Bandwidth

We Americans like to think that everything will always get better. With technology that has been the case. Faster, cheaper, better.

All this comes down to bandwidth. The term bandwidth confusing because it means different things. In computer networking it means one thing and in communication theory something else and in signal processing and in linear algebra some other things altogether.

I think of bandwidth as carrying capacity. More bandwidth more carrying capacity whether number of frequencies or bits per second or whatever.

We think of bandwidth as getting ever bigger or else we don't think of it at all and assume that it will. We think we can continue to expand our number of Internet sites and the space required by computer games, etc. We've already seen an absolute eruption in the volume of our communications.

There may be a limit to it all. We don't know. And what will we do when this limit is reached? Are we having our own micro-big band, our own universe continuing to expand until some point in the future and then what? Does it stop? Or start to contract again.

And once we've become dependent on the ever-expanding world-wide web, what then? I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow or next year or in the next millennium, but like the world's oil supply it will run out some day.

As Grand papa says to Peter in Tschaikovsky's story set to music, Peter and the Wolf: "What if the wolf does come out of the forest? What then?"

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.