In the smartphone era, some version of this graph showing capacity and data demand always holds. All else being equal, the capacity of an existing data network eventually is exhausted by demand growth which is faster than supply can be increased.
The key conditioning clause is “all else being equal.” All else never is equal. Given a sufficient pain point, remedies are found. For 50 years, for example, communications and computation have been substitutes for each other.
Remote cloud computing essentially substitutes communications for local processing. Edge computing substitutes more-local computing for communications cost. That has been the case since the time of mainframes.
There are all sorts of solutions for data demand that exceeds network capacity. 6G replaces 5G because it supports 10 times more capacity. Processing is shifted locally so WAN transport demand is lessened or not required. Caching gets more use, as is the case for video streaming services and most heavily-used consumer-facing applications.
In other words, given sufficient cost pressure, it always makes sense to alter inputs in ways that actually reduce the strain on either computing or communications resources.
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