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.'"

That quote...

...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...

Oh no the massive profits the telecom industry has enjoyed with the explosion of the internet might at some point cause them to have to sink money into infrastructure? The horror!

Re:

That is the sound of the smallest violin being transmitted in 6.1 ch dolby HD to every IP in america.

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:

"top percentage of internet ready nations"

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:Which Stocks to Buy?

Invest in feedstocks.

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?

Word in the smart circles is that all of that shit is made out of string anyway, so that's where the real smart money is.

Re:

By whom? I mean yeah DARPA probably laid the original lines, but there was a huge boom of laying (and leasing) - privately - dark fiber all through the 1990's. I'm just curious. Or are you referring to the giant blocks of IP addresses?

Re:

"Infrastructure that they were largely given free of charge."

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...

the telcom industry has been the most radically changed by new technology, in the 1970s people had telephone service, and unless they could afford long distance rates, they called relatives long distances away only for emergencies. Today, for $20 instead of getting 20 hours of long distance phone calls you get unlimited long distance through the US and sometimes Canada, often with only a small surcharge for calling Europe, or even a plan with unlimited calls over seas for a slightly larger monthly fee..

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:That quote...

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:That quote...

The title he has is just another name for a lobbyist. Start a myth, get other people to believe such a myth, then get congress to force people to give them more money to pay for the myth. Seems like a standard practice.

Re:That quote...

Start a myth, get other people to believe such a myth, then get congress to force people to give them more money to pay for the myth

From his BIO [att.com]:

Mr. Cicconi also served in the White House under two presidents, including two years as deputy chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush and four years as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan

I'd say he has the experience for it :)

Re:

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

THANK YOU AT&T!!!

Oh my God! This is the best news I've heard in a long time! AT&T's top lawyer has just promised us 20 TBps residential internet in 3 years.

I can hardly wait! Imagine how many BluRay porn discs we can download every second!

I love you AT&T!

Re:THANK YOU AT&T!!!

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:That quote...

great points, Agreed.

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

"We need more Government subsidies and tax breaks to build out more infrastructure (suckers)."

life mirrors art

Oh noes! The internet is going to dry up! Better start hording internet now, so that it can be used when it runs dry!

Re:life mirrors art

Please don't tell me what I want from the Internet, thank you.

re: I disagree!

The Internet actually HAS served as an "alternate" TV network of sorts, ever since people first realized it was possible to stream video formats or do animation in a web browser window.

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:

I, like you, sadly pine for the days of old when the Internet was used for activities that were intellectually stimulating, and bemoan the emergence of passive, mindless, consumerist culture on the once erudite Internet community. I remember hoping that as people joined the internet, their mental atrophy would reverse and they would begin learning and participating on a more socially constructive level. How naive and myopic of me to not see that mindlessness would simply follow them online.

Government and bi

I think we are safe

Since our end ISP's are throttling us now, i don't see things 'expanding' for most of us.

Fark's article summary...

AT&T says the tubes of the intarwebs will be clogged with lolcats by 2010....

I'm still waiting

Where is my fiber to the curb? A lot of my tax dollars were freely handed to them to do it. A decade later and what do they have to show? A report the the tubes will be clogged in less than 2 years.
I want congressional hearings, and heads on platters.

Re:

It seems that they 'accidentally' ran it to my house instead... ;)

Re:

I think it's ironic that fiber to your door is swiftly becoming more common among city dwellers in Romania than in the U.S.

Re:I'm still waiting

It took an act of the whitehouse to get telephones and powerlines connected to everyone in the US. If they feel like they can make more money not installing fiber everywhere, then we won't be getting fiber any time soon.

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

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:

But not the important part of the capacity problem, which is the backbone connections. We need cables across oceans and between cities before we think about the connection to the premises getting much faster. ADSL2+ will be fine for a while yet, though it really is pushing copper (and aluminium and lead - there's some crazy old shit still in use) to its limits. No point having 100Mbps to your house if every peering point and backbone link is so saturated you only actually get 3Mbps.

Re:

Satan worshiper? You're out of date. After extensive market testing, the Devil has been rebranded as "Stan" [sm], beating out such alternatives as "Old Nick" (too old fogey) and "POD" (too urban). Hell, is now "Brimston Lake: A Gated Community".

Three years, eh?

'In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.'

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

My! That IS good news!

I am heartened to hear that there will be enough quality content to saturate that amount of bandwidth.
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

This is a typical company FUD tactic especially when costs in reality are going down or are static (share holders don't like static income growth). In this case speeds on fibre have increased massively over the last ten years with data speeds going from cutting edge single digit gigabyte speeds to terrabyte speeds within a few years. Some may say equipment and maintenance costs have gone up but that is also FUD because fibre maintenance and distances between amplifiers has increased and over all equipment failure rates have dropped.

Re:The Sky is Orange

And in any case, they live by selling bandwidth. If the need for bandwidth increases explosively they should be happy as they can sell more.

But for some reason they insist on casting a bonanza in demand for their primary product as a problem for them.

It doesn't make any engineering sense.

Fiber is fiber is fiber. It's marginally more expensive to deploy 100 strands instead of one, and having ridiculous overcapacity. Not to mention all the dark fiber out there.

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 :)

i bet that quote...

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

Interesting...

It's interesting that the same people who sell you cable are complaining about video on demand over there data network...

Conflict of interest maybe guys?

Corrections

In three years' time, 20 typical households will receive more traffic than the entire Internet today.'[...] [AT&T is investing $19 billion of taxpayer money it was given years back to maintain our network and upgrade our backbone network like they were supposed to do years ago.

There, fixed that for you

$19 billion out of how much?

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.

I already paid for the upgrade

It is time for the Telcos to deliver. The American taxpayer was bilked out of billions of dollars to subsidize broadband buildouts. The results, so far, have been unimpressive.

three years time?

'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.

Re:

'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:

VOIP consumes negligible bandwidth (8 KBps).

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

Tech Support

This is going to make tech support fun.

"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." ... Having said that, I'm reminded of working at an ISP 3 years ago, and having our Wireless Broadband Network reach capacity a few times, and having to explain, well, that exact line, only without using the terms "full", "capacity", "bottleneck", or really giving any information out at all.

Maybe that's not such a laughing matter after all...

This industry is pathetic

You know that an industry is in a sad, sad state when it is bitching about an increase in demand for its product. Particularly when that increase in demand is coupled with a decrease in cost to supply.

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

Death of the internet. Film at 11.

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.

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

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.

US Net Quality Sucks

I am usually a UK net consumer. My mother is on ADSL2+ and gets a line speed of about 4.5Mbits, for which she can download from a typical European (read: EU, not UK) site at about 400kB/s. She pays £18/month, but could be paying £14/month if she was on standard ADSL.

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!

As Mark Twain Said

As Mark Twain said over 100 years ago, "Figures don't lie, but Liars sure figure."

One more example of bad statistics used badly.

Imminent death of the net predicted!

Seriously, I've been hearing this as long as I've been on the 'net (early 1990s). It's been going around since Vint Cerf first hooked two computers together.