Technology

Aside from me obviously joking about home 22Pb/s. I'll tell you a story.

In the early 90s. I was gifted a modem. I used it to connect to BBS systems. It had two outgoing call speeds. 300bit/s sync and 1200/75bps. And since I'd never connected my computer to the outside world, the whole thing seemed amazing. Many BBS' had modems that couldn't cope with 1200/75, it was an odd speed. So, I had to swap to 300 for those. But it was still an amazing time. But, file sizes were pretty small. It really wasn't a huge problem.

In the mid 1990s, when I had a 28.8k modem (and later 56k) to connect to the internet (and by the way, paying for the phone calls too). The always on 64k leased line (£1k per month) seemed like a dream. The 10Mbit coax ethernet at the office seemed like light speed. Hell, it was faster than the local hard disk (caching improved that, mind you). I remember in the office where we had an ISDN modem setup, chaining them together to get 128Kbit seemed like light speed. Later we got a 256Kbit leased line in the office, and it was amazing in terms of speed. I actually ran effectively a mini ISP that some of us connected to, to get free internet. It had 4 USR Courier modems.

Then, in 1999 I was lucky enough to be enrolled on a trial. A trial for 2Mbit ADSL. It was amazing, 2Mbit down, 256Kbit up. This was groundbreaking. Web pages loaded instantly. Everything was so much faster. LANs in the office and at home was up to 100Mbit, and that seemed pretty damn fast. We'd be sure we'd not need more than that.

Then, 8Mbit DSL arrived. Again, amazing leap forward. Gigabit LAN became the norm, and again, who would have thought it would be too slow for anything? After all, we were all using hard disks, and they really weren't that fast after all. ADSL2+ arrived with speeds up to 24Mbit, and those of us unable to get the higher sync rates started to suffer the internet being just a bit too slow.

Then we got VDSL and faster cable internet. 80Mbit, 100Mbit, 150Mbit. These seemed overkill for many. But pretty soon we were downloading 4k video and 150GB games onto 5GB/s+ SSD drives. This started to feel slow to some.

Now we're at a place where FTTH 1Gbit is becoming quite common. Many ISPs here in the UK are offering packages with speeds between 2 to 5Gbit/s too. The tech they use is apparently good for up to 50Gbit/s.

Now, with this history of speed increases leading to demand increases. Why do you think it will stop at 1Tb/s? Maybe we cannot currently imagine why we'd need such speeds. But, someone will find a way to fill such connections. Don't limit yourself to just expanding what we do now.

Maybe you're right, but I honestly would never say never when it comes to computing.