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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.'"
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!
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?
I think it's ironic that fiber to your door is swiftly becoming more common among city dwellers in Romania than in the U.S.
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. "
You name it. But indeed, there is a rather simple solution to VOD clogging up the fibre tubes: stop pushing those services to consumers. The internet is not a TV network, never was, it is a playground that should encourage _active_participation_ instead of passive consumerism. Push movie downloads into the channels that were made for yesterday's AV distribution, namely cable and satellites.
There's no need to push this stuff onto iPhones and Laptops, so leave the internet for what it's best at: fast and concise information. Some people (like the top reps at Microsoft) will do everything they can to urge VOD upon us as the new thing, just to kill the now increasing demand for Blu-ray. Don't let their blind anger kill the internet (as we knew it) for all of us.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
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
VOIP consumes negligible bandwidth (8 KBps).
The rest of the services you mentionned are correct. HiDef video is a bitch and will ultimately require 100Mbps connections to feel comfortable (2-6 simultaneous 1080p channels that are not overly compressed and spare capacity for interwebs) and it ought to scale up to 10Gbps residential by the time we're all dead to keep up with new demand and uses (continuous HD backups will happily eat up a few dozen Mbps for instance).
You've heard it here first, folks! 10Gbps is all we'll ever need (our grandchildren will be mutants so they will use mutantnet, which is just like the internet but costs more because it's AT&T)
What would be nice is a law making it illegal for municipalities to grant the infamous "last mile" monopoles to telephone and cable companies.
In my ideal little fantasy world, it would also be nice if we stopped obsessing over the "natural monopoly" aspects of line ownage. We'd have more infrastructure than we'd know what to do with if we let AT&T, Comcast, etc. each install their own lines rather than forcing them to share. (Granted, telephone poles having 6 or 7 different phone lines on them sounds redundant, but part of the capacity problem would be solved.)
DATABASE WOW WOW
great points, Agreed.
What I love is that I am watching the future unfold in technology that seems to be leading straight to the future we commonly depict in Anime...
I just hope there is less of a totalitarian overlay than we seem to be headed for.
If you can't mod them join them.
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.)
By whom? I mean yeah DARPA probably laid the original lines, but there was a huge boom of laying (and leasing) - privately - dark fiber all through the 1990's. I'm just curious. Or are you referring to the giant blocks of IP addresses?
moox. for a new generation.
But not the important part of the capacity problem, which is the backbone connections. We need cables across oceans and between cities before we think about the connection to the premises getting much faster. ADSL2+ will be fine for a while yet, though it really is pushing copper (and aluminium and lead - there's some crazy old shit still in use) to its limits. No point having 100Mbps to your house if every peering point and backbone link is so saturated you only actually get 3Mbps.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I, like you, sadly pine for the days of old when the Internet was used for activities that were intellectually stimulating, and bemoan the emergence of passive, mindless, consumerist culture on the once erudite Internet community. I remember hoping that as people joined the internet, their mental atrophy would reverse and they would begin learning and participating on a more socially constructive level. How naive and myopic of me to not see that mindlessness would simply follow them online.
Government and big business have a vested interest in maintaining a stupid, politically inert and consumerist society, so it was inevitable that bread and circuses would be pushed down the tubes as soon as it became mainstream.
I hate printers.
Making claims about technology not bounded in time is a poor choice. If we humans haven't managed to increase our perceptual bandwidth in, say, ten thousand years then we are an absolute failure as an intelligent species.
But in the foreseeable future you very well might be right that a terabit per second is a bit much for an average household. Compressed HDTV is only 20 Mbps. We can probably completely saturate the human sensory inputs with nearly-uncompressed data at a bandwidth on the order of a gigabit per second.
On the other hand, there may be engineering gains in using bandwidth inefficiently. For example, TOR uses significantly more bandwidth than traditional routing in order to provide anonymity. Compare processor clock cycles - in 1955 the idea of wasting them was absurd. Today, I throw away two orders of magnitude of processor efficiency every time I decide to write a program in Ruby - and it's usually the right engineering choice simply because my time is worth more than processor time is.
Here's another concept: Optimistic delivery for interactive content. Imagine that we have a full-sensory VR environment and 1 Tbps of bandwidth, but still have hundreds of milliseconds of latency (damn speed of light). We can trade off bandwidth against latency by guessing at the user's actions and pre-buffering the content that they *might* experience. They could look up, or look down, or hit the button to teleport themselves to an underwater reef palace - so load it all.
Another, even simpler point is that people frequently want to download things like movies faster than they can watch them. So if we have a 200 Mbps super-HD two-hour movie, it'll take 1.3 seconds to download on a 1 terabit link. That's sure better than the nearly two minutes it would take to download on a 10 Gbps link. So I guess that does show that a 1 Tbps link may be useful for an average household ever.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.