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.'"

i bet that quote...

[kris.montpetit]

Is part of their/Comcast's previously mentioned and pathetically wrong argument against net neutrality by doomsday mongering about an exaflood [arstechnica.com] that, like Y2K, gigalapses, and marijuana, will be the end of civilization as we know it-unless we allow them to start throttling bandwidth and selling off top speeds to companies

Re:That quote...

[eihab]

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..

Re:$19 billion out of how much?

[puppis]

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 [arstechnica.com]), then they need to spend more than 8%! Doing otherwise, when you run an essential utility, ought to be considered criminal negligence imho.

You are misstating revenue as income (which generally means net-profits). AT&T had $118 billion in revenue in 2007 and $11 billion in profits. So $19 billion would be 172% of their profits, a little more than the 8% you calculate.

Right AT&T... Now lets listen to NANOG

[FliesLikeABrick]

Now lets listen to what NANOG has to say about this FUD.

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg07568.html

Especially this post in that thread: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg07603.html

Among other things, they point out that AT&T's claims (about 20 homes)wouldn't be possible, even if 40gbit ethernet was deployed to every home.

Simple math and common sense, plus any reasonable FUD-detector should make it clear what to make of these claims the AT&T VP is making.

Re:THANK YOU AT&T!!!

[gbjbaanb]

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.

Re:It doesn't make any engineering sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

fewer.