🌐 The End of Nielsen’s Law? The best way to give you the info from the link is to chunk-ify it like this:
Moore’s Law: Computing power (i.e. processing power as measured by number of transistors) tends to double about every two years.
Nielsen’s Law: Network connection speeds tend to double about every 21 months for high-end users.
Weird Asterisk: Nielsen noted that the growth rate of network speeds was actually slower than processors’ growth rates under Moore’s Law (probably because of the higher “principal” speeds of processors, and the fact that processors started doubling first). Regardless, he concluded on this basis that user experience would be constrained by bandwidth more than processing power.
Latest News: According to new research, bandwidth demand will continue to increase over time, but the rate of increase might actually taper hard (from 34% growth in 2018 down to 6% growth in 2030). If so, it would mean the end of Nielsen’s Law somewhere in there.
Why This Matters: That same research concludes, based on those models, that 300Mbps should be sufficient for most households’ needs for the next decade (until 2031). It’s not the only research on this subject… but research on this subject is sure to be getting attention nowadays, given Congress’s call to the FCC to update broadband requirements and help close the Digital Divide.
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