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This time is different, say the foolish. They say it to justify a new boom. It’s a new paradigm now, they proclaim. Then later, after the bubbles bursts, people will look back and see those statements as warning signals. History repeats itself, and by learning the lessons of the past we can make a more stable future, or so some suggest. Well, maybe. But I think there are some very interesting developments afoot, right now. Take BT for example; a product it plans to offer could… well, it could change the world. And this time, it really is different.

I reckon economists don’t get technology. They don’t see the effect it has on us all. They don’t see the link between innovation and growth or employment, or boom and bust.

Right now, the Internet is going through some profound changes. And by the way, the likes of Facebook may ride these changes, but I think it is more likely that in a few years, they will be foot notes in this remarkable story of our time.

I began telling this particular story last week, in the Bull and Bear column. The tale begins with Butter’s Law of Photonics, named after Gerald Butters, the former head of Lucent’s Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs. Butter’s Law says, and the quote here comes directly from Wikipedia: “That the amount of data coming out of an optical fibre is doubling every nine months.”

Now, look at how broadband speeds are changing. According to data from Ofcom out last week, broadband speeds in the UK increased by 22 per cent last year, up to November 2011. And it was really Butter’s law at work, on this occasion. The increase in speed largely came about as we saw the upgrading of networks across the UK from copper to fibre optic.

Also last week, BT announced plans to provide new ultra-fast broadband service of around 80 mbps. Virgin Media has already revealed plans for a 120 mbps service. When I saw those data speeds I nearly fell off my chair. After all, it was less than ten years ago when we accessed the Internet via dial-up. Back then, our Internet speed was limited to the 56kbps modems most of us used. According to my maths, the 100 megabit service BT is planning will be two thousand times faster. (Although, in fairness, that is peak rate, and individual users will rarely get bandwidth speed anywhere near that fast.)

But then, over the weekend I read that BT is planning to offer 300 megabit fibre optic broadband in 2013.

I gather that those kind of speeds are already the norm in South Korea. Even so, I find this mind boggling.

The truth is that the applications that will make use of these Internet speeds have not yet been written. But they will. And it will happen fast. Just as Facebook has gone from nowhere to world domination in half a decade, the new bandwidth speeds will mean new players will crop up virtually overnight, and come to rule the world. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and co may learn how to ride these changes.

Being a world leader once is one thing, doing it twice is something altogether more difficult. Apple has managed it. So has Microsoft, when it managed to migrate users from DOS to Windows. Google is trying to do it with the Android. I suppose you could argue the current problems we are seeing at Sony and other Japanese consumer electronics companies just support my argument. Sony managed to back new technology and forge itself a lead many times in the past. But this time it has not been so successful.

But it is interesting to note that none of the technology/media giants of five years ago, managed to dominate social media. Rupert Murdoch tried, but bought the wrong company – MySpace. No one saw the rise of Facebook until it was too late for the incumbents.

I suspect it will be the same again, but next time it will be Facebook that fails to find the right product for the new ultra, ultra-fast bandwidth speeds.

But there is another point. The implications of such incredible speeds will be massive indeed, simply massive. I reckon the Internet and other new technologies have been behind globalisation and the recent trend we have seen in growing wage differentials. Although the Internet has done much that is good, such as underpinning the Arab Spring, I suspect that it has also made the financial crisis of our times more severe and harder to predict. Economists have not woken up to this yet.

As for predicting the companies that will be winners, I suspect that the tech and pharma giants of today that will continue to flourish are those that allow internal evolution. That is how Microsoft found Windows. There will come a day when providing Internet access will be a commodity. And it will be very hard for  companies such as BT to make significant profits. But as long as things keep changing, BT amongst many others sits on a huge opportunity.

These views and comments are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the view of The Share Centre, its officers and employees