TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World [Hardcover]

George Gilder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 2000

The computer age is over.

After a cataclysmic global run of thirty years, it has given birth to the age of the telecosm -- the world enabled and defined by new communications technology. Chips and software will continue to make great contributions to our lives, but the action is elsewhere. To seek the key to great wealth and to understand the bewildering ways that high tech is restructuring our lives, look not to chip speed but to communication power, or bandwidth. Bandwidth is exploding, and its abundance is the most important social and economic fact of our time.

George Gilder is one of the great technological visionaries, and "the man who put the 's' in 'telecosm'" "(Telephony magazine)." He is equally famous for understanding and predicting the nuts and bolts of complex technologies, and for putting it all together in a soaring view of why things change, and what it means for our daily lives. His track record of futurist predictions is one of the best, often proving to be right even when initially opposed by mighty corporations and governments. He foresaw the power of fiber and wireless optics, the decline of the telephone regime, and the explosion of handheld computers, among many trends. His list of favored companies outpaced even the soaring Nasdaq in 1999 by more than double.

His long-awaited "Telecosm" is a bible of the new age of communications. Equal parts science story, business history, social analysis, and prediction, it is the one book you need to make sense of the titanic changes underway in our lives. Whether you surf the net constantly or not at all, whether you live on your cell phone or hate it for its invasion of private life, you need this book. Ithas been less than two decades since the introduction of the IBM personal computer, and yet the enormous changes wrought in our lives by the computer will pale beside the changes of the telecosm. Gilder explains why computers will "empty out," with their components migrating to the net; why hundreds of low-flying satellites will enable hand-held computers and communicators to become ubiquitous; why television will die; why newspapers and magazines will revive; why advertising will become less obnoxious; and why companies will never be able to waste your time again.

Along the way you will meet the movers and shakers who have made the telecosm possible. From Charles Townes and Gordon Gould, who invented the laser, to the story of JDS Uniphase, "the Intel of the Telecosm," to the birthing of fiberless optics pioneer TeraBeam, here are the inventors and entrepreneurs who will be hailed as the next Edison or Gates. From hardware to software to chips to storage, here are the technologies that will soon be as basic as the air we breathe.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

And he said, "Let the computer age be over."
And so it was.

George Gilder, the tech-friendly author of the well-received chip treatise, The Meaning of the Microcosm, and publisher of the Gilder Technology Report, has brought forth Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World, another work of technical prose that's sure to appeal to both techheads and nontechnical folks alike.

Telecosm predicts a revolutionary new era of unlimited bandwidth: it describes how the "age of the microchip"--dubbed the "microcosm"--is ending and leaving in its wake a new era--the "telecosm," or "the world enabled and defined by new communications technology."

Speaking like a prophet of the bandwidth deity, Brother Gilder lays down the telecosmic commandments--the Law of the Telecosm, Gilder's Law, the Black Box Law, and so on. He describes the gaggle of industry players--from cable and satellite to telephone and computer--who populate the telecosm arena.

Books about telecommunications rarely are quotable, but Telecosm at times is a brilliant example of magical and (believe it or not) mystical prose. Gilder's philo-techno perspective makes for interesting and thought-provoking musings: "Wrought of sand, oxygen, and aluminum, the three most common substances in the Earth's crust, the microprocessor distills ideas as complex as a street map of America onto a sliver of silicon the size of a thumbnail. This gift of the quantum is a miracle of compression." And, finally, he describes precisely what the telecosm will create among its congregation: "The gift of the telecosm is a miracle of expansion: grains of sand spun into crystalline fibers and woven into worldwide webs."

What happens when we become blessed with the miracle of infinite bandwidth? Gilder writes, "You can replace the seven-layer smart network with a much faster, dumber, unlayered one. Let all messages careen around on their own. Let the end-user machines take responsibility for them. Amid the oceans of abundant bandwidth, anyone who wants to drink just needs to invent the right kind of cup." And what of unlimited bandwidth? No mere contradiction in terms, unlimited bandwidth is what we strive for--"we" meaning those of us who suffer bravely through the contradictions of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law, as we increase our RAM and decrease our Net access time.

While it seems too simple to describe Telecosm as a telescopically written book of cosmic proportions, it is that and more. Gilder's political rants and raves for infinite bandwidth boldly foretell the age of the telecosm and its dramatic impact on all of us--of our metamorphosis from users who found ourselves bound by the limits of our networks to "bandwidth angels" who compute in the "Promethean light." --E. Brooke Gilbert

From Library Journal

Gilder, a highly respected and widely read technology analyst (Forbes, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal), predicts an impending "bandwidth blowout" that will reshape the way we do business and organize our lives. The author's The Meaning of Microcosm (1997) described a world dominated by the Microsoft- and Intel-based PC. In his latest work, a world enabled and dominated by new telecommunications technology will make human communication universal, instantaneous, unlimited in capacity, and free to all. Gilder explains the science and engineering trends of his predictions, who is fighting them, who will ride them to victory, and what it all means. He weaves together a number of rich and complex stories to back up his claims and provide readers with the necessary components toward understanding the pending telecosmic revolution. This book will be of interest to technologists, investors, and general-interest readers. Recommended for public and academic libraries.DJoe Accardi, Northeastern, Illinois Univ., Chicago
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (September 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684809303
• ISBN-13: 978-0684809304
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,102,908 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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109 of 115 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Cosmic-size confusion and megabits of muddle, November 20, 2000

By 

Kirill Pankratov - See all my reviews

This review is from: TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World (Hardcover)

G. Gilder for many years had a reputation of the high-tech guru and the prophet of the "Internet Era". How justified is it? In fact he missed the Internet revolution altogether. Back in 1994, when the first Mosaic web browsers spread all over computer screens on campuses like a brush fire, he wrote and talked in his interviews and columns about the same things as now - increasing bandwidth, fiber optic lines, cable, interactive TV. Internet was occasionally mentioned in passing, Web - not at all. But isn't the Internet all about bandwidth and megabits per second? No, it would be like saying that the PC revolution of the early 80's was all about increasing number of transistors. Growing transistor count was one of the enabling driving forces. The revolution itself was radical shift in business models and organizational structures, huge leap in availability of computing power at the fingertips of much greater number of people. Similarly, the Internet revolution was not about more bits per second - it was a rapid and momentous transformation of the whole business of accessing and exchanging information by individuals and organizations all over the world. And G. Gilder largely missed it. To his credit, most of the other "gurus" missed it just as well. This is a pesky trait of true revolutions - to fool and confuse all pundits and pontificators gazing into their crystal balls.

Mr. Gilder is also often cited for in-depth knowledge of scientific and technical aspects of the "telecosm". I have an impression this reputation comes mostly from journalists who themselves understand very little of these technical issues, or those who do understand but directly benefit from his relentless promotion of certain technology companies. To be sure, there is no shortage of technical jargon, precise quotes of wavelengths and megabits scattered all over the book, copious panegyrics to "erbium-doped amplifiers" and the likes. Nevertheless, reading the "Telecosm" I constantly had an uneasy feeling whether the author really understands in depth the scientific and technological matters he discusses, or hides his lack of solid grasp of these issues behind the mystical vagueness. Sometimes the mistakes are obvious, like quoting supposedly 40% change of light wavelength in Michelson-Morley experiment; it should be about million times less than that. There is a rambling description of the polar lights being "naturally occurring laser" (in fact it is a very different phenomenon), and many other examples.

The book contains many stories about discoveries and development of various optical, laser or semiconductor technologies. Some of these stories are well-written and occasionally witty, but most can be found in other books and magazines; often they are incomplete and biased. For example, he includes a many pages long narrative about the invention of laser by Charles Towns, without even mentioning independent co-inventors Soviet scientists Basov and Prokhorov, who were co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with Towns for laser development.

The central idea, constantly repeated throughout this book, is prediction of the "coming bandwidth abundance". G. Gilder's main argument is that each wave of technological innovation makes certain crucial and previously scarce ingredients so plentiful that the price goes virtually to zero and this radically changes the whole economic landscape. To some extent this is valid. But recall the promise of electricity from nuclear power that would be "too cheap to meter" - it didn't quite came true. Large increase in supply of these ingredients does not reduce their real cost close to zero. Most people still cringe at their electricity bills; a car with 180 h.p. V6 engine cost a couple of thousand dollars more than a similar one with a 120 h.p. 4-cylinder engine. Abundance changes numbers, but doesn't eliminate economic laws.

Another often repeated idea is about the future dominance of "dumb networks, with intelligence shifted to network's edges". It may turn out that in some parts of a network the sheer amount of bandwidth will be more advantageous relative to sophisticated and expensive switching or routing functions. But it is doubtful that this principle will hold true for much of the future communication infrastructure. But instead of business or technological arguments Mr. Gilder attributes to this idea some kind of religious and mystical significance. There are also some scientifically sounding phrases such as "to have high-entropy content the network must have low entropy". I am still at loss to know which laws of math or physics this notion is based upon.

Near the end of the book Mr. Gilder lists his "20 Laws of Telecosm". This chapter was probably the biggest disappointment. Among these 20 "laws" I haven't found a single one, which doesn't have very serious problems with consistency and credibility. Some of them vary from obvious to dubious ("Telecosm requires better and better directories...", "today's television is dead..."), but these are the least of the problems of these "Laws". Just a few examples:

2. "Gilder Law", stating that the amount of bandwidth doubles each 6 months, three times faster than the computing power. That's apples and oranges. Moore's Law tells about increasing power of a single chip; Gilder talks about cumulative increase of all bandwidth in the world, which is often of little relevance to majority of users stuck for many years with 56-Kb modems.

6-7. Shannon's Law and Corollary. "Bandwidth is the substitute for power. The future is in low-power broadband devices...". This is based on the simplified and erroneous understanding of the Shannon's Law (presumably he means Shannon's formulae C=B*log(1+S/N), where B is bandwidth, C is information transmission capacity, S/N is a signal-to-noise ratio). This is a misnomer. Shannon's Law was a foundation of the modern communication theory, but hardly the guidance for actual technologies, which must take into account error-correction, nonlinear "cross-talk" effects and many other factors. Real communication systems are designed to all allocated bandwidth, and transmit minimal amount of power sufficient to reduce error rate to acceptable levels, which Shannon's expression doesn't describe.

87 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Useful Look at Some Telecommunications Irresistible Forces, September 16, 2000

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World (Hardcover)

Many people have a point of view about how the telecommunications technology and industry will evolve, but few fully understand the principles and assumptions behind their own perspective. Telecosm is a valuable summary of the science, engineering, and most influential companies that have been leading the changes in telecommunications potential. Those who have an advanced understanding of the science can skip those sections (Part One) and still have an enjoyable read. Those who want to know the human side of the engineering will find many rewarding stories (Part Two).

The only people who will be disappointed will be those looking at his thoughts about investments (Part Four and Appendix B). First, it takes too long to bring out a book for the investment ideas to be any good by the time they appear. The market will have moved on. Second, this book is not enough in the futurist mode for us to find the important seedlings that will dominate the future. The companies discussed favorably in this book are visible and understood by most high technology investors already. Third, these ideas have been discussed for many years by Mr. Gilder in a variety of formats so they will only surprise people who are not familiar already with Mr. Gilder's nearly-ubiquitous prognostications.

Mr. Gilder has several strengths as a technology guru that are evident in Telecosm. First, he writes clearly, simply, and beautifully. No one else does it as well in this field. Second, he knows a lot of the people involved and can unveil the personalities and intellectual history in an engaging way, as a result. Third, he is a systems thinker, so he is adept at connecting one development to another in explaining his reasoning about why one thing or another has or will happen. In doing this, he pays his reader the compliment of leaving the reader with enough information to develop her or his own opinion on the same subject. Fourth, he comes at the information from several perspectives, and that makes it more accessible. Well done!

No book is without flaws, and it may help you to know what some of the ones are in this book. First, he fails to follow the line of his technology arguments into related fields. For example, he makes a great case for universal wireless devices of all types in constant use, but doesn't go very far in talking about what some of the enabling technologies are. For example, analog chips are very important in extending the battery life of these devices, which bodes well for those who make those chips. Second, he tells you about a trend and doesn't talk about who the players are. For example, one of his 20 Laws (see Appendix A) is the Yellow Pages Law: 'The telecosm demands better and better directories . . . .' Yet he doesn't talk about the efforts to develop those directories. This should be one of biggest areas of developing value in the next ten years, yet it gets little attention in the text. Third, he seems a little overfocused on the telecommunications technology side of the telecommunications revolution. You get very little about the implications for mass storage technologies. With infinite virtually free bandwidth, companies can assemble far more data and put it into more useful forms than ever before. What are the key principles for making this new direction work? His customized information and advertising arguments are pretty simple and incomplete. Fourth, he seems to be dead wrong in at least a few places. For example, he says that television cannot survive. If we are carrying around portable devices that little screens, I have a hard time imagining that they will have the same emotional impact on us as the larger television screens. Also, there is a parallel development built on fiber optics for television-based connectivity that receives very little attention here.

Perhaps the biggest gap here is in addressing what the company should do with its Internet presence who will benefit from and be affected by these technologies. For help in those areas,I suggest you read The Last Mile, From .com to .profit, and Community Building on the Web.

After you are done with this book, ask yourself what key assumptions Gilder is making that could be totally wrong about an area of supreme importance for the future of your work. Then imagine how you can develop a business or organizational strategy that would allow you to outperform your competitors whether or not Gilder is right in those areas. Then ask yourself what he did not address that could be important to you, find out what assumptions are being made in those areas and again find a strategy robust enough to allow you to outperform despite your inability to forecast. That's the real payoff from a book such as this one.

82 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Triumph of Style Over Substance, September 16, 2000

By 

Charles Hill (Mill Creek, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World (Hardcover)

This book is a big disappointment. It reads like a rushed job. A collection of Forbes ASAP articles stappled together. The organization of this book is poor. It jumps from topic to topic without any transition. There is little coherence across chapters. We get a bit on optics, and bit on wireless, a bit on Netscape and Java, etc, but Gilder does a poor job of telling the reader how everything fits together. Gilder's central thesis is never clearly articulated. At times Glider rambles and he repeats himself ad nausea. Sometimes exactly the same sentence is repeated within two paragraphs (where on earth were the editors?). The explanation of the technology is shallow. Don't look to this book to gain a layman's understanding of optical networking, or wireless technology, or the economics of either, because you won't get it. Instead, Glider uses extravagant language as a substitution for deep explanation. He goes on and on and on about "Maxwell's rainbow", "incandescent fibers", "Cathedral's of glass", and the like without ever stopping to dig deeper into the workings of the technology or educate the reader about the economic impact of all this. Actually, the language itself is a major source of irritation. If you like Gilder's hyperbolic use of language, perhaps you can live with it, but I was grinding my teeth by the second chapter. There is also his annoying tendency of putting his pet heroes and companies on "shimmering pillars of incandescent glass", while he denigrates his favorite whipping boys. And when he makes the truly absurd claim that Marc Andreessen is the next Bill Gates, the man's credibility goes out the window. It's really a shame, because at one time Gilder could write, and he clearly knows a lot. I suspect he could have done a much better job. In the final analysis, this book tells us less about the triumph of the Telecosm than it does about the triumph of Gilder's uniquely irritating style over substance.