How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 15, 2007 @11:19AM from the read-a-book dept.

lopy writes "First Google claimed the internet infrastructure won't scale to provide an acceptable user experience for online video. Then some networking experts predict that a flu pandemic would bring the internet to it's knees and lead to internet rationing. We used to think that bandwidth would always increase as needed, but what would happen if that isn't the case? How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage? Would you be willing to voluntarily limit your internet usage if necessary? Could you live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access?"

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From what I understand by Anonymous Coward · 2007-02-15 11:23 · Score: 5, Informative

bandwidth is an artificial limitation to a point (ie: you can't have 100 people soaking up a 100MBit line at 100MBit each and expect people to be happy). But the ISP's are limiting everything on purpose to insanely slow speeds in comparison to what they can actually do.

re: I worked for an ISP until recently.

They're just cheap when it comes to actually upgrading the infrastructure.