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March 1, 2003
Bandwidth liquidity
I got my first exposure to liquidity when I became an individual investor in June, 1999. That was the month I opened my first on-line trading account, and vigorously read everything I could about investing as an individual.
Market liquidity became very noticeable as the stock market crashed in 2001. I heard more and more people talking about how amazing it was that even when companies were failing, there were people buying up the stock as it was sold by ever-more-humble individual investors. It's a failing of the human mind, that we just can't imagine how many people are buying and selling stocks, so we have a hard time comprehending all of the motivations from all of the people and institutions who are always buying and selling stocks, no matter what the price. I may not get the price I want for a stock I want to buy or sell, but I can always count on being able to buy it or sell it. Amazing.
eBay is another example of liquidity. About a year ago, I tried an experiment to see how liquid eBay is. I cleaned out my supply of various electronic parts that I was sure to use someday, ten years ago. This included relics such as old 56k routers, old ISDN terminals and a beautiful fully-functional 5.25" floppy drive. It cost me $0.50 to list each one on eBay, plus some time putting together a nice posting. I sold everything. I didn't make much money, but somewhere in the millions of eBay users, there was at least one (and sometimes more) person who wanted my junk. Contrast that to the much-less liquid classifieds where I would never have had a chance.
The job market is another example of liquidity. I thought about this as I sat at a new very good Mexican restaurant at Jordan Landing (Enrique's). Some no-name start-up company can put a sign in the window to hire a couple of employees, and no matter how tight the market is, people will be available. There are enough people entering the work-force or floating between jobs to fill most of the positions that open up. Maybe not as good an example, but still interesting to think about.
So, my point. Bandwidth is much different. As an Internet user, and Internet company, or an Internet developer, I always have to think about bandwidth. And probably latency, too. But mostly bandwidth right now. As a dial-up user, I have to find applications that work on my 56k (or 28k) dial-up, and I often run into sites and pages and files that are just too slow to use, and I get frustrated. As an Internet company, I have to spend lots of time focused on my customers' experience at various levels of bandwidth (this would be somewhat similar to retailers having to track the driving experience of each customer from home to their store--which they probably do to an extent, but not as core to their business). As an Internet developer, a major part of my time (unless I plan to be fired) is spent considering how my application works on dial-up, broadband and high-speed connections.
Imagine how different the stock market would be if most people spent most of their time figuring out if they could sell or buy a stock, and trying to figure out how to sell or buy it, instead of just selling or buying to meet their investment or amusement goals. What if businesses had to worry about how to convince people to even consider applying for a job and if there were people who would want to work, instead of just worrying about interviewing, selecting and paying the people who apply for the job.
What if bandwidth was liquid? What if a users experience was reasonably consistent no matter what site they went to? What if Internet companies could focus on improving their customer experience through improved functionality, rather than figuring out how to squeeze more into a tiny chunk of bandwidth? What if developers could develop like they do on LANs, where only a small amount of effort is focused on bandwidth issues, and focus more on the usability and functionality of the Internet application?
High-speed networks are enabling bandwidth liquidity. Internet2 is one environment where most users, organizations and developers spend very little of their time worrying about bandwidth (though the network planners spend quite a bit of time). There is even an annual event to see if the available bandwidth can be filled. I think UEN is getting to that point, at least on our backbone, where concerns about wide-spread deployment of video and voice and bandwidth-intensive applications will soon be a thing of the past, at least within the network. Through peering and regional exchanges and lower Internet transit, we hope to improve liquidity outside the network as well.
As long as most of our efforts are focused on whether the network can support what we want to do, instead of focusing on doing what we want to do, the network isn't going to be very valuable. The sooner we can have enough ubitiquous, inexpensive bandwidth that we stop thinking about it, the sooner we will have a network-enabled society.
Posted by pete at March 1, 2003 8:51 AM