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AT&T Claims Internet to Reach Capacity in 2010

Posted by timothy on from the calls-for-even-more-paper-towels dept.

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.'"

3 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. It doesn't make any engineering sense. by __aailob1448 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)

  2. Re:I'm still waiting by Z34107 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

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  3. Re:That quote... by eihab · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Start a myth, get other people to believe such a myth, then get congress to force people to give them more money to pay for the myth From his BIO:

    Mr. Cicconi also served in the White House under two presidents, including two years as deputy chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush and four years as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan I'd say he has the experience for it :)
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