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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Please don't tell me what I want from the Internet, thank you.
I don't know about the typical household, but personally I don't think I can watch that much porn. You are being cynical, but you're quite right. In 3 years time, Vonage (and Vonage-alikes), Netflix, Amazon Unbox, TIVO, and AppleTV are going to change the average ISP user (currently a grandmother who reads her emails once a day) to something vastly more resource intensive.
Given that AT&T, Comcast, et all have made a living based on overselling their networks for 20+ years, this is a really BIG problem.
Even without throttling, the basic equation is:
{capacity they have}/{customer they have} = {kbit/s on their ads}.
They have full control over all 3 numbers. What is their problem exactly?
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.
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
Every other week some idiot is telling us the internet is going to die soon.
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!
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)."