essing power doubles every 18 months). In practice, Moore's law refers to a number of components on integrated circuits, which directly influence the processing power of computers. However, different factors also may influence trends, such as prices. In the twenty-first century most telecommunication end-user devices are computers because they have hardware and software (which includes the operating system of the device that contains protocols above the physical layer and applications on top of the protocol layering stack). So, one may apply Moore's law directly to such telecommuni- cation devices. But what happens to the bitrates in the access networks? QoS for Fixed and Mobile Ultra-Broadband, First Edition. Toni Janevski. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 4 QoS for Fixed Ultra-Broadband First, let's discuss a question: since when can we apply a law on the bitrates in the access networks? The answer is: since globalization of the Internet - that is, the middle of the 1990s, or more accurately, from 1993 when the WWW was allowed to spread "free of charge" outside the CERN labs in Switzerland where it was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. Considering that, let's start in the first half of the 1990s and continue until the present day. So, in the 1990s the main type of access to the Internet for residential users was 56 Kbit/s dial-up via digital telephone networks (i.e. via twisted pair copper lines). The introduction of ADSL in 1999 brought bitrates of 8 Mbit/s in downlink and 1 Mbit/s in uplink. ADSL spread during the 2000s, reaching bitrates over 10 Mbit/s in the downlink and even over 20 Mbit/s with ADSL2+ in the 2010s. At the same time fiber technolo- gies started to spread in the last mile by the end of the 2000s and further increased in the 2010s. Typical access rates with shared passive optical networks are in the range of 50 Mbit/s (although dedicated fiber links in the access part may provide Gbit/s speeds). So, regarding fixed access per individual user (not aggregate bit