At the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 held in London, the VP of Legislative Affairs at AT&T stated that by 2010 the Internet will have reached it’s max capacity.  This is, of course, with out billions in dollars worth of upgrades–$55B in the US alone, and $130B globally.

The idea of the Internet maxing out seems a bit far fetched to me.  Specifically, this quote made me think that the problem might be getting blown out of proportion:

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

Really?  My neighborhood is going to generate more traffic than the entire Internet?  I find this really hard to believe.  And a statement like that makes me doubt everything else Cicconi talked about.  Perhaps if every appliance in my home is downloading full-length HD-quality movies, plus bonus features, and streaming porn, and making video calls to other appliances down the street, and running their own stock markets and research projects.  But at least at this time I don’t forsee my toaster actually taking up that much bandwidth.  And is AT&T going to provide me a reasonably priced 1Gbps pipeline to my house?  Probably not.  Even if they do provide such a pipleine I doubt most homes would pay the price for it.

Some who heard the speech felt that Cicconi was in a roundabout way advocating for bandwidth shaping and prioritizing their Internet traffic (i.e. slowing down or restricting users who are downloading movies via file sharing sites).  Cicconi of course claims that’s not the case, and with good reason given Comcast being put in the hot seat over that issue.

I think it would be interesting for the big providers to publish some data on their current capacity levels–most people aren’t maxing out their bandwidth all the time. But I’m curious to know what level of usage on average the companies are actually seeing.

 


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