This big!: George Gilder was a promoter of telecommunications during the boom of the 1990s. Credit: Michael Temchine/The New York Times/Redux

This past February, with the Southern California days already warm and the sunlight reflecting off the bay and the high-rises along the waterfront, 12,000-odd members of what is perhaps the most important technology industry on the planet converged on San Diego's convention center for their annual conference.

Since 2005 this event has been called the Optical Fiber Communication Confer­ence and Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference. It's a mind-numbingly dull name with an unpronounceable acronym (OFC/NFOEC). But the nearly one terameter (1,000 million kilometers) of fiber-optic cable encircling the earth effectively makes up our global civilization's central nervous system, since it carries Internet traffic and all international telecommunications--including voice calls, which nowadays are transmitted as packets of digital data. The world's data traffic, moreover, is doubling in volume every two years. Industry critic ­Robert X. Cringely claims that the only reason video didn't overwhelm U.S. Internet services in 2007 was that broadband ISPs capped bandwidth and closed switches to control traffic, while pretending that they were taking no such measures. People have been predicting that the Internet would crash as long as it's existed, of course. Still, it's worth considering that if, for instance, all of YouTube's users were to upload their videos in high definition, it would nearly double U.S. Internet traffic.

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