After the laughter

John Sidgmore is a pretty funny guy. The WorldCom vice chairman and UUNet chairman has been doing a lot of gigs on the industry event circuit, and it turns out he's pretty good at cracking wise.

At last week's Next Generation Networks conference in Washington, for example, Sidgmore quipped about how video telecommuting could help prevent inappropriate office hugging and spun a yarn about a prototype pair of Internet-enabled eyeglasses that weigh eight pounds. His funniest anecdote was probably the one about the need for ubiquitous, automatic delivery of critical information that most people wouldn't seek out on the Web. To make his point, Sidgmore pulled up a fictitious site called IsYourHouseOnFire.com.

The two meatiest parts of Sidgmore's address, though, were no laughing matters: the brewing broadband content eruption and the myth of the bandwidth glut.

The two are intimately related: Broadband applications drive the need for ever-increasing quantities of bandwidth, and that bandwidth creation drives more content development.

Sidgmore said the capacity of UUNet's network alone gets 10 times greater every year, and even then the company is barely meeting current needs. And everything new - increased computer-to-computer interaction, residential broadband, multicasting, interactive voice portals, audio and video content and "boring corporate applications of all kinds" will only drive that demand higher, he said.

"People think there's a bandwidth glut because new players are putting new fiber in the ground," Sidgmore said."Everyone misses the demand side. We have to keep increasing to keep up with applications."

Sidgmore's point isn't lost on the creators of Aerie Networks, one of the new glass-layers and the subject of this week's cover story (see page 56). Aerie's strategy parallels the parasitic content-to-bandwidth connection: The company hopes to alter the economic structure of selling bandwidth and, in doing so, stimulate the creation of new applications to ride within it. What's more, Aerie is planning to give its service provider customers the means to control and customize the networks they create out of Aerie's fiber, not raw bandwidth to burn.

Aerie's view, like Sidgmore's, is that the development - and, therefore, the bandwidth requirements - of broadband content isn't even close to reaching full tilt. That will make infinite amounts of intelligent and usable bandwidth necessary, which means the optical goods of companies like UUNet and Aerie will always be hot commodities.

The real jokers in all this are the people who believe the broadband content available today is a good gauge of future bandwidth demand. When they're proved wrong and their bandwidth reserves are tapped, who do you think will be laughing?