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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.'"
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?
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. "
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
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.)