2010: D-day for the Internet as it hits "full capacity&

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Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:01 am

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2010: D-day for the Internet as it hits "full capacity"?

Wed Apr 23, 2008 4:19PM EDT

Buzz up!on Yahoo!

Doom-filled warnings arrive from AT&T this week. The company says that without substantial investment in network infrastructure, the Internet will essentially run out of bandwidth in just two short years.

Blame broadband, says AT&T. Decades of dealing with the trickle of bandwidth consumed by voice and dialup modems left AT&T twiddling its thumbs. The massive rise of DSL and cable modem service in the 2000s has had AT&T facing a monstrous increase in the volume of data transmissions. And that's set to increase another 50 times between now and 2015. That's enough, says AT&T, to all but crash the system.

In response, AT&T says it's investing $19 billion to upgrade the backbone of the Internet, the routers, servers, and connections where the bulk of traffic is processed.

Of course, AT&T is using this breathlessness in part to point fingers beyond simple broadband use. Web video (especially high-definition video) is the most commonly mentioned bandwidth hog. AT&T says video alone will eat up 80 percent of traffic in two years vs. just 30 percent now. One wonders how YouTube doesn't collapse under the pressure. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, many are wondering whether this is prelude to AT&T announcing (or not announcing, but doing anyway) a traffic prioritization/shaping system like Comcast has been tinkering with... and which has earned it nothing but scorn. Net neutrality (which would forbid premium pricing for certain Internet applications and destinations) is a topic that continues to be hotly debated on Capitol Hill, and telcos are anxious to kill the idea since they'd love to be able to charge additional money for different kinds of web traffic. If the whole Internet is about to crash, well, that makes AT&T's argument all the more compelling, doesn't it?

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 12:11 pm

Not just AT&T, the UK ISP's have been moaning about BBC iplayer's bandwidth consumption and p2p is hogging a hell of a lot of the system as well.
The telephone infastructure was never designed for all this information transfer so it was always going to be a matter of time before it cracked. All well and good having a 16 Meg line to your ISP, but if it's upline stream is buckling over the sheer amount of dat transfers then it's still going to be as slow as hell. I've seen more and more people getting 3G cards for their computers simply because they are sick of the congestion on DSL.

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 12:51 pm

They're just preparing you for higher internet costs and a tax per bit send or received. A free for all WWW, now that can't last.
Milking the internet has started a long time ago and it will only get worse. In the meantime lots of programs you paid for are connecting to the net every day several times to check for updates, safety and other unwanted stuff.
MS has introduced live solutions to help you to enjoy their program better. They also now know who is interested in what and can adjust the commercials to that. Norton checks every half hour for updates of his programs. DVD burners report what you have been burning.
But if... spam will have to stop and that's nice too Laughing

Here in Canada we're told that we have to buy a HD tv or a converter to be able to watch tv after next year February. Once they got that installed and the HD sales are finally what they expected I'm ready to buy a new tv with Super HD in two years, forced consumption, now that's nice for the producers. As I have no tv I could care less, but that's how it works now-a-days. Get them hooked and start raising the prices, that's the way to make a profit.

Elite Baiter Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 1702

Its not the end of the internet, and no real price hikes either.

Its the constant alarm bell that big corps keep ringing.

What will happen is the cables under the sea will be doubled, PIV6 will come into play, the infrastructure will get upgraded, a few years later it will go total wireless via sat links and wimax, the cables wont technically exist anymore, broadband in the home will be a thing of the past, wireless technology will plummet in price, and everyone will get very high speed broadband for the cost of dial up - thats what the big companies also state, but when does good news ever get reported Razz

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 5:00 pm

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everyone will get very high speed broadband

sorry mate but I'm going to take issue with that. I don't know about other countries but in the remote part of the UK where I used to live they didn't even get broadband until 2003 and even then it was seriously limited. People living in large cities and other built up areas may indeed get super duper high speed broadband but large areas of the UK will have to wait years for it and suffer the ever slowing DSL system.

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 11:08 pm

I build large scale telecommunications equipment. I think they're crying wolf or running around screaming "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Laughing

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 12:35 am

When the telephone was invented, it was predicted that that means of communication was important enough that by the year 2000 every major city in the USA would have one.

One.

So much for predictions.

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 1:23 am

I've been hearing about stuff like this for months. One of my friends takes every opportunity to refer me to this article he read about the Internet "running out of capacity". But it's like digital-one said, the infrastructure needs to be upgraded, so the infrastructure will be upgraded. The companies whose profits rest on customers being able to get high speed internet aren't going to put their hands up and say "sorry guys, run out of bandwidth, you can't use the Internet any more." They'll do their darndest to give the customers what they want, laying new cables, going wireless, whatever. That's how market economies work.

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 1:57 am

even if they bring all those new systems in, someone is going to pay for it Wink

just wait until they hook up 2 billion Chinese users and a few people from India.

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 10:16 am

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but in the remote part of the UK where I used to live they didn't even get broadband until 2003 and even then it was seriously limited.

Actually, it was September 2004 here and it's still seriously limited. The max line here is 1Mb and I'm lucky if I download anything at over 40kbps. And the local exchange isn't due to be upgraded until 2010.
And I wouldn't even say I'm that "remote". The village I live in is sandwiched by two towns. Both about 4-5 miles away.

UK Broadband is a complete joke. Even if the system does overload (which I seriously doubt) it can't get much worse than it already is.

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