IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

70 Chapter 3
that matters, according to Gilder) 48 —but where those points are still
matters a lot. Says Townsend, ‘‘mobile devices reassert geography on the
internet.’’ 49
The Law of Locality
People and information want to be closer. When planning where to put ca-
pacity, network designers are guided by the law of locality; this law states
that network traffic is at least 80 percent local, 95 percent continental, and
only 5 percent intercontinental. Between 1997 and 1999, for example, 30
percent of all U.S. Internet traffic never crossed the national infrastructure
but stayed within a local metropolitan network. 50 Someone should have
mentioned the law of locality to investors before they dumped some seventy
billion dollars into projects for long-haul Internet infrastructure.
Only a tiny fraction of these costly fibers are currently ‘‘lit’’—as little as 3
percent by some estimates. 51 According to the research firm Probe Research,
only 14 percent of the fiber-optic cable laid across the Atlantic to
support Internet traffic may ever be needed.
This is not the ‘‘death of distance’’ that the companies who laid the fiber
had in mind. The assumption driving the money spent on this long-haul
infrastructure was that the need for more capacity on the Internet would
grow exponentially through the widespread adoption of bandwidthsucking
applications such as virtual private networks and videoconferencing.
The enduring popularity of the telephone is proof that high-value
connectivity is not bandwidth-dependent. At the height of Napster’s popularity,
in 2000, the service was using about 5 percent of the available network
capacity in the United States—but no other Internet-based service
has ever come near that level of usage. High-capacity networks are a fabulous
technology chasing applications that do not yet exist—and may never
exist.
The designers of computer chips use another design rule that we can
learn from: ‘‘The less the space, the more the room.’’ In silicon, the trade-off
between speed and heat generated improves dramatically as size diminishes:
Small transistors run faster, cooler, and cheaper. Hence the development
of the so-called processor-in-memory (PIM)—an integrated circuit
that contains both memory and logic on the same chip. Savings of energy
and speed efficiencies operate at all scales of network topology. By using a