An important factor in the rapid rise of Internet access speed has been advances in MOSFET (MOS transistor) technology. The MOSFET, originally invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng in 1959, is the building block of the Internet telecommunications networks. The laser, originally demonstrated by Charles H. Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow in 1960, was adopted for MOS light wave systems around 1980, which led to exponential growth of Internet bandwidth. Continuous MOSFET scaling has since led to online bandwidth doubling every 18 months (Edholm's law, which is related to Moore's law), with the bandwidths of online communication networks rising from bits per second to terabits per second.