AT&T Claims Internet to Reach Capacity in 2010 239
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.'"
The world is ending! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm guessing they are crying wolf to get more money from the government.
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
Conflict of interest maybe guys?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
I already paid for the upgrade (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:life mirrors art (Score:2, Interesting)
There's no need to push this stuff onto iPhones and Laptops, so leave the internet for what it's best at: fast and concise information. Some people (like the top reps at Microsoft) will do everything they can to urge VOD upon us as the new thing, just to kill the now increasing demand for Blu-ray. Don't let their blind anger kill the internet (as we knew it) for all of us.
Tech Support (Score:3, Interesting)
"Sorry Ma'am, the reason your Kazaa isn't working is because the Internet is full. Please try again later after a few other people have logged out for the day."
Maybe that's not such a laughing matter after all...
It doesn't make any engineering sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:three years time? (Score:3, Interesting)
The rest of the services you mentionned are correct. HiDef video is a bitch and will ultimately require 100Mbps connections to feel comfortable (2-6 simultaneous 1080p channels that are not overly compressed and spare capacity for interwebs) and it ought to scale up to 10Gbps residential by the time we're all dead to keep up with new demand and uses (continuous HD backups will happily eat up a few dozen Mbps for instance).
You've heard it here first, folks! 10Gbps is all we'll ever need (our grandchildren will be mutants so they will use mutantnet, which is just like the internet but costs more because it's AT&T)
Re:I'm still waiting (Score:5, 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.)
Re:That quote... (Score:4, Interesting)
What I love is that I am watching the future unfold in technology that seems to be leading straight to the future we commonly depict in Anime...
I just hope there is less of a totalitarian overlay than we seem to be headed for.
Re:That quote... (Score:5, Interesting)
re: I disagree! (Score:4, Interesting)
While it's still a "playground" in many ways, sometimes, serving content that's meant to be passively enjoyed is part of the "fun". Not everybody gets (or even WANTS) the job of creating an animated series that runs on commercial television. But far more people DO get a kick out of creating animations and using the net as an inexpensive way to broadcast them. (What's the point in creating art of any kind, if nobody else is there to enjoy it afterwards?)
By the same token, as technology advances, it only makes sense to consolidate things. Why run and maintain a whole mess of coaxial cable for cable TV, if you can just serve the content over the same connection that handles the regular Internet broadband? This is the future, and the only part that *doesn't* make much sense about it is all the artificial content restrictions the mass media still demands.
(One of the BIGGEST advantages of consolidating network television as IP traffic on the net SHOULD be the flexibility in handling the traffic with whatever computer and software the end-user likes. No more need for dedicated hardware that's just a sub-set of what's in their desktop PC already, to do the decoding, display, and recording of programs.)
Re:That quote... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm still waiting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:life mirrors art (Score:3, Interesting)
Government and big business have a vested interest in maintaining a stupid, politically inert and consumerist society, so it was inevitable that bread and circuses would be pushed down the tubes as soon as it became mainstream.
Re:That quote... (Score:3, Interesting)
Making claims about technology not bounded in time is a poor choice. If we humans haven't managed to increase our perceptual bandwidth in, say, ten thousand years then we are an absolute failure as an intelligent species.
But in the foreseeable future you very well might be right that a terabit per second is a bit much for an average household. Compressed HDTV is only 20 Mbps. We can probably completely saturate the human sensory inputs with nearly-uncompressed data at a bandwidth on the order of a gigabit per second.
On the other hand, there may be engineering gains in using bandwidth inefficiently. For example, TOR uses significantly more bandwidth than traditional routing in order to provide anonymity. Compare processor clock cycles - in 1955 the idea of wasting them was absurd. Today, I throw away two orders of magnitude of processor efficiency every time I decide to write a program in Ruby - and it's usually the right engineering choice simply because my time is worth more than processor time is.
Here's another concept: Optimistic delivery for interactive content. Imagine that we have a full-sensory VR environment and 1 Tbps of bandwidth, but still have hundreds of milliseconds of latency (damn speed of light). We can trade off bandwidth against latency by guessing at the user's actions and pre-buffering the content that they *might* experience. They could look up, or look down, or hit the button to teleport themselves to an underwater reef palace - so load it all.
Another, even simpler point is that people frequently want to download things like movies faster than they can watch them. So if we have a 200 Mbps super-HD two-hour movie, it'll take 1.3 seconds to download on a 1 terabit link. That's sure better than the nearly two minutes it would take to download on a 10 Gbps link. So I guess that does show that a 1 Tbps link may be useful for an average household ever.