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