High-end user connection speed grows about 50% a year, slower than computing power.
Nielsen's 1998 law, derived from the connection speeds available to a high-end user rather than from a representative population sample. Its consequence is that software becomes bandwidth-hungry faster than connections improve for the median user, so the gap between fast and slow connections widens.
In practice
- A team building for a fast office network ships software the median customer cannot load.
- A site optimised on a developer's connection is unusable in a rural area, and the gap widens each year.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is infrastructure: bandwidth growth depends on physical rollout and regulated investment, which move more slowly than semiconductor manufacturing.
- In its favour
- The gap it names is real and consequential, since software written on fast connections is repeatedly unusable on ordinary ones, and the trend held for two decades.
- Against it
- It was derived from one high-end user's connection history rather than a representative sample, and it describes a technology trend rather than anything about people, so its status as a law is nominal.
- Standing
- Derived from the connection history of a high-end user rather than a representative sample; a technology trend rather than a law about users.
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- The curves, the limits and the laws of software