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.'"
That quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Re:That quote... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously though, didn't we just get the report that we are in the top percentage of internet ready nations? Doesn't that mean that we "can do it" before it reaches the "I can't give it any more captn' she'll blow" stage?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I suppose if you count ALL the nations. But you guys are realllllly far behind what the super power should be doing. I think you are in 15th place atm out of 200 countries... thats not bad i guess... But being the biggest economy in the world you could afford to do better.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Which Stocks to Buy? (Score:4, Funny)
Neutrons, Protons, Electrons....that sort of shit. Also whatever radio waves are made out of. Buy a big bunch of that stuff too.
Re:Which Stocks to Buy? (Score:5, Funny)
I knew it would happen one day! (Score:2, Funny)
I can't wait to tell the wife. 30yrs ago she said I was an idiot using the spare room to house my string collection. After the children were born she demanded I get rid of my balls alltogether, said she "never wanted to see those hairy monstrosoties again".
I stood firm, I told her "I would rather leave her with my balls intact, than stay and suffer the pain of eternal seperation".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Can someone give me any insight as to what insight can be found in the GP's insightfull remark. In other words, I call bullshit.
Re:That quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
this is a drastic change, and it was only made possible by fiber optics, instead of laying expensive copper cables, cheap glass and cheap lasers are used instead.
and no the network wasn't laid for free, rather the googles of the world are paying for it, because the telcom industry discovered a much deeper pocket than consumers ever had, now that so much data can be sent over such a cheap infrastructure.
the market changed, and thanks to new technology they're rolling in money, even though more and more people are dropping land lines for wireless phones (which have also boosted telcom profits, $50 for the main plan plus $15 per phone... or more, for more minutes a month..)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That quote... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
With today's computers, I can't think of any way for a single household to usefully saturate a one terabit per second link. And I'm the guy who always calls people short sighted idiots for saying that X amount of bandwidth is "good enough". In order to even *generate* that traffic you'd need 1000 computers with gigabit ethernet and obscene routing hardware.
For today, I'd be happy with a gigabit connection. I feel pretty safe in saying that I won't be needing any faster than that, personally, this year.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (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
Re: (Score:2)
Well let's see, 720p requires 37 Mhz over the air, so let's call it 247 Mbps [netdish.com] and an assumption of a 10 room house is pretty generous for and average, times 20 houses with an HD camera in every room equals 49.3 Gbps. Well there it is folks we now have it on good authority, Jim Cicconi- vice president of legislative affairs for AT
Re:That quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That quote... (Score:5, Interesting)
THANK YOU AT&T!!! (Score:5, Funny)
I can hardly wait! Imagine how many BluRay porn discs we can download every second!
I love you AT&T!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Computers ALSO evolve.
Re: (Score:2)
ISA, EISA, Nubus, VLB, PCI, PCI-X, AGP, PCI Express. Better get cracking on that 20Tbps bus by 2010.
Re:THANK YOU AT&T!!! (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
The translation is simple (Score:3, Insightful)
life mirrors art (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (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 co
Re:life mirrors art (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Last time I checked, most content providers weren't trying to encourage downloading of full-resolution movies. In fact, it seems that the phenomenon of movies being downloaded over the Internet far predates iTunes and can be blamed largely on people who go out of their way to illegally download movies. People want movies over the Internet, without any official encouragement. If it's not Pira
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Government and bi
I think we are safe (Score:5, Funny)
Fark's article summary... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm still waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
I want congressional hearings, and heads on platters.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm still waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing is that after decades of "deregulation" we have less of a market economy than ever before. The largest businesses in the country (and this is especially true in telecom) hold their positions with a massive buttress of government contracts and protectionist legislation. Government regulation doesn't do half the damage to a market that government favor brokering does.
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: (Score:2)
It's more telling that cable and telecom monopolies lobby so hard against city that want to add competition to the last mile, say through mun
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Good (Score:2)
Three years, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:2)
My! That IS good news! (Score:3, Insightful)
Or does he mean that the amount of spam and ad traffic will have grown to swamp teh intarweb?
Or maybe Flash 74.2 will use 50 gajillion bytes/second to render static images on dilbert.com?
The Sky is Orange (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Sky is Orange (Score:5, Insightful)
But for some reason they insist on casting a bonanza in demand for their primary product as a problem for them.
Re: (Score:2)
But for some reason they insist on casting a bonanza in demand for their primary product as a problem for them.
Also known as "People are starting to use what we've already sold them". I'm quite probably one of said bandwidth hogs, and I don't feel the least bit ashamed over it. Why? Because it's what you sold me, and thanks to decent consumer protection laws they haven't complained either. A resturant would never offer an "all-you-can-eat" buffet and complain that you're eating too much, they'd cut that out and only offer dishes instead. ISPs on the other hand would like to sell you an "all-you-can-eat" buffet of 5
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: (Score:2)
To some degree your comment is correct but fibre isnt fibre. There is a wide variety of different optical fibre from glass to plastic to all the weird doped variants that allows the Telco's to use less amplifiers on long connections.
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the follow up info!
The world is ending! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm guessing they are crying wolf to get more money from the government.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Their internal connectivity is great, but bandwidth to sites located outside of japan is quite poor... I would assume they use a lot of caching.
Re: (Score:2)
If this is true, then the areas of the US with high population density would have service comparable to Japan. But this isn't the case, and this shows that your reasoning is extremely flawed.
i bet that quote... (Score:3, Informative)
Really? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
Conflict of interest maybe guys?
It's already saturated. (Score:2)
So really, wtf is this guy talking about?!
Corrections (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you
$19 billion out of how much? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, you used only one years profits for your comparison, and there are still about two years until 2010 (more or less depending on when during the year they expect their network to become satu
I already paid for the upgrade (Score:4, Interesting)
That will surely suck. (Score:2)
Sweet! (Score:2)
Translation (Score:2)
three years time? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.'
I don't know about the typical household, but personally I don't think I can watch that much porn.
You are being cynical, but you're quite right. In 3 years time, Vonage (and Vonage-alikes), Netflix, Amazon Unbox, TIVO, and AppleTV are going to change the average ISP user (currently a grandmother who reads her emails once a day) to something vastly more resource intensive.
Given that AT&T, Comcast, et all have made a living based on overselling their networks for 20+ years, this is a really BIG problem.
Re: (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
Huh? (Score:2)
That is without question the stupidest comment I've heard all week (anything belched forth from the White House excepted, of course.)
Re: (Score:2)
Fixed that for you.
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...
Re: (Score:2)
key part of the sentence is "without investment" (Score:2)
- The question is, why would telecommunications/backbone providers and ISP's not keep the networks upgraded to keep pace with consumer demand. Could it be because there is not enough competition to give them an incentive to do so? You can bet that if competition was healthy, AT&T would not be saying any such thing, since U.S. network cap
This industry is pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)
If any of those slimy bastards try and insist that the free market is working, point them to this. When you can afford to get upset when your customers want more of your product, the idea that you are vulnerable to "competition" is a bad joke(yes, I know, the economics of overselling are part of this).
Can you imagine any real industry doing this?
General Motors: "OMG, the interstate highway system will cause your factories to explode due to excessive demand!"
Hollywood: "We must not have more than 5 TV channels, or the demand for made-for-TV movies will overwhelm our studio capacity!"
Pathetic.
Translated (Score:3, Insightful)
We're going to raise prices, so we need to justify it ahead of time. We'll do that by telling you it's for your own benefit. And you'll believe us.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
MORE EXPENSIVE IS CHEAPER. REALLY. HONEST.
Re: (Score:2)
"Will the REAL Doctor Pederman PLEASE report to Neurosurgery IMMEDIATELY!"
RS
Right AT&T... Now lets listen to NANOG (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
US Net Quality Sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Friends in Loughborough, UK, get 20Mbit Cable. They download at 2Mbit/s from sites all over the UK and the Netherlands, including the occasionally P2P traffic.
Two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco. Not only does DSL suck over there, cable isn't THAT much better, and the quality of service DROPS during busy periods. Speeds were often far below that of my mother's cheap connection, and I'm not just using public wi-fi, I tried on residential connections too. Mobile net sucked too - I don't think I saw a single 3G signal anywhere.
I'm currently on a connection at Newark, NJ, and to be quite honest, it sucks here too. Sure, it's public wifi, but speeds of 10kB/s and below are substandard to say the least.
What I'm getting at is - people complain about UK bandwidth... And they're mostly factually incorrect. I assumed the US were just whining as US (and other) geeks do. Personal experience tells me different... The US telecomms structure sucks - and the net sucks bigger. I can't believe I'm saying this but... Take a hint from the UK, from France, from the Netherlands... From SWEDEN! Fix your internet!
Rebuild the internet (Score:2)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/12501 [networkworld.com]
http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2913761,00.html [zdnet.com]
As Mark Twain Said (Score:3, Insightful)
One more example of bad statistics used badly.
A perfect example of modern marketing (Score:2)
This leads to a somewhat surrealistic situation; they advertise (in a negative way) what they're bad at. For example, WaMu is well known and reviled for their sub-su
Re: (Score:2)
That they charge too much for what they deliver, and want to charge more for even less in a few years.
Imminent death of the net predicted! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)