by dylan tweney
published 10 november 2000

Bandwidth will never be free. Get over it.

A persistent meme has been running through rarefied strata of the digerati for the past few years, and that is that bandwidth will eventually be free. As far as I can tell, this notion was cooked up in the fevered brain of George Gilder, who uses it in his newsletter to pump up the stocks of optical networking companies whose CEOs have befriended him.

The idea is, to be blunt, a complete crock. In fact, bandwidth is one of the few truly valuable commodities on the Internet.

It's easy to see where Gilder et al. get this wrongheaded idea. Bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time, and the Internet's capacity for moving huge quantities of data is constantly increasing -- particularly at the level of the Net's backbones.

Besides, bandwidth is a commodity -- and that makes it uninteresting to the majority of Internet professionals. It's impossible to create expensive, creative marketing campaigns around undifferentiated commodities, so for your typical San Francisco black-clad director of marketing, bandwidth might as well be barrels of oil or pork bellies.

If you buy the idea that Internet companies are analogous to the railroad companies of the 19th century, you might believe that massive overbuilding of the Internet's infrastructure will eventually lead to a glut that drives the cost of bandwidth to zero. In this view, those zillions of dollars AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint are paying to lay cable will never pay off. The telcos will go belly-up, broken by their overinvestment, and all that fiber optic cable will be like so many miles of forgotten track, slowly rusting in the desert sun.

There's just one problem with this analogy. The companies who shipped their goods over 19th century railroads only had so much stuff to move around. By contrast, the users of today's Internet have shown an almost insatiable demand for bandwidth. Witness this week's election coverage -- and the meltdown of many news web sites under the crushing onslaught of Internet traffic [1].

"No matter how much bandwith you give them, someone will find a way to use it," Keynote's director of public services Dan Todd said in an Inside.com article this week [2]. "If you give them news, and not have any glitches in presenting it, and it showed up on your page instantly, users would not only want that, but would also want more streaming video, etc. People will always find a way to expect more."

You have only to look at the vast crop of broadband-oriented Web sites to realize that companies, too, are eager to soak up as much bandwidth as they can get. From failures like Pseudo.com to erstwhile successes like Quokka.com, a lot of brainpower is being devoted to figuring out how to take advantage of broadband Net access. Got a DSL line or a cable modem? Someone wants to send video your way.

Advertisers, too, are slavering over increased bandwidth, which will let them deliver video and audio streams in their banner ads, and in general muck up the Internet until it looks just like TV.

Those companies that provide Internet infrastructure well realize how this increasing demand for bandwidth will help line their pockets. Take a look at Inktomi CEO David Peterschmidt, who is eagerly predicting the advent of a video- and multimedia-enhanced Internet, which naturally will increase demand for Inktomi's services [3].

The thing is, Peterschmidt is right. The Internet will change radically over the next 18 months, video will be more commonplace, and demand for bandwidth will remain high. Bandwidth will never be free, and there will always be a need for companies that can help overcome bandwidth barriers (by, for instance, cacheing data closer to users instead of delivering it long-distance).

When Intel's 386 processor was released, pundits such as Esther Dyson were waxing poetic about how this new CPU would deliver more processing power than anyone would need. As it turned out, new programs came along to soak up all those CPU cycles, and the 386 turned out to be barely sufficient for running Windows.

Expect the same thing to happen with broadband. Yes, we'll have more bandwidth than ever before. Yes, we'll be able to do some unimaginably cool things with it. But it's also likely that the vast majority of this bandwidth will be occupied by advertising and marketing content designed to keep you entertained and online.

[1] News and Elections Web Sites Stressed Under Heavy Use (Keynote Systems press release)

[2] News Sites Struggle and Buckle Under Election Night Strain

[3] ISPCon: Internet to change radically, executive says