Grid computing 50,000Tbps to 200,000Tbps Web agents 50,000Tbps to 200,000Tbps You aren't likely to need to download the Library of Congress many times, if ever, in your lifetime, but you will need to transfer huge amounts of other sorts of data. We're entering an era of bandwidth-hungry applications, such as those listed in Table 1.3, that will require Pbps networks and, ultimately, Ebps networks. What technology is going to provide us with the bandwidth abundance needed to facilitate these emerging applications? Certainly one of the greatest contribu- tions is coming out of the optical arena. Developments in microfluidic optical fibers and integrated optical chips will usher in a new era of bandwidth abundance. As the capacity of broadband access lines approaches 100Mbps and beyond, core network capacity will demand expansion. As we talk about next-generation net- work infrastructures in Part III, "The New Generation of Networks," we'll spend quite a bit of time on new optical core and optical edge technologies. For now, let's look at the equivalent of Moore's Law in the optical bandwidth realm: The number of bits per second being carried per lambda (or wavelength) is doubling every 12 months, and the number of lambdas per fiber is also doubling every 12 months, resulting in a 50% drop every 9 months in the cost of transmitting a bit of informa- tion. As with CPUs (cost per MIPS) and storage (cost per KB), the cost per Kbps of bandwidth is rapidly approaching $0. Numerous developments made in the wireless arena are bringing us capacity that will be beneficial and instrumental to ensuring mobility. We'll explore the wireless trends in Part IV, "Wireless Communications." Adapting to New Traffic Patterns Sharing of information can occur in a number of ways-via smoke signals, by let- ters sent through the postal service, or as transmissions through electrical or opti- cal media, for example. Before we get into the technical details of the technologies in the industry, it's important to understand the driving forces 