As of year-end 2009, the
world’s 1.8 billion Internet users represented roughly 26 percent of the
world’s population.1 Meanwhile, the number
of mobile subscribers reached one billion. By 2020, the number of electronic
communication instruments connected to the global network is likely to reach 20
billion.
Most of the growth won’t take place in today’s most affluent countries. More than half of those 20
billion devices will be in the hands of people in China, India, and Africa.
Mass proliferation of
technology is nothing new; it’s been commonplace since the Industrial
Revolution. That’s why we find automobiles everywhere we turn. Of course,
automotive technology changed the world because the industry was able to make
cars available to everyone in the developed world all at once.
In the process, the mass
adoption of automobiles forced the creation of roads, which, in turn, led to
the creation of suburbs, and eventually led to the creation of a whole economy
that didn’t exist — and couldn’t exist — without the radical mobility
conferred by automobiles.
But nothing like the
current revolution has ever happened before. The emerging category of devices
is qualitatively different. Automobiles don’t talk to each other. Yet, each
node in this remarkable network has the ability to touch every other node.
With just a billion mobile phones in use, the possible number of connections
they can make already exceeds the number of elementary particles in the
universe. Behind each one of those devices is a human brain with its limitless
possibilities for ideas and creativity.
Today, with Wikipedia,
Google, and other Internet resources, the individual power of knowledge,
reason, and invention has already become supercharged. This has made
economies, businesses, and governments more efficient and transparent. But the
new era, in which the majority of the world’s population has access to the
network anytime, from anywhere, promises to change the game entirely.
To make this possible,
the first prerequisite is the availability of sufficient bandwidth to
accommodate all these devices. The conventional wisdom is that bandwidth is
scarce.
That’s actually...
