Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth

September 19, 2018

 

by Kuldeep Singh

BANDWIDTH

Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth states that a user’s connection speed grows by 50% per year. Unlike  Moore’s Law, which tells us that computing power doubles every 18 months ( in equivalent terms grows by 60% per year ).

  Nielsen attributes the slower growth of Internet bandwidth to three factors:

• Upgrading infrastructure is complicated and expensive. Telecoms companies are conservative. They need to dig up streets and install equipment in hundreds of thousands of central offices so they think twice (or thrice) before investing the necessary billions of dollars. Even after they invest, it takes time to update their sprawling physical plant.

• Users are reluctant to spend money on bandwidth. If you buy twice as fast a computer, your software runs twice as fast; if you buy twice as large a harddisk, you can store twice as many files. But if you buy twice as fast a modem, then you don't download web pages twice as fast: the speed of the internet is a function of both the individual user's connectivity and of the infrastructure. You don't get the full benefits of your own bandwidth upgrades immediately — only gradually as the internet and the host servers improve.

• The user base is getting broader all the time as mainstream users get online. These new users are more likely to be low-end users than high-end users (all the geeks have been online for years), so the average shifts ever lower.

Of course, there are many technologies to deliver faster bandwidth, on  optical fiber. Unfortunately, these technologies will time to mature enough to be consumed by users.

The vast masses of users are low-end and will lag 2–3 years behind the high-end users. Bandwidth is one of the two most important elements in computing these days (together with screen quality), since computational speeds are almost always more than enough for non-engineering tasks.

Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth has its relevance, but the cost of using services has its logical implication, most users still save on bandwidth and prefer a moderate bandwidth at a moderate price to the highest-speed at highest-cost option.