Applicable Laws

The following are some of my favorite laws, when it comes to tracking technology and bandwidth growth:

Everyone has heard of Moore’s Law, invented by the legendary Geofrey Moore, founder of Intel. Moore’s Law predicts:

Probably the next most cited law in technology circles is Metcalfe’s law. Created by the inventor of Ethernet, and the founder of 3Com, Metcalf’s Law states:

George Gilder, the legendary technology visionary, came along with another law in 1996 predicting internet bandwidth growth. Gilder’s Law postulates:

Maybe a little optimistic in terms of what we know now, but a valiant attempt, none-the-less to predict bandwidth growth. Perhaps a more accurate estimate is Nielsen’s Law:

However, my favorite law of all is attributed to Jeff Farmer, the former CTO of Wave7, who perhaps predicted Internet bandwidth in the most accurate of ways… Farmer’s Law states:

In reality, bandwidth has been growing at approximately 40% per year but my favorite law remains to be Farmer’s Law.

When I first started in this industry as a junior PLM, I used to believe that bandwidth would keep growing until the point where one could stream a decent resolution video stream over the Internet that could be watched on a large screen TV. At that point the killer app (video) would have been realized and bandwidth growth would start to slow significantly. Now with websites like Netflix, this has proved possible. However, the growth in bandwidth doesn’t appear to be slowing anytime soon.

Bandwidth has provided us with the opportunities to develop more and more applications, which in turn fuels the need for more bandwidth, which in turn opens up new applications.

Looking forward, I think cloud computing will set an interesting bar for the next major milestone for bandwidth. It will be very interesting to see the day when latency and bandwidth are so fast, that very low cost clients will have seamless interfaces to massive datacenters that host all our applications, files and software.

Video: Finisar 10G Tunable XFP Demonstration at OFC 2010

WaveShaper Coming to CLEO

Come one, come all! For those of you planning to attend CLEO/IQEC next week at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, we invite you to visit Finisar booth #1218. From May 18-20, our illustrious technical team, including our staff from down under, will be on-hand to demonstrate the WaveShaper family of Programmable Optical Processors. Based on high-resolution Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) technology, the WaveShaper processors provide extremely fine control of filter amplitude and phase characteristics, making them ideal for a range of pulse-shaping and optical signal processing applications.

For more information about WaveShaper, visit our website. Or send an e-mail anytime to waveshaper@finisar.com.

See you at the show!