With Internet data rates increasing, established vendors, startups, and research labs have made 1997 a year of technical innovation. Industry and university experts generally agree there are only a few remaining obstacles to building terabit routers. But a terabit is a factor of 1,000 short of a petabit. Here's where Moore's Law can help out. It predicts that by 2002 chips will be about 10 times faster.
Smart engineering can often boost that by a factor of two or better.
That means we only have to go 50 times faster. And parallelism can probably buy us that last factor of five. All of that makes it seem as though a petabit network isn't outside the realm of possibility. Let's look at access technologies. We all know that wireline technology is improving.