The Drivers of the Information Revolution : Cost, Computing Power, and Convergence

Bond, James

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ALGORITHMS;    ANALOG;    BANDWIDTH;    BASIC;    BINARY CODE;   

RP-ID  :  17125

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The author explains the drivers of theinformation revolution - the decline in the cost oftransmitting information, the increase in the power ofcomputing, and the shift from analog to digital informationtechnologies that has joined the telecommunications andcomputing industries and merged segments of the informationindustry. Over the past twenty years, the cost of voicetransmission circuits and the computing power per dollarinvested have both fallen by a factor of 10,000. Prices havenot fallen nearly as fast - they have been set by acartel-like system of international agreements betweenincumbent monopolies. But as convergence restructures thetelecommunications industry, new operators are arbitragingthe difference between costs and the old tariff structures,putting pressure on incumbent telecommunications operators.