“Abundance” always has been a foundational concept for Internet apps, processor power and memory. Moore’s Law enables “abundance” of computing resources, lowering barriers to market entry and innovation.
“Scarcity” is the reigning paradigm for communications capacity, which has been capital intensive and constrained, in the untethered and mobile space, by sheer lack of supply: only so much over the air spectrum is suitable for communications use, and nearly all of it already has been allocated to somebody else.
But Moore’s Law is enabling us to break some of the historic scarcity constraints faced by mobile, untethered and fixed networks.
As often is the case, abundance will displace scarcity, with obvious impact on the prices of the goods now made more abundant. The whole business strategy behind Netflix is, in fact, abundance of Internet access bandwidth.
Scarcity is a harder problem in the mobile and untethered access domain, but there too, Moore’ Law is helping substitute abundance for scarcity.
As with many other issues in life or business, abundance can lead to waste. When a product is inexpensive, people use more. And even if computing is a relatively low impact kind of process, it is not “impactless.” Talk to anybody who knows about data center power consumption.
Moore’s Law will dramatically reduce scarcity in the untethered and mobile communications arena because we can be more efficient users of “limited communications spectrum.” That is what shared spectrum is all about.
Obviously, Moore’s Law also will enable sophisticated signal processing that will help commercialize use of huge amount of spectrum previously unusable for communications purposes.
But Moore’s Law is not the only important innovation. Mobile operators always have been able to “create” more usable bandwidth by shrinking cell coverage area, creating more cells. The basic rule is that cutting cell propagation radius by half increases the number of cells by four, but also “multiples” spectrum re-use by somewhere between double and four times.
Smaller cells will allow more efficient use of finite spectrum.
Moore’s Law also enables “spectrum sharing,” which again will intensify our use of the scarce wireless communications resource.
At the same time, growing abundance has implications. We are more aware of our carbon footprint these days. So even when it is possible to “waste more,” that doesn’t mean we should waste more.
And that is why some of us believe Google Fi has hit on a simple, elegant, transparent way to align even abundance with stewardship.
Low and very-low prices encourage usage. That often is a good thing. Netflix would not be possible without low pricing of Internet access, on a per-bit basis.
Most Internet-based business models and product substitutes or enhancements are based on low to extremely-low prices for computing, storage and Internet access and communications.
At the same time, even abundance can lead to externalities or unwanted side effects. Pollution or carbon generation are examples. But abundant consumption of bandwidth also has direct costs for the networks that have capital investment and resource implications.
While we mostly could agree that abundance of computing, storage and transmission are “good things” because they enable all sorts of interesting new products, encouraging waste also is a danger. Usage-based pricing always has been a way of incorporating both “fairness” and “responsibility” into the production and consumption of products.
Google’s Fi does that quite nicely. Ironically, usage-based pricing always has been the preferred model for communications product consumption. Usage-based pricing aligns end user consumption with supplier cost in a natural way.
So we want abundance and yet “scarcity” at the same time. We want people to use the resource “in abundance.” But we also do not wish to encourage “wastefulness.”
Usage-based pricing--even when decried--does that.
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