UUNET chief: Fear equals understanding

We haven't seen the worst of bandwidth consumption yet, according to John Sidgmore, WorldCom, Inc.'s chief operating officer.

Sidgmore, who is also CEO of UUNET Technologies, told attendees of his keynote here at NetWorld+Interop that "when new applications start to come on the Internet, we will see levels we have never seen before."

"If you're not scared, then you don't understand," Sidgmore said. "In a few years, the Internet will take up half the bandwidth in the world."

That bandwidth demand is insatiable, too, he said. While the PC industry, according to Moore's law, is doubling in size every 18 months, bandwidth demand is doubling every three to four months. "That's a growth rate of 1,000% per year," Sidgmore said.

Contributing to the proliferation of bandwidth use, as Sidgmore's colleague Alan Taffel said at Spring Internet World 98 in Los Angeles, are the "silicon cockroaches." According to Taffel and Sidgmore, silicon cockroaches are electronic devices that communicate with one another, such as fax machines and handheld devices. Sidgmore said in the next few years, each person is expected to have at least five mobile electronic devices on them at a time.

And while UUNET, along with other Internet service providers and new entries to the pipe market, such as Qwest Communications and Level 3, are trying to meet that demand, he said it's tough. "We're deplyoing bandwidth aggressively locally and long distance," he said. "We're deploying new technology rapidly such as dense wave division multiplexing ... and we're expanding internationally. But everybody has missed the demand side. We need a 10x-per-year growth just to stay even."

Sidgmore said users are mistaken to think that the Internet will continue to be as inexpensive as it has been. Instead, providers are going to have to make up the cost of laying fiber and investing in other high-speed technologies by imposing fees on customers. Some examples might be charging for long-distance Internet use. "The math doesn't add up," he said. "Local is not the expensive part, long distance is."

"We need to not design the Internet around expensive technologies, though," Sidgmore said. "Eventually, there will be an optical core to the network."

Sidgmore said local caching methods could greatly reduce costs, as well, and that a lot of capital money is going to be thrown at this segment of the market.