Work (And Bandwidth) Expands To Fill …

There is an old saying that goes “work expands to fill the time allotted”, … or something like that.  I really was never very good at sayings. But it means that if you have an hour to do something, it’ll take you an hour.  (it’s true … have you ever been on a conference call scheduled for an hour that didn’t take just about an hour?).

The same principal which covers our human bandwidth applies to digital bandwidth.  Look back to Bill Gates.  I know, I know, an evil word – he first version of does was only 4KB.  For the non technical, your cell phone has more than 1,000 times more memory.  Now programs can easily be as large as 4 GB – simply because our systems can support it.

The FCC recently announced that it is considering opening unused airwaves for public wi-fi (dubbed “Super Wi-FI”).

Perhaps instead of expanding bandwidth, we should look to ways to optimize the bandwidth that we have.  Utilizing hybrid peer to peer technology, which delivers the efficiencies of peer to peer technology with the stability of traditional CDN content delivery (I know, more geek speak … it’s like a Toyota Prius delivering your movies online).  Forcing ourselves to be more efficient will fuel just as many technological advancements as expanding our capacity.  Especially when we have plenty of unused fiber capacity (dark fiber).