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

by Christopher Null

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.

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?

1 comment:

A D said...

( http://news.cnet.com/2100-1034_3-6237715.html ) and various articles covered in the past few months have all been focused around how Ineternet usage and bandwidth would be 50 times more than today and the content created then would jam the internet space.

Typically utilization of bandwidth and usage is directly proportional to the no.,quality & results of QUERIES that a user inputs from the moment he logs on. These queries can be as simple as searching, or as intense as uploading. At the end of it, its all about minimizing the no. of queries.

We are trying to research the potential ways of minimizing these queries by pre-defining most searched “keywords” & “categories”.

By not entering any search query, or typing for searches you would be skipping multiple steps and help in saving energy and bandwidth.
If we all try and add to this pre-defined list of searches, we can help save far more energy, bandwidth and money.

Help us all move towards the green technology.

http://www.lazii.com

(currently in beta stage)