The computer age is over. After a global run of thirty years, it has given birth to the age of the telecosm—the world enabled and defined by new communications technology. To seek the key to great wealth and to understand the bewildering ways that high tech is restructuring our lives, look not to chip speed but to bandwidth. Bandwidth is exploding, and its abundance is the most important social and economic fact of our time.

George Gilder is one of the great technological visionaries, famous for understanding and predicting complex technologies as well as for putting it all together in a soaring view of why things change and what it means for our daily lives. He foresaw the power of fiber optics and wireless networks, the decline of the telephone regime, and the explosion of handheld computers; now, he brings you the bible of the new age of communications.