There is one last “dimension” of Moore’s Law to discuss briefly — the continuing advance in our communication networks. Again, all you need to do is think back a few years (well, all right, maybe more than just a few) to the era of 100-baud modems, followed by 300 baud, 1200 baud, and then 2,400 and 9,600 and 56K, before we began moving into today’s world of “broadband” networks of varying speeds.

I’m not concerned here with the ongoing debates about which country has the fasted networks, or what percentage of the U.S. actually has broadband in their homes, or the various other issues about the current state of our networks. What I’m more interested in is future trends; and here we find that Butter’s Law — named after Gerald Butters, the former head of Lucent’s Optical Networking Group — says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months (see “Speeding Net Traffic With Tiny Mirrors“). And Nielsen’s Law (named after Jakob Nielsen) says that the bandwidth available to users increased by 50% annually, doubling every 21 months.

Whether this trend continues on, into the indefinite future, is beyond my ability to predict; but it does seem that we can look forward to significant improvements for at least the next 5-10 years. From what I’ve seen in the past decade, it seems that the biggest obstacle/limitation is likely to be infrastructure and the capital investment required to upgrade that infrastructure. Whether it’s building more transmission towers, or pulling more optical cable (or copper wire) to homes and buildings, it seems to be a problem analogous to the problem of upgrading our highways and railroad tracks to accommodate significantly faster cars and trains.

In any case, I think the biggest question is going to be similar to that facing us with faster, cheaper, smaller computers: what useful, interesting, fun things will we decide to do with networks that are 10 times, or perhaps even 100 times more powerful than what we have now? The first reaction is likely to be, “More of the same — but faster and cheaper.” Yes, of course we want to have movies that download onto our computer with no visible delay; and we want “streaming” video of live events, with no delays or glitches. But that doesn’t really strike me as innovative or transforming. It won’t really change our lives.

What will change our lives, I think, is an increase — on a grand scale — in communicating, always-on, location-aware devices. We’re already beginning to see this trend, with RFID devices implanted in more and more manufactured products. But it’s still a shock for many of us to turn on our iPhone in a strange city and type a query that says, “I don’t really know where I am, but I’d like to find a good Chinese restaurant nearby.” The iPhone basically says, “Well, maybe you don’t know where you are, but I do. And I also know about all kinds of things around you — like the location of the nearest bank, hospital, bar, and … oh, yes, the nearest Chinese restaurant.”

Most of what my iPhone knows consists of large, static thingies (like buildings) whose location has already been placed into a database (which, of course, it can access thanks to a WiFi network or a wireless communication service). But it probably knows about other iPhones nearby, and I think it’s only a matter of time before it will know about all nearby objects with “dynamic” locations (like the taxicab that’s about to knock you down as you step off the curb). And it will know about objects smaller than buildings and taxicabs, right down to the size of a paperclip.

Equally important, all of these devices will have the ability to recognize you (or your iPhone) and interact with you. As we saw in the 2002 Tom Cruise film, “Minority Report,” this could be an advertiser’s bonanza, with billboards and posters and other objects calling out to you, beseeching you to pay attention and buy their products. Indeed, it could be a Tower of Babel … but it probably won’t. How this technology gets put to use in a socially acceptable, and useful/beneficial way, will be one (of many) great things to watch over the next decade…

Oh, one final observation: to the extent that network communications do continue to improve according to Moore’s Law, and to the extent that this improvement ensures always-on, always-accessible, always-reliable networks, it can’t help but make today’s tentative adoption of “the cloud” more acceptable. Storage capacity may well increase by a factor of 10 or 100, but we’re still going to have a difficult time storing vast amounts of data on the ultra-miniature devices that proliferate all around us. And if I’ve got thousands of these devices all around me, I’m not going to want all of my data replicated on every device. I might be willing to use advanced networking capabilities to synchronize some of the data, but it’s more likely, I think, that we’ll use “thin” devices that read and write the data they need from vast servers in the cloud.