Last week AT&T announced that the Internet will run out of bandwidth by 2010. Do you think people will care more about the “death of the internet” or Global Warming?

Here is the full article: http://www.news.com/2100-1034_3-6237715.html

Do you think there will come a day when there will be mandatory “internet bandwidth rationing” like water rationing when there is a drought?

Or do you think a quasi government agency will step in a institute some kind of bandwidth regulations?

Or could providers start charging by the kilobyte of bandwidth used?

Why is AT&T the only provider out there saying that the sky is falling? They have apparently committed to investing over $19 Billion into upgrading the infrastructure. The article states it will require approx $130Billion so where’s the rest coming from?

Is the mostly a US based problem or a WorldWide problem? I can’t see how it really affects people with little to no internet access to but entire Corporations here in the US have built on the Internet as it’s sole source of customer contact; how will companies like Amazon, YouTube, Etrade, Linkedin Etc continue to run if they loose internet access or it slows down so much it’s like working on a 28K modem again? I doubt their users will put up with increasing wait times for pages to load.

Why isn’t there a huge cry from the Web Development community for better video compression standards, smaller graphic files, more efficient site development to decrease bandwidth needed to use/browse a site etc?

Besides laying a whole bunch of fiber in the ground what other technologies can be utilized that could help offset this issue?

A lot of questions I know but I don’t see this getting a whole lot of media attention so either they have their head in the sand or it’s getting buried by other “more newsworthy stories.

These are mostly retorical questions and I’m just hoping to act as a conduit to open up the topic for a discussion. And I think it’s a pretty important topic. Esp for those of us that make their living on the internet.

Jeff Weidner
jeffweidnerlinkedin@gmail.com
I never IDK!

Jeff Weidner 20,000+

Talent Sourcing Mgr at Comcast

We don’t yet know how much of the actual bandwidth usage is a result of normal fluctations in the environment or natural cycles. So we should just convene a council of scientific minds to study the problem and make policy recommendations. <ahem>

In both cases, the majority of people aren’t going to pay attention until they’re personally impacted by the problem. Fortunately for the Internet, large corporations will feel the problem long before it trickles down and they’ll drive the mitigation. In addition, there will be good money to be made from the “power users” who pay a premium for an improved infrastructure (especially if they notice their Halo lag times going up or their massive bittorrent downloads slowing to a crawl)

Now if we could just find a way to make global environmental remediation something that people would be willing to pay for.