A Most Disruptive Technology

"What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

"First, it is an outlier , as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

- Nicholas Nassim Taleb

In Taleb's world, Black Swans are not just events like 9/11 or the crash of '87. They can be positive events like the introduction of a new technology which changes everything. It is now easy to see the affect of the Internet, but not many saw it in 1987, and those who did were few and considered kind of strange. The steam engine changed a world, slowly at first, but it was a major Black Swan.

This week we look at what I think will be another Black Swan with the potential to be one of the most disruptive introductions of technology in the last 20 years. In one sense, it is entirely predictable. On the other hand, it will fundamentally alter the economic equations of the telecommunications world, as well as spawn whole new enterprises and enable radical new ancillary technologies.

What happens if you add 3 billion new people (in a very short time) to the internet, and increase the bandwidth available to everyone by a factor of 20 today with a potential for a factor of 100 in the near future? Let's look at the implications of a new technology that holds the promise of inexpensive broadband coming not only to your backyard, but to the backyards of an entire world. This is…