Nielsen's Law of Bandwidth says there's a 50% increase in data transfer every year and his empirical data starting from 1983 supports this. Assuming it remains this way for 20 more years, That's going to be HUGE data transfer speeds.
Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth (Alertbox Apr. 1998)
Moore's law has been right also when it said the number of transistors per integrated circuit is doubling every 24 months. The thing is, Moore's law is talking about inexpensive, aka home user machines. Imagine if they could use more expensive materials to create super computers capable of streaming the entire computer experience to 1000s of users at a time. They could then recycle their precious materials and reuse them. The only downloading that would exist would be the stream of 250kbps. Everything would be server side. All programs, all information stored on the server. You could be listening to your favorite music and playing an ultra realistic game with nothing more than a monitor and keyboard. Your bandwidth never goes over 250kbps. No worries about viruses or spyware because the server takes care of it. Big Brother would love it. It's almost scary.
250kbps sounds like a lot but it's not. A lot of people are getting 250kbps right now. Assuming we get anything close to 50% increase in bandwidth per year, That's almost enough to stream 250kbps to every active computer with our current infrastructure. I doubt this will happen in the next 100 years, but if the entire internet was centralized with huge clusters of supercomputer streaming out nothing but video and accepting no data except input commands, It'd make data transfer and management much more efficient.
I had a longer post but I accidentally clicked a bookmark that opened in this tab.. grr..
I'm definitely going to go play in Liveplace when it launches.
LivePlace To Launch Photo-Realistic Virtual World Rendered In The Cloud