If You Build It They Will Come

Imagine my surprise at finding that MeatBall Wiki has a version of this page, but it goes off in another direction.

This is about bandwidth. It's about the uses and consumption of bandwidth. It's about the phenomenon of never having enough bandwidth.

You can never have too much bandwidth. (And while you can never be too rich, it turns out that you can be too thin.)

When I lived in Las Vegas several years back, my apartment was at what was then the West edge-of-town boundary. To the West of us was Rainbow Blvd, a two-lane road that devolved into a dirt track to the South of our street and connected to the not-really-a-freeway to the North of us. It sucked as a street, but it was there.

People began to put businesses along this (minor) thoroughfare. A small shopping center appeared. One of my clients added a branch to his chain of sports bars. A fast food place appeared. Developers decided the time was ripe and got subdivisions approved. Housing developments began to spring up along the boulevard.

And one day, out of the blue, the road was no longer wide enough to support the traffic. What a surprise. A project to widen the road was undertaken (at great expense, of course). More businesses showed up. More housing showed up. What had been the Western boundary of the city gradually moved toward the center. Nobody remembered what had happened to Valley View, which had a few decades before been the Western boundary (a dirt road on the outskirts of town where kids used to park for a bit of bill-and-coo and snogging).

We were reliving the whole oh-my-God-the-road-is-too-narrow realization. As the communities grew more Westward, Rainbow Blvd underwent yet another widening project (at great expense).

I use this example because it is so classic and so representative of a dirt-common phenomenon: if you create a path or road or communication line, traffic will flow on it, and the traffic will eventually consume all the available bandwidth -- to the point where the road or comm line becomes congested and must be increased in capacity -- and it mostly comes as a surprise.

It seems that it's almost an axiom that traffic will expand to consume all available bandwidth.

Sometimes the solution is WidenTheRoad?, sometimes it's BuildAnotherRoad?.

We've recently run into this phenomenon with the wiring/node/protocol infrastructure in our installations. Fortunately, we have more options available and can use the existing components in the middle while changing leaf and root nodes and crafting a new protocol. We will eventually hit that same wall again. We're trying not to worry about it too much just now, since we don't have a "worry about the future" project on the boards.

I'm guessing this isn't a new concept. There's probably even another page on c2 that says the same thing.

-- GarryHamilton