The cost of transmitting a bit over optical fibre halves roughly every nine months.
Butters's law explains why bandwidth outran computing power over the 1990s and 2000s, and therefore why cloud computing became viable before anyone planned for it.
In practice
- Video calls, cloud backup and streaming all became ordinary because the transmission cost collapsed, not because anyone's computer got faster.
- A rural office that could not run a video meeting in 2005 runs eight simultaneously in 2015 on the same hardware budget.