Thomas Stanton on Gilder's law
From Tom Stanton, Chairman & CEO, ADTRAN · · BroadbandWorldForum
“Gilder's law, which states that the bandwidth of systems will triple every 12 months, has turned out to be less accurate. Bandwidth has grown about 45 percent a year over the last 20 or 30 years, which is good but substantially less than what could be achieved.”
On , Thomas Stanton, President, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman at ADTRAN HOLDINGS INC, spoke about Gilder's law during Tom Stanton, Chairman & CEO, ADTRAN on BroadbandWorldForum.
About Thomas Stanton
In a September 2014 presentation, Tom Stanton, Chairman & CEO of ADTRAN, discussed the accelerating pace of change in broadband and networking. He attributed this to the combined effect of Moore's law, Gilder's law, and Metcalfe's law, the last of which he described as stating that "the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of that network." Stanton argued that speed remains a "bottleneck to innovation" and that increasing access speeds will unleash new capabilities. He also stated that the network is not scalable if built for all users to have everything, and pointed to software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) as a path to economical scaling. Stanton compared the current technological shift to the impact of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, saying it "completely changed society by making knowledge and education available to everybody." He referenced futurist Ray Kurzweil's prediction that the century could see the equivalent of 20,000 years of progress if bandwidth bottlenecks are unlocked. Stanton asserted that "the demand for broadband is infinite" and that it is impossible to foresee where broadband requirements will peak.