Cisco Systems, the dominant provider of the digital pipes that run the Internet, is making a big play in digital entertainment.
And bandwidth is a huge problem, because until the digital pipes get bigger and more organized, networking will be constrained.
"If the digital pipes are significantly narrowed by gatekeepers who divert fans to preferred content, a unique opportunity will be lost for creators of music and those fans," he said.
A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset.
To repeat our oft-repeated theme: The Big Three sectors of the Internet era are chips, storage and digital pipes.
Slow-running digital pipes can also be crippling for home-office workers stuck using a 56-kilobit-per-second modem, unable to get a digital subscriber line.
It will, however, put a real drag on new capital investment in faster digital pipes by making it illegal for many big companies to help pay for them, while leaving everyone guessing about the details for years.
But acquiring the cable systems of Tele-Communications and MediaOne was only the first step; billions more will be spent turning sometimes antiquated one-way cable lines into fat, fully digital pipes.
Allen was far ahead of the technology, but he innately understood that as digital pipes expanded and chips got cheaper, there'd be a shift even more massive than the move from mainframes to desktops.
