Customer Reviews

TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World

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2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book has a number of themes, introduced with the dramatic opening sentence, "The computer age is over."

1. Just as farming gave way to manufacturing, and manufacturing gave way to data processing, data processing is giving way to communication.

2. Just as his earlier book "Microcosm" traced the role of solid state physics in data processing, "Telecosm" traces the role of light-wave physics in communication. Data processing is about manipulating electrons, and communication is about manipulating photons.

3. The computer age created an abundance of processing power. The telecosm will create an abundance of bandwidth.

4. Pipes will be dumb. The purpose of networks is to pump through packets, leaving extraction and interpretation to the endpoints.

5. Fiber wins, copper loses. Gilder has little patience for DSL, much less ordinary modems.

6. Wireless devices are constrained by power requirements. This is an important point, easily overlooked. But as someone who has owned two mobile computers that were ruined by catastrophic loss of backup battery power, I concur.

I enjoyed the book because:

1. It helped provide me with perspective on the bandwidth and wireless issues that are becoming more important every day.

2. I like the way Gilder describes how technology evolves. He does not simply look at the path a technology took and treat it as obvious. He looks at why alternative paths seemed plausible at the time but ultimately proved less efficient. You get a grasp of the uncertainty and complexity involved in trying to anticipate which approach will be able to overcome its inherent weaknesses.

3. I like the fact that he thinks in terms of economic implications, including abundances and scarcities. I don't necessarily agree with his views, and I will have a longer essay ("Techno-mysticism") on my site about this issue.

My only disappointment with the book is that, like so many lesser pundits, Gilder makes a big deal about the potential to be paged with stock market alerts. Instead, I would like to propose the Law of the Unforeseen Application. That is, we probably do not know what will be the most compelling application for the high-bandwidth telecosm.

At the dawn of personal computers, pundits did not foresee word processing and spreadsheets. Instead, they talked about household cooks being able to store recipes. Stock market alerts strike me as equally insipid.

I was expecting a good coherant yarn in this book, but instead it was series of yawns. It appears that Mr. Gilder put together his Forbes articles did some minor editing and passed off the book to his publishers. It is all the hype about how huge fat pipes are coming gushing with bits. It does not provide any deep insights into the technologies nor what applications will exploit such fat pipes.

A potential reader is well advised to pass on this, or at least wait until his local library gets a copy.

George Gilder is an engaging writer, and this book is easy and enjoyable to read. By addressing such large issues, as well, Gilder will certainly cause you to rethink some deeply held beliefs about the future of communications.

That said, this book would have been much more valuable four years ago than it is now. Much of what Gilder predicts, while still in the future, is conventional wisdom: net computing will flourish, wireless technologies will take off, and selling will become much more targeted. Probably true, but I didn't need Gilder to tell me that.

Having said this much, this book is still an interesting look at where we've been and where we're (probably) going. You won't go wrong by buying it.

George could have done better. Most communications industry observers agree that the first (last) mile bottleneck is where all the action will be in the coming decade. George seems to agree. At least he dances all around these local access issues.

At one point (page 186), he even suggests that cable modems and new wireless technologies will help fill the gap. But he never really gives us a detailed account of what he thinks will evolve in the next few years and why.

He's not alone in this. Almost everyone in the telecom industry is making WAGs while investors are betting billions on their favorite horses. Still, no one has yet articulated a clear understanding of how we will eventually fill this gigantic missing hole in our communications systems.

George mentions most of the component pieces. Apparently, he just hasn't been able to put them all together into a cohesive self organizing whole yet. Pity!

Gilder is an aggressive, over-the-top rhetorician. He's interesting to read, but anyone with a solid technical background should be at least a little resentful, and distrustful, of someone having such a big forum when he gets so many facts obviously wrong--as other reviewers have pointed out. Not only are auroras NOT natural lasers, but increasing bandwidth does not, in itself, increase your channel capacity (that would be the info-equivalent of a perpetual motion machine); GEO satellites do NOT travel faster than LEO satellites (p. 97, hard cover); cable modems are NOT 500-1000 times faster than 56 K modems (p. 189); and glass prisms do not split wavelengths due to diffraction and interference (p. 214), but rather by the totally different phenomenon of refraction. Nor do objects that approach you have a blue-shifted spectrum because they are ACCELERATING toward you (as he suggests on p. 257)--it's because of their VELOCITY!

Gilder's book can tell you a number of exciting things that you might not have known before--as it did me--but given the kind of howlers that even a layman can sometimes spot, how much can you rely on the correctness of what he says?

In a word: Awful.

Don't buy this book if you are already technically literate but want to know more about the telecom revolution or, conversely, if you're a neophyte with the hopes that this book will clarify things, because although Gilder sprinkles technical jargon around liberally, he doesn't seem interested in actually conveying real understanding to the reader. Most of the prose is hopelessly overblown, and is apparently intended to give Wall Street types warm and fuzzy feelings about telecom's aMAZing future.

Typical prose (from the chapter "The meaning of light"): "Through these coruscating channels will ultimately run most of the commerce of the world; more value will move by resonant light than by all the world's supertankers, pipelines, eighteen-wheeler trucks, and C5A airships put together. Yet all these frequencies, visible on the spectroscope in space, are invisible to you and me on earth. The Internet is a cloak of many colors for the communications of the world. But human sense can grasp none of its tints and spangles. The 400 terahertz of visible light are absent in the links. On the global ball of light of Internet frequences, visible light sparkles only in the billion phosphorescent spots where there is a screen."<P....

G. Gilder has done a very good job connecting the dots between a a group of interelated technologic trends underlying the very real "bandwidth revolution" that is picking up speed.

Nothing new that has not been said in his recent writings or newsletter, but it is all in one place. In fact, I recognized whole chapters from previous newsletters. The technologic forces at work (and they are at work all around us)are explained for a non-technical audience to the point a reader can see how the interrelated pieces tie together.

The capitalist cheerleading gets to be a bit much and the Reagan era supply-side rants and government bashing gets old, but that can be ignored. What cannot be ignored is the fact that many of the technologies and comapnies described in the book a already emerging as market leaders - how many of everheard of Qualcomm until 1999, or JDS-Univase. If you want to understand why this is happening just read this, it would take you forever to put the pieces together on your own.

Gilder's technical foresights have held up pretty well over the years. To see for yourself obtain a copy of Microcosm (1989) (a very good book) and imagine you'd bought Intel, Microsoft, and Micron(which you would have done)and gotten a glimpse of the wave of informaton networking (Sun, 3-Com, Cisco) that was about to hit. If you are investing in technology companies for the long haul you'd be well advised to buy this book.