, however, Schmidt ordains, bandwidth will be king.

Bandwidth is communications power—the capacity of an information channel to transmit bits without error in the presence of noise. In fiber optics, in wireless communications, in new dumb switches, in digital signal processors, bandwidth will expand from five to 100 times as fast as the rise of microprocessor speeds. With the rapid spread of national networks of fiber and cable, the dribble of kilobits (thousands of bits) from twisted-pair telephone lines is about to become a firehose of gigabits (billions of bits). But the PC is not ready. Attach the firehose to the parallel port of your personal computer and the stream of bits becomes a blast of data smithereens.

Tsunami of Gigabits
The bandwidth bottleneck of telephone wires has long allowed the computer world to live in a strange and artificial isolation. In the computer world, Moore’s Law has reigned. At its awesome exponential pace, computer price-performance would increase some one hundredfold every 10 years. This means that for the price of a current 100 mips (millions of instructions per second) Pentium machine, you could buy a computer in 2004 running 10 billion instructions per second. Since today the fastest bit streams routinely linked to computers run 100 times slower, at 10 megabits per second on an Ethernet, 10 bips seems adequate as a 10-year target. All seems fine in computer land, where users rarely wonder what happens after the wire reaches the wall.

In the face of the 10 times faster increase in bandwidth, however, Moore’s Law seems almost paltry. The rise in bandwidth does not follow the smooth incremental ascent that the heroic exertions, inventions and investments of Andy Grove and his followers have maintained in microchips. bandwidth bumps and grinds and then volcanically erupts. The communications equivalent of those 10 bips that would take 10 years to reach according to the existing trend would be 10-gigabit-per-second connections to their corporate customers next year.

During the very period of apparent bandwidth doldrums during the 1980s, phone companies installed some 10 million kilometers of optical fiber. So far only an infinitesimal portion of its potential bandwidth has been delivered to customers. Moussouris estimates that the bandwidth of fiber has been exploited one million times less fully than the bandwidth of coax or twisted pair copper.

Nonetheless, the tide is now gathering toward a crest. This year, MCI offers its corporate customers access to a fiber connection at 2.4 gigabits per second. Next year that link will run at 10 gigabits per second for the same price. Two years after that it is scheduled to rise to 40 gigabits per second. Meanwhile, at Martlesham Heath in the United Kingdom, home of British Telecom’s research laboratories, Peter Cochrane announced in early September that he could send some 700 separate wavelength streams in parallel down a single fiber-optic thread the width of a human hair. Peter Scovell of Northern Telecom’s Bell Northern Research facility declares that by using “solitons”—an exotic method of keeping the bits intact at high speeds through a kind of surface tension counterbalancing dispersion in the fiber—it will be possible to carry 2.4 gigahertz (billions of cycles per second) on each wave length stream. That would add up to more than 1,700 gigahertz on every fiber thread.

Blocking such bandwidths until recently was what is called in the optics trade the “electronic bottleneck.” The light signals had to be converted to electronic pulses every 35 kilometers in order to be amplified and regenerated. Thus fiber optics could not function any faster than these electronic amplifiers did, or between two and 10 gigahertz. In the late 1980s, however, a team led by David Payne of the University of Southampton pioneered the concept of doping a fiber with the rare earth element erbium, to create an all-optical broadband amplifier. Perfected at Bell Labs, NTT and elsewhere, this device overcomes the electronic bottleneck and allows communications entirely at the speed of light.

[ back to top ] [ page | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ]