"Exaflood" Disaster Appears Unlikely

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "By now, we've all heard of the 'coming exaflood' that will drown the ISPs in data and smite the wicked P2P users. Fortunately, the 'exaflood' is unlikely to be a disaster. Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year, and there's plenty of core bandwidth — now handling about an exabyte a month in fact — but the last mile is still slow. So there's a reason that Comcast & co. are worried about losing to P2P, but the Internet itself isn't likely to suffer a meltdown any time soon. And there's plenty of data to counter anyone who says otherwise."

Comments

Re:It's the last mile which is holding it back

[Chrisq]

That sounds pretty likely. If I could get real time video over the internet I would watch all sorts of things instead of terrestrial tv. Having to start a download and wait for a couple of hours for a half-hour program limits my use and therefore the bandwidth I use. In this way the last mile bottleneck reduces my usage of the core.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[unlametheweak]

The opposite of FUD, whatever you may call it, from the headline article on Slashdot:

Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year Note quite, but as stated in the referenced article, the rate of growth is falling. Yes there are concerns with increased growth, especially since much of the usage and growth in usage is not the typical text based Internet of the 1990's, but of the multimedia and P2P type growth of the 20th Century. It makes sense that network capacity should keep up with this growth. This seems to be the concern with most people I believe. From the article; "But from 2002-2007, the growth rate has dropped, and it now hovers at 50 to 60 percent a year." This isn't shabby growth by any means, think of compounding effects of this over the long term, and P2P growth is at only 100% a year; again, if you think of it as money compounding one could get rich very quickly.