Customer Reviews

Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance

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While this book is extremely well written, it is outdated now in 2003. This book is filled with the hype, euphoria, and speculative promises of the .com era. Yes, the writing sizzzles and many of the stories are interesting, but the writing seems to lack a firm foundation of fundemental research and the stories when read carefully seem to be re-written from third party accounts rather than the result of original research, interviews, and fact finding. Somehow, Wired Magazine articles are better than this.

IT Strategy studies and deployment of solutions was my area of interest during the last decade. In most cases, especially while dealing with businesses that are geographically dispersed, connectivity has played a key role in deciding on the solution set. Trade off between centralized vs. de-centralized structures, TCO, maintainability and application response times on WAN have been crucial factors in decision making. Going by Eliyahu Goldratt's "Theory of Constraints", it is not difficult to guess that bandwidth availability and costs have dictated the boundaries of IT architectures. The "Last Mile Problem" used to sound like the last post. Not anymore, even in developing countries if Telecosm becomes a global reality. With abundance of cheap bandwidth we are entering a new era in IT Solutions. If Microcosm could pack computing power far exceeding the power of legacy mainframes on the PC sitting on our desks, Telecosm is about distributing this power from the center of the network to the peripheral devices. The ethernet card connecting the "teleputer" dissolves into the World Wide Web; World Wide Wait is eliminated by World Wide Waves. "The Network is the Computer".

Microcosm has multiplied Computing power and Storage and divided costs by million folds. Connectivity between these massive and powerful systems has not kept pace during this phase. Better late than never, enter Telecosm. Fiber and Satellites using light and electromagnetic waves transfer information across the globe at Petabit rates. This paradigm shift in communications is bound to have profound effects on business and society. We will soon be wasting bandwidth as we are now wasting transistors on our processors. Gilder narrates this phenomenon very well.

After reading the first 3 chapters of the book, I decided to revisit my college books on Quantum Physics- Planck's Constant, Wave Theory, Speed of light, Schroedinger's equation come in handy to really appreciate the power of Telecosm. For ready reference the book provides an excellent glossary of all technical terms that help have a quick recap. I would appreciate if the next edition contains detailed notes on concepts like WDM, CDMA and Packet Switching in the appendix.

The future looks so bright that I foresee a global scarcity of sunglasses! But we still have a problem on hand- the limitation imposed by the speed of light. But if God created light, we need to urge with him to create something that is faster. That will need different lines of communication not discussed in this book. Till then, let there be light!