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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.'"

23 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. That quote... by 26199 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

    1. Re:That quote... by colmore · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh no the massive profits the telecom industry has enjoyed with the explosion of the internet might at some point cause them to have to sink money into infrastructure? The horror!

      --
      In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
    2. Re:That quote... by eihab · · Score: 5, Informative
      I liked this one:

      "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today." I'll be waiting for my 1 Terabits per second connection any day now, and even then I don't think 20 households would generate more traffic than the infrastructure we have today.

      Given how impressive his title is I'd say that last one is most likely... From the article:

      Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T Doesn't sound like a techie to me, of course he should know better and at least consult with someone before making absurd statements like this, but oh well, what do you say..
      --
      If you can't mod them join them.
    3. Re:That quote... by HeLLFiRe1151 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The title he has is just another name for a lobbyist. 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. Seems like a standard practice.

      --
      I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
    4. 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 :)
      --
      If you can't mod them join them.
    5. Re:That quote... by kesuki · · Score: 4, Insightful

      the telcom industry has been the most radically changed by new technology, in the 1970s people had telephone service, and unless they could afford long distance rates, they called relatives long distances away only for emergencies. Today, for $20 instead of getting 20 hours of long distance phone calls you get unlimited long distance through the US and sometimes Canada, often with only a small surcharge for calling Europe, or even a plan with unlimited calls over seas for a slightly larger monthly fee..

      this is a drastic change, and it was only made possible by fiber optics, instead of laying expensive copper cables, cheap glass and cheap lasers are used instead.

      and no the network wasn't laid for free, rather the googles of the world are paying for it, because the telcom industry discovered a much deeper pocket than consumers ever had, now that so much data can be sent over such a cheap infrastructure.

      the market changed, and thanks to new technology they're rolling in money, even though more and more people are dropping land lines for wireless phones (which have also boosted telcom profits, $50 for the main plan plus $15 per phone... or more, for more minutes a month..)

      --
      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
  2. life mirrors art by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh noes! The internet is going to dry up! Better start hording internet now, so that it can be used when it runs dry!

    1. Re:life mirrors art by The+End+Of+Days · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please don't tell me what I want from the Internet, thank you.

  3. I think we are safe by nurb432 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Since our end ISP's are throttling us now, i don't see things 'expanding' for most of us.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  4. I'm still waiting by mea_culpa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I'm still waiting by colmore · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It took an act of the whitehouse to get telephones and powerlines connected to everyone in the US. If they feel like they can make more money not installing fiber everywhere, then we won't be getting fiber any time soon.

      The funny thing is that after decades of "deregulation" we have less of a market economy than ever before. The largest businesses in the country (and this is especially true in telecom) hold their positions with a massive buttress of government contracts and protectionist legislation. Government regulation doesn't do half the damage to a market that government favor brokering does.

      --
      In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
    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.)

      --
      DATABASE WOW WOW
  5. Three years, eh? by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 5, Insightful
    'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.'

    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.
  6. The Sky is Orange by EEPROMS · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:The Sky is Orange by thue · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And in any case, they live by selling bandwidth. If the need for bandwidth increases explosively they should be happy as they can sell more.

      But for some reason they insist on casting a bonanza in demand for their primary product as a problem for them.

  7. Corrections by noidentity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In three years' time, 20 typical households will receive more traffic than the entire Internet today.'[...] [AT&T is investing $19 billion of taxpayer money it was given years back to maintain our network and upgrade our backbone network like they were supposed to do years ago.

    There, fixed that for you

  8. $19 billion out of how much? by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  9. 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 :)

  10. This industry is pathetic by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. THANK YOU AT&T!!! by __aailob1448 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:THANK YOU AT&T!!! by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Informative

      FYI PCI-e 1.1 supports 250 MB/s (250 million bytes per second), so x16 gives you 4GB/s. Most network speeds are given in bits per second, so thats roughly enough for 32Gbps transfer.

      PCI-e 2.0 is double speed compared to PCI-e 1.1, you'll have it in newer mobos.

      Your HDD (if its a sata-2) will support 3 gbps (3 gigabits per second) transfer, though that's burst rate so you'll only get half that on average - 150MB/s, but you could put your drives in a RAID0 array to increase that.

      If you don't believe me, look it up on wikipedia. I promise I've not just gone there and changed the numbers.

  12. Re:Which Stocks to Buy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Invest in feedstocks.

    Neutrons, Protons, Electrons....that sort of shit. Also whatever radio waves are made out of. Buy a big bunch of that stuff too.

  13. Re:Which Stocks to Buy? by Malekin · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.