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Follow The Light, Says Guru Gilder (10/04/00, 7:53 a.m. ET) By Ken Schachter, TechWeb Finance SAN FRANCISCO -- The computer revolution has run out of steam, says George Gilder. In his book "Telecosm," Gilder declares the computer age over on page one. Next he dismisses technology icons like Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates, Apple Computer Inc.'s Steve Jobs, and Intel Corp.'s Andy Grove. The action has passed them by, he says. So where is today's life-transforming technology? Look no further, Gilder says, than the all-optical network. Speaking at Merrill Lynch's Techtopia West conference, Gilder called the architecture underlying the Internet hopelessly inadequate for the demands that will be placed on it. A packet on the Internet makes about 17 hops between routers, creating delays that average from 260 to 450 milliseconds. "The delays and latencies pile up," he says, and will only get worse as today's 1.3 billion Web pages mushroom. Gilder's vision is for a network that is all optical at its core, with optical fiber feeding into dumb, mirrored optical switches. "It means the whole core of the network is based on mirrors," says Gilder, whose book "Wealth and Poverty" helped pioneer supply-side economics and influenced the Reagan White House. Further, Gilder believes, the new optical network will give mankind bandwidth to burn. What will mankind do with all this bandwidth and lightning-fast networks?
3D video may develop, he says, and video teleconferencing "will be the canonical application of this new era."
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