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AT&T Claims Internet to Reach Capacity in 2010
An anonymous reader writes "CNET News has a piece in which AT&T claims that the Internet's bandwidth will be saturated by video-on-demand and such by 2010. Says the AT&T VP: 'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.' Similarly: 'He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.'"
...is so obviously wrong that he's either a) been misquoted, b) an idiot or c) misquoting someone else. Given how impressive his title is I'd say that last one is most likely...
As for the internet "reaching capacity"... that's a pretty meaningless thing to say. At the root of all this we get the actual "story": bandwidth use is likely to increase more quickly over the next few years than ever before.
Is anyone really surprised? The fast links are starting to be there, so people are starting to figure out ways of using them that appeal to the masses. Exponential growth is not exactly a new concept in the computer industry...
Still. Not a good time to be an ISP.
Oh noes! The internet is going to dry up! Better start hording internet now, so that it can be used when it runs dry!
Since our end ISP's are throttling us now, i don't see things 'expanding' for most of us.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
AT&T says the tubes of the intarwebs will be clogged with lolcats by 2010....
Where is my fiber to the curb? A lot of my tax dollars were freely handed to them to do it. A decade later and what do they have to show? A report the the tubes will be clogged in less than 2 years.
I want congressional hearings, and heads on platters.
Maybe this is all just an explanation of why they will raise their rates shortly, but the good news out of that is that they are investing in infrastructure. They are still looking for long term solutions to problems that are arising.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Sh'yeah - right Wally. 20 households eating up hundreds of millions of users worth of bandwidth, many many hundreds of thousands of which are already:
a: bombing away on bittorrent
b: watching youtube (reminds me - I need to watch last night's Bill Maher...)
c: downloading eons of pr0n
d: spamming the planet with adverts for C4iL1s and v14grA?
Whatever he's smokin' - I want some. Now. It's been a long and pretty dorky day, I could use some massive hallucinogens.
Give the horsey some sugar cubes. Aaaaah - look - it's all PAISLEY...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Oh crap!! There's going to bandwidth saturation in a few minutes alright, unless all ISPs stop filtering torrents and start filtering 6 4 0 k and b
I am heartened to hear that there will be enough quality content to saturate that amount of bandwidth.
Or does he mean that the amount of spam and ad traffic will have grown to swamp teh intarweb?
Or maybe Flash 74.2 will use 50 gajillion bytes/second to render static images on dilbert.com?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
This is a typical company FUD tactic especially when costs in reality are going down or are static (share holders don't like static income growth). In this case speeds on fibre have increased massively over the last ten years with data speeds going from cutting edge single digit gigabyte speeds to terrabyte speeds within a few years. Some may say equipment and maintenance costs have gone up but that is also FUD because fibre maintenance and distances between amplifiers has increased and over all equipment failure rates have dropped.
What AT&T says will happen in three years time has already happened in Japan, where the average advertised broadband download speed is 93 mbit/s (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0711/). I don't seem to remember a lot of Japanese ISPs going bankrupt.
I'm guessing they are crying wolf to get more money from the government.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Is part of their/Comcast's previously mentioned and pathetically wrong argument against net neutrality by doomsday mongering about an exaflood that, like Y2K, gigalapses, and marijuana, will be the end of civilization as we know it-unless we allow them to start throttling bandwidth and selling off top speeds to companies
Is there really that much smut out there?
It's interesting that the same people who sell you cable are complaining about video on demand over there data network...
Conflict of interest maybe guys?
My cable connection sucks, because it is saturated!! They've already oversold their capacity and I am getting nowhere near the bandwidth I paid for.
So really, wtf is this guy talking about?!
There, fixed that for you
AT&T's annual income was $118 billion in 2007.
If they're only investing $19 billion over the next 2 years until 2010, that's 8% of their income they spend on maintaining and upgrading their network.
And they make some pretty huge profits, even after all of their expenses ($11 billion in 2007)
If they're only spending 8% of their money on network maintenance and upgrades, and raking in huge profits, while their network fails to keep up with demand (which, contrary to alarmist reports is multiplying more slowly than it used to), then they need to spend more than 8%! Doing otherwise, when you run an essential utility, ought to be considered criminal negligence imho.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Look at what you started! The Internet is ruined because of you! Either that, or the ZetaBytes of pr0n downloaded every day.
It is time for the Telcos to deliver. The American taxpayer was bilked out of billions of dollars to subsidize broadband buildouts. The results, so far, have been unimpressive.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Then providers will have to use some of that dark fiber. Or upgrade their OC units at each end of the fiber. And upgrade routers. Oh, how will they ever cope?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
A country like America with so many resources and so much wealth can't do what a little country like Japan can do?
Is it any wonder no one wants to buy American? Companies are just out to screw people rather than earning more money by giving them what they want.
Didn't John Sidgmore say something like this a year or so before Worldcom went tits up, Web 1.0 imploded and suddenly we went from impending crisis to what to do with all the "dark fiber" ?
I'm finally going to get to see the final boss of the internet!
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
"We would like to screw our customers some more and need changes in law to do so. Here is a doomsday prophecy you can use as an excuse to remove some of the regulations that currently stand in our way."
Yep, you're completely right.
I mean, the second hit from http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying
was this video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9083419535371820707&q=video+cloud+spraying&ei=EWoKSI7fCYWkjAKbrPGtBA&hl=en
named "Using Cloud-Seeding GeoEngineering to Solve Global Warming ".
What are they trying to do to our beloved global warming? It's all a big conspiracy man, I'm telling you.
Bastards!!!
'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.' I don't know about the typical household, but personally I don't think I can watch that much porn.
In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.
That is without question the stupidest comment I've heard all week (anything belched forth from the White House excepted, of course.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Then in the same article they quote him as saying broadband traffic would increase 50-fold by 2015.
You would think a responsible reporter would seek clarifications before printing glaring contradictions. Or perhaps CNET is relying on their spell checker a bit too much. 20 million households? But spell checkers don't catch omitted words.
Son, someday all this will belong to your ex-wife.
Ha. Ha ha.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
This is going to make tech support fun.
... Having said that, I'm reminded of working at an ISP 3 years ago, and having our Wireless Broadband Network reach capacity a few times, and having to explain, well, that exact line, only without using the terms "full", "capacity", "bottleneck", or really giving any information out at all.
"Sorry Ma'am, the reason your Kazaa isn't working is because the Internet is full. Please try again later after a few other people have logged out for the day."
Maybe that's not such a laughing matter after all...
Fiber is fiber is fiber. It's marginally more expensive to deploy 100 strands instead of one, and having ridiculous overcapacity. Not to mention all the dark fiber out there.
:)
The real cost of upgrades is simply faster switches to make sure switching between 0s and 1s is done as fast as possible, something that needs to be done all the time, by any internet provider and which SHOULD BE INCLUDED IN MAINTENANCE COSTS!
ATT wants you to picture them rewiring the entire country with gold fiber, Monster cables or some other horseshit.
I'm not going to bother commenting about the 20 families broadband usage. That's just meme fodder
U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.
- The question is, why would telecommunications/backbone providers and ISP's not keep the networks upgraded to keep pace with consumer demand. Could it be because there is not enough competition to give them an incentive to do so? You can bet that if competition was healthy, AT&T would not be saying any such thing, since U.S. network capacity would have been updated to cutting-edge speeds long ago.
Ideally, the 700Mhz wireless auction would have ended with the promise of new competitors, but most of that bandwidth went to incumbents as well, which means in places like my neighborhood in well-populated Los Angeles, citizens will most likely still have only 2 companies to choose from for broadband when 700 Mhz services go live: Verizon (who has a well-earned reputation for having the worst call center customer service) and Time Warner Cable(FWIW, Verizon has announced no plans to even bring FIOS to my neighborhood in West Los Angeles.)
I'm not normally a big fan of litigation, but I do think that class-action lawsuits on behalf of consumers would serve everyone well here, since the FCC and FTC have not been looking out for consumer interests as well as they should have been, on policy decisions affecting the broadband industry over the past several years.
Al Gore can just invent another internet if this one breaks.
"In this field, almost everything is discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes," says the professor. "The future of physics is very much predictable at this point."
The practice of encouraging young and aspiring physicists to look to different fields is becoming more and more widely practiced, as experts around the world agree: Physics is just about dead.
Planck, however, has decided against von Jolly's advice, and will continue to pursue his dream of entering the once exciting but quickly dying world of physics.
(C) Copyright Arrogant Scientists, 1874
You know that an industry is in a sad, sad state when it is bitching about an increase in demand for its product. Particularly when that increase in demand is coupled with a decrease in cost to supply.
If any of those slimy bastards try and insist that the free market is working, point them to this. When you can afford to get upset when your customers want more of your product, the idea that you are vulnerable to "competition" is a bad joke(yes, I know, the economics of overselling are part of this).
Can you imagine any real industry doing this?
General Motors: "OMG, the interstate highway system will cause your factories to explode due to excessive demand!"
Hollywood: "We must not have more than 5 TV channels, or the demand for made-for-TV movies will overwhelm our studio capacity!"
Pathetic.
Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T:
Jim Cicconi loses any semblance of credibility right there. As if "president of legislative affairs for AT&T" wasn't enough.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
Oh my God! This is the best news I've heard in a long time! AT&T's top lawyer has just promised us 20 TBps residential internet in 3 years.
I can hardly wait! Imagine how many BluRay porn discs we can download every second!
I love you AT&T!
Death of the internet. Film at 11.
We're going to raise prices, so we need to justify it ahead of time. We'll do that by telling you it's for your own benefit. And you'll believe us.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
MORE EXPENSIVE IS CHEAPER. REALLY. HONEST.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Now lets listen to what NANOG has to say about this FUD.
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg07568.html
Especially this post in that thread: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg07603.html
Among other things, they point out that AT&T's claims (about 20 homes)wouldn't be possible, even if 40gbit ethernet was deployed to every home.
Simple math and common sense, plus any reasonable FUD-detector should make it clear what to make of these claims the AT&T VP is making.
Suppose indeed AT&T will have to sink money into infrastructure. Are we talking about routers here, or wires and such? I'm curious if this presents investment opportunities for us?
... was taking up that much bandwidth.
Every other week some idiot is telling us the internet is going to die soon.
Bull-fucking-shit. Assuming each household has 3 computers, saying a total of 60 workstations are able to consume that much bandwidth is simply ridiculous. For that much data just to get written to volatile system memory, it would require PC RAM to increase in speed by many orders of magnitude over the next 3 years. Let alone all the other impossibly ridiculous implications.
Says the AT&T VP: 'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Yeah right.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
This is interesting coming from AT&T who tries to sell bandwidth to ISP's at unbelievable prices compared to the likes of Level3, Cox, Cogent et.al. The statement seems to elude to the internet being a finite resource which it isn't. If there is a capacity issue ( there aren't enough 'tubes' as our president would say ;) ) service providers will increase the capacity as long as the ROI is there and they can make money delivering content.
So, expansion requires investment and returns...so I would expect that we'll see and gradual increase in pricing per Mb...the days of 10.00/Mb for internet connectivity will become harder to find by 2010...
Should be a fun ride!
I am usually a UK net consumer. My mother is on ADSL2+ and gets a line speed of about 4.5Mbits, for which she can download from a typical European (read: EU, not UK) site at about 400kB/s. She pays £18/month, but could be paying £14/month if she was on standard ADSL.
Friends in Loughborough, UK, get 20Mbit Cable. They download at 2Mbit/s from sites all over the UK and the Netherlands, including the occasionally P2P traffic.
Two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco. Not only does DSL suck over there, cable isn't THAT much better, and the quality of service DROPS during busy periods. Speeds were often far below that of my mother's cheap connection, and I'm not just using public wi-fi, I tried on residential connections too. Mobile net sucked too - I don't think I saw a single 3G signal anywhere.
I'm currently on a connection at Newark, NJ, and to be quite honest, it sucks here too. Sure, it's public wifi, but speeds of 10kB/s and below are substandard to say the least.
What I'm getting at is - people complain about UK bandwidth... And they're mostly factually incorrect. I assumed the US were just whining as US (and other) geeks do. Personal experience tells me different... The US telecomms structure sucks - and the net sucks bigger. I can't believe I'm saying this but... Take a hint from the UK, from France, from the Netherlands... From SWEDEN! Fix your internet!
If only we had a good old fashioned pipe cleaner to clean the tubes of the internet with. The tubes, think of the tubes!!! 360 Networks tanked because there was far more bandwidth than use. Compression technologies combined with multi-phase physics led to an exponentially larger amount of bandwidth available. There is still quite a bit of dark fiber around from that time (circa 2000). Sure more people are using broadband and VOIP, but hey, those are things that are being pushed now aren't they....and by the ISP's. Its not unlike computers from 5-7 years ago (I still have one) with stickers plastered all over it talking about 'downloading music' off the internet. It was a sales campaign. When people did it though, they are labeled 'criminal', even though they are doing what the ad promises. VOIP and broadband are offered, but are no longer things people should want? What? There is still gobs more bandwidth than ISP's can use, its just that they want to create artificial shortages to make more money.
Hopefully some new alternatives to fiber optics and present day routers which would remove bottlenecks for faster video and so we don't have to order the evil cable tv.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/12501
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2913761,00.html
sounds like someone needed a quick pep rally for shareholders to me.... this guy is more or less imagining his salary in 3 years due to the "uplifting" piece of info he has given us today.... he'll wake up from his wet dream.... when we run out of IP addresses.... and everyone has a max 30 minutes per ISP every 5 hours...when they decide to curb the bandwidth due to technical constraints ...right? Oh yes....then there is the copyright issues crap that they think they have the ability to control...but well save that for another idiot another day!
The Internet actually HAS served as an "alternate" TV network of sorts, ever since people first realized it was possible to stream video formats or do animation in a web browser window.
While it's still a "playground" in many ways, sometimes, serving content that's meant to be passively enjoyed is part of the "fun". Not everybody gets (or even WANTS) the job of creating an animated series that runs on commercial television. But far more people DO get a kick out of creating animations and using the net as an inexpensive way to broadcast them. (What's the point in creating art of any kind, if nobody else is there to enjoy it afterwards?)
By the same token, as technology advances, it only makes sense to consolidate things. Why run and maintain a whole mess of coaxial cable for cable TV, if you can just serve the content over the same connection that handles the regular Internet broadband? This is the future, and the only part that *doesn't* make much sense about it is all the artificial content restrictions the mass media still demands.
(One of the BIGGEST advantages of consolidating network television as IP traffic on the net SHOULD be the flexibility in handling the traffic with whatever computer and software the end-user likes. No more need for dedicated hardware that's just a sub-set of what's in their desktop PC already, to do the decoding, display, and recording of programs.)
As Mark Twain said over 100 years ago, "Figures don't lie, but Liars sure figure."
One more example of bad statistics used badly.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
"We need more Government subsidies and tax breaks to build out more infrastructure (suckers)."
This leads to a somewhat surrealistic situation; they advertise (in a negative way) what they're bad at. For example, WaMu is well known and reviled for their sub-sub-standard customer service. See their advertising where they trumpet their excellent customer service? There you go.
So we see Microsoft advertising speed and stability, McDonalds advertising nutritional benefits, etc. These things are clues; see the ad, observe what characteristic they're claiming excellence in and you'll know what they do badly.
Now - what is AT&T actually saying?
Seriously, I've been hearing this as long as I've been on the 'net (early 1990s). It's been going around since Vint Cerf first hooked two computers together.
ISPs will experience exponentially increasing demand for bandwidth, and now with everyone enjoying the service, can actually expect to have money thrown at them when they need it. More and more, the market comes to the ISP, rather than the ISP having to entice customers.
/.ers seeding linux distros and streaming HD media.
So maybe they'll diversify packages they offer a bit, be able to make a nice cut on high end packages, and still scoop up pennies serving out little bumps of bandwidth with per-gb and (relatively) narrowband packages to the masses.
This is a very good thing, for ISPs. By shaping bandwidth into different packages, or selling pay-per-gb models, they force customers to buy depending on their actual usage habits. Joe, the office worker who only downloads the NY Times daily and checks his emails occasionally will pay less than the
So maybe in the future a paper copy of a magazine will be $5.00, and a digital one will be $0.50, and we will pay for the share of bandwidth we use, like we really ought to.
A good result is that there'll be increased pressure to refine inefficient technology, and more enthusiasm and reason to support newer, more streamlined tech. This song I'm listening to is encoded in mp3, a relatively crude predecessor to more efficient formats, but linux distros are seeded at incredible speeds largely by non-professional servers. Efficiency is coming. Maybe you and I will help develop it, or at least keep up with it.
But this more valid internet might cost us more valid cash than we're used to. Too little bandwidth is going to be a problem with your internets and mine and everyone else who's discovering richer media/bigger downloads. How do good ultracapitalists solve this problem? We could attempt to integrate the businesses into our government, which in a more perfect nation would mean we could trust these companies to not totally screw us. Or the thing the consumers are more likely to do, because it requires less understanding of the economic, technical, and political implications of the situation:
Throw money at it, by paying for bandwidth reasonably. The service that ISPs provide (i.e. transport of information in a digital format) has gained value and continues to. Not a good time to be big downloader.
But really, what's new?
"Word in the smart circles is that all of that shit is made out of string anyway, so that's where the real smart money is."
I can't wait to tell the wife. 30yrs ago she said I was an idiot using the spare room to house my string collection. After the children were born she demanded I get rid of my balls alltogether, said she "never wanted to see those hairy monstrosoties again".
I stood firm, I told her "I would rather leave her with my balls intact, than stay and suffer the pain of eternal seperation". Eventually we compromised, we built a shed so that I could keep my balls out of her face. It worked well, to this day I can still play with them (or simply stand and admire), them whenever I feel like it. Now that they are worth money I bet she will want to display them on the mantlepeice and pretend she always loved them.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The "throw money at it" solution is for morons. Of course it's going to cost a lot of money for these upgrades, but proposing that AT&T isn't spending enough because they're only using 8% of their profits is asinine. I wouldn't doubt that this is most likely silly bitching on AT&T's part fueled by some other motive, but I doubt either you or I could estimate the cost of such an upgrade better than they. Especially not with percentages.
Sounds like BS and "We'll save the internet!" It's all advertising to AT&T.
The article says ATT plans to spend 19B$ on infrastructure. Preumably, its in faster switches, routers, and lines (fiber optic). Whose equipment are they buying? Cisco, Juniper, Cienna, others? These are some of the big names in IP plumbing on the big pipe end. What class of equipment and what do they see as the next step?
Gents, we have been hearing this exact same line since 1990. It was wrong then, it's wrong now. I'm surprised they have the gaul to post this nonsense.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
The world is full of dark fiber. If there's demand for more bandwidth, there will be money to put it into service, and the available bandwidth will increase.
I remember seeing this discussion more than 20 years ago over people transmitting images over Usenet and the ARPAnet. What happened was that the bandwidth was added to handle the traffic, and the bandwidth available for plain text applications like traditional Usenet was increased.
This is what I have to say to Southwestern Bell: "If they come, you will build it."
WTF was that? No more Meth for you... BAD tWeekER! bad...
Mr Sterwart Pid...
If you drive a car straight, you will either hit something, or run out of gas.
If you predict that we will
A) Run out of bandwidth
B) Run out of storatge
C) Run out of computing horsepower
See Moore's Law.
Sirs:
This wont work because...
Stoopid Man! - Or, perhaps, really, really clever man! I wish I could predict the future. I think in the future, we will be able to predict the future. But the future is a long way off. Especially when your attention span is 2 mins.
They're looking for excuses to keep violating net neutrality, and they are also fishing for subsidies.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
I hear there's still some internet in Silicon Valley.
"we have screwed so bad with overselling that we need to secure public funding or some dirty scheme to bail ourselves out asap"
Read radical news here
So? Put more cable down and use more wireless effectively. Bandwidth will continue to increase, don't believe the hype.
Remember when they told us that everyone upgrading to 56K modems was going to "break the internet" and top out the capacity?