Edholm's law

Edholm's law was proposed by Phil Edholm of Nortel Networks. He observed that telecommunication bandwidth (including Internet access bandwidth) was doubling every 18 months, since the late 1970s through to the early 2000s. This is similar to Moore's law, which predicts an exponential rate of growth for transistor counts. He also found that there was a gradual convergence between wired (e.g. Ethernet), nomadic (e.g. modem and Wi-Fi) and wireless networks (e.g. cellular networks). The name "Edholm's law" was coined by his colleague, John H. Yoakum, who presented it at a 2004 Internet telephony press conference. Slower communications channels like cellphones and radio modems were predicted to eclipse the capacity of early Ethernet, due to developments in the standards known as UMTS and MIMO, which boosted bandwidth by maximizing antenna usage. Extrapolating forward indicates a convergence between the rates of nomadic and wireless technologies around 2030. In addition, wireless technology could end wireline communication if the cost of the latter's infrastructure remains high. ==Underlying factors==

In 2009, Renuka P. Jindal observed the bandwidths of online communication networks rising from bits per second to terabits per second, doubling every 18 months, as predicted by Edholm's law. Jindal identified the following three major underlying factors that have enabled the exponential growth of communication bandwidth. • The MOSFET was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960, after Frosch and Derick discovered and used surface passivation by silicon dioxide to create the first planar transistors, the first in which drain and source were adjacent at the same surface. Advances in MOSFET technology (MOS technology) has been the most important contributing factor in the rapid rise of bandwidth in telecommunications networks. Continuous MOSFET scaling, along with various advances in MOS technology, has enabled both Moore's law (transistor counts in integrated circuit chips doubling every two years) and Edholm's law (communication bandwidth doubling every 18 months). Most of the essential elements of wireless networks are built from MOSFETs, including the mobile transceivers, base station modules, routers, RF power amplifiers, RF circuits, and radio transceivers, He established it as a general principle, along with Viveck R. Cadambe, in 2008. They introduced "a mechanism to align an arbitrarily large number of interferers, leading to the surprising conclusion that wireless networks are not essentially interference limited." This led to the adoption of interference alignment in the design of wireless networks. According to New York University senior researcher Dr. Paul Horn, this "revolutionized our understanding of the capacity limits of wireless networks" and "demonstrated the astounding result that each user in a wireless network can access half of the spectrum without interference from other users, regardless of how many users are sharing the spectrum." ==See also==