Is there a Moore's law for bandwidth?

Moore's (1965) law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every 18-24 months, has held remarkably well over three decades of semiconductor device production. Using historical data, a similar prediction is made for modem speeds, and in particular for the speed at which data can be transmitted over twisted wire pairs, where it is found that modem data rates have historically doubled every 1.9 years. This result suggests that rapid increases in bandwidth delivered to subscribers over the coming decades will have profound societal and economic effects, just as the development of the integrated circuit and the microprocessor have had. Nevertheless, the regulated aspect of telecommunications may limit the growth of bandwidth and the deployment of high-speed modems which deliver services over existing twisted wire pairs. The cable environment, which from a data transmission perspective is, generally speaking, less regulated, may allow for deployment of modems which support rates in excess of what is predicted by our Moore's law analogy. In this article we examine Moore's law as applied to modem technology, and how regulation may affect the deployment of broadband services.