Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Networking the Future

The overall future of networking looks like a growth sector. We’re familiar with Moore’s Law as applied to ever-increasing computing capacity. And Gilder’s Law for bandwidth increase suggests that this growth rate is even faster than that given by Moore’s Law, albeit plotting the actual increases shows the growth to be more in periodic spurts than a linear increase. Although both were formulated as descriptive relationships, their predictive power is generally accepted as very good.

One might hazard to guess that this step-like growth reflects the slower turnover of bandwidth-related communication infrastructure—we don’t rewire connectivity as often as we change computers, but when we do, it tends to be a large-scale upgrade. ...