It is no secret that the World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth since its humble beginnings in 1991. That was the year that the first website, for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the world wide web’s creator. Today there are over 1.1 billion websites (though only 193,890,945 or 17.32% are currently active) with 177,372 new websites created every day.
In 1993, the number of internet users was 2.9 million. In 1995, 16 million. By 2000, the number had climbed to 361 million. In 2005, the number of users crossed the 1 billion threshold. It climbed to 4 billion in 2018. As of 2022, the number had surpassed 5.5 billion users.
This explosive growth in internet usage, would not have been possible without a corresponding growth in what telecommunications engineers refer to as “bandwidth”. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can pass through a transmission medium. Since the mid-90s, growth in bandwidth has been astronomical. Perhaps you might get a better sense of this astronomical growth if we compared to the growth in computer processing power.
Computer processing power is encapsulated in what is known as Moore’s law, which is a rule of thumb formulated by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel in 1965, that underpins the entire microprocessor industry. It basically states computer processing power doubles roughly every 18-24 months, without a corresponding increase in price. The explosion in computing power as a result of Moore’s law made possible the Personal Computer (PC) era possible. Moore’s made it possible for computers to become small but powerful enough to fit on our desks, laps and in our pockets.
In comparison, bandwidth has been growing at roughly twice the rate as that of processing power. That means bandwidth has been doubling roughly every 9-12 months. Just as with Moore’s law, bandwidth doubling has had huge ramifications, launching us into the age of connectivity. It has made fast and ubiquitous internet possible.
The bandwidth explosion has been driven by innovations in fibre-optic and wireless technology. Those innovations were crucial in breaking through the bandwidth bottleneck imposed by trying to access the internet over landline telecom copper wires. Then (i.e. the late 90s), data transmission rates of 56.6 Kilobits per second (Kbps) were state of the art (These were the best of what were called dial-up modems). Today, we have Fifth Generation (5G) Wireless and 10G-PON (Passive Optical Network; a next-generation fibre-optic technology for residential and enterprise use) capable of delivering 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) – 1+ Gigabits per second (Gbps) and 10 Gbps respectively. In addition to that, you have internet backbones (The backbone is the part of a network assumed to carry the most traffic) running off what is known as Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Fiber that permit bandwidth rates in the range of 100 Gbps – 400 Gbps per channel. These technologies have blown the bandwidth bottleneck wide open and ushered in the age of video on demand, cloud-computing, live-streaming, Internet of Things (IoT) and AI accessible over the web.
The future will certainly see more exponential data growth, with global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic forecasted to reach 1 zettabyte (1 zettabyte is about 1 trillion gigabytes) per month by 2030, and for mobile data traffic to grow 4x-6x between 2025 and 2030. A lot of this data will be AI and Cloud Computing workloads; data generated by IoT devices; Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Metaverse applications. The data explosion will no doubt continue to encourage innovation on the bleeding edge of fibre, wireless and even satellite technology.
Bibliography
- Gilder, George. 2000 Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World New York: The Free Press
