More than half of all computers aren’t computers anymore. Smartphone shipments surpass PCs. The transition is done. But in this new era of mobile personal computing, the limiting factor is not the CPU, it’s the spectral efficiency of the whole mobile environment, experienced as the user goodput. At least 1MBit/s is needed to get an optimal browsing experience on a mobile phone.

As in Moore’s law, the growth is exponential, but with a rather less pronounced slope. And underlying both, economic models that serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a barrier of what technology could achieve in the future: the costly deployments of mobile networks, financed by debt, parallel those of semiconductor chip fabrication plants that Rock’s law models as constraints to transistor integration limits.