Will Internet TV Crash the Internet?

Stony Stevenson writes "Analyst groups and Cisco have come out saying that the internet is heading for a crash unless it increases its bandwidth capabilities which are being strangled by the increased use of Web TV. Stan Schatt, research director at ABI said: "Uploading bandwidth is going to have to increase, and the cable providers are going to get killed on bandwidth as HD programming becomes more commonplace." He added that the solution to the problem is to change to digital switching and move to IPTV. "They will be brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century," he said. Cisco weighed into the argument, adding that it had found American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000."

Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ...

whether they are going to give us what want, and find a way to stay profitable ... or not. In other words, they're going to have to start acting like real businesses.

It's not rocket science

whether they are going to give us what want, and find a way to stay profitable ... or not.

If you ask me, the whole "problem" is a bunch of balony. ISPs oversubscribe their services, because most people just browse websites, and that's low-bandwidth. Now, they're realising they can't do that, because people are using youtube and bittorrent, and that's about to reach critical mass when people like the BBC legitimize it in a consumer-oriented shrink-wrap. Suddenly, ISPs can't claim that people who actually USE their services are doing something immoral or illegal.

So, what's the problem again? You sold a service extra-cheap, because you didn't think you'd have to provide the full service? Tough. Get real, and sell what we're buying. The prices might go up, sure, but either we'll pay, or we won't care about the new service. Your upstream providers might charge too much for bandwidth, but that'll soon change as ISPs start demanding more.

Re:It's not rocket science

Yes, they sold us a service based upon consumer expectations at the time ... worked great for a while too. Then (as always happens) our appetite for capacity increased, they didn't predict it (or, if they did, failed to act on that prediction) and now they're scrambling to keep the bandwidth hogs in their place. The problem is that, as you say, everyone is on the verge of becoming a bandwidth hog. If nothing else, things are about to get interesting.

Re:It's not rocket science

they didn't predict it (or, if they did, failed to act on that prediction)

They did predict it, and did act on the prediction, else youtube would not be able to move as much data in a month as the whole internet did in a year in 2000. They under predicted the growth curve though.
-nB

Re:It's not rocket science

There's no big difference between failing to predict growth and under-predicting it when that growth is (near) exponential. Your prediction is out by a factor of 20% in the first year, and by the fifth year, you are out by (according to the back of my envelope) 150%.

Sanity from Cringely? You don't say.

I normally avoid anything from Cringely, but in this case I think he's spot on:

There are no good guys in this story. Misguided and incompetent regulation combined with utilities that found ways to game the system resulted in what had been the best communication system in the world becoming just so-so, though very profitable. We as consumers were consistently sold ideas that were impractical only to have those be replaced later by less-ambitious technologies that, in turn, were still under-delivered. Congress set mandates then provided little or no oversight. The FCC was (and probably still is) managed for the benefit of the companies and their lobbyists, not for you and me. And the upshot is that I could move to Japan and pay $14 per month for 100-megabit-per-second Internet service but I can't do that here and will probably never be able to.

Despite this, the FCC says America has the highest broadband deployment rate in the world and President Bush has set a goal of having broadband available to every U.S. home by the end of this year. What have these guys been smoking? Nothing, actually, they simply redefined "broadband" as any Internet service with a download speed of 200 kilobits per second or better. That's less than one percent the target speed set in 1994 that we were supposed to have achieved by 2000 under regulations that still remain in place.

This sounds like the telcos' modus operandi to a T. Recall a few years ago, when the FCC eliminated some surcharges, and they continued charging them to customers (as "cost recovery fees") until so many people got angry that the Federal government slapped them down? This is just the same thing, writ even larger.

Although I'm sure there are most corrupt agencies somewhere in the government, I can't think of one that's more bald-facedly corrupt than the FCC. Until we can the whole business and replace it with an organization -- and people -- who have as their mandate the best interests of the citizens of the United States, rather than the telecommunications companies, we're never going to have a first-class communications infrastructure. And the longer we keep the current bunch of bent industry shills and political operatives in place, the worse of a backwater the U.S. will become.

Re:It's not rocket science

I would gladly sell you what you are buying.

Lets see, 24mbps (ADSL2+) @ $30/mbps = $720/month. Are you willing to pay that much money or would you like me to overcommit 100:1 and get the price down to $7.20 ?

$30/meg is decent bandwidth, you can approach $10/meg for crap bandwidth but you do get what you pay for.

To put it another way, $30,000 for a GigE connection per month, but you need 2 of them because you have to be redundant, so $60,000 for 1 Gigabit of redundant bandwidth. A HDTV signal eats up 7mbps so you can support 142 of them on a GigE connection, $422 per channel. Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view. You wouldn't be able to watch on-demand or fast-forward the signal. You could pause/rewind it if you had a hard drive in your set top box. That isn't what consumers want. As a provider selling triple-play services you need to dedicate at least 7mbps per end user in your edge/aggregation network. You will also need massive hard drive caches in your POP to cache as much content as close to your subscribers as possible. Set top boxes with big drives so you can pre-load content using multicast/broadcast techniques (i.e. pre-load the new hit movie on all set boxes and make them available on the release date) The cable infrastructure isn't built to handle this type of content delivery. DSL is but DSL distance limitations make getting 7mbps to customers hard (10kft limit). FTTH is the obvious answer but that is insanley expensive

The days of broadcast television are dying. Things like AppleTV & YouTube are going to kill it. Soon independant television producers will be able to produce/distribute the show directly to the consumer, no need to sell the show to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. You'll be able to subscribe to the shows and download them. All of that is unicast traffic and it will destroy internet bandwidth ratios.

Apple & iTunes is the way to go, once they start distributing content around the Internet (ala Akamai) they will have the parts needed to replace the broadcasters.

Re:It's not rocket science

Most consumer grade ISP services are sold as 'up to X mbps'. There is no guarantee in availability. read the fine print it is all classified as 'best effort'.

The Army Reserve used to advertise:

You will serve one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer

Then, it became:

Most will serve one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer

Then, it became:

Many will serve one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer

Then, the statement disappeared entirely

Cable is making the same sort of statement with "*cough* Up to X mbps *cough*" - the fine print doesn't say "Most will only get sustained speeds of Y mbps where Y is significantly less than X

Re:It's not rocket science

Let's see you try recruiting with:

"You will serve up to 15 months at a time in various warzones."

Re:It's not rocket science

Most consumer grade ISP services are sold as 'up to X mbps'. There is no guarantee in availability.

The issue isn't the connection speed - the problem is the total bandwidth available over a period of time.

Here in the UK, many of the smaller ISPs are selling accounts with a well publicised bandwidth limit (e.g. 30GB per month on-peak, 300GB off-peak), and making a number of different bandwidth limits available at appropriate prices. If you don't use much bandwidth then you can get a cheaper account, whilest the heavy users pay more. This is a sensible business model.

However, the larger ISPs still advertise "unlimited broadband". If you're using the word "unlimited" in your advertising then you probably can't complain when people try to max out their connection 24/7. Notably, two of the big ISPs (Tiscali and TalkTalk) have recently been complaining about the bandwidth used by people with "unlimited" accounts using the BBC's iPlayer. They sold something they couldn't provide without running at a loss on the assumption that people wouldn't use it, and now that people _are_ using what they paid for the ISPs are demanding that the BBC pay them to get them out of the hole they made for themselves.

You agreed to the fine print when you signed up for service so you really can't complain.

Most of the fine print for "unlimited" accounts just have a hand wavey "subject to fair use" clause with absolutely no indication as to what the ISP believes is "fair use". In any case, it seems like misrepresentation to me - if you advertise a product you can't then have small print that removes the very feature your adverts are using as a selling point. Advertising something as "unlimited" and then imposing limits is illegal.

You can speak loudly with your wallet, buy services from the few remaining independant ISPs

I do - I avoid buying from the ISPs who group all users together into a one-size-fits-all account. I'm not interested in a stupidly cheap service that's been overrun by the 24/7 bittorrenters and I'm not interested in a stupidly expensive service that forces me to subsidise the bittorrenters.

keep the big guys honest.

I don't hold out much hope for that. The big guys seem to be basically run by marketting departments who believe they will succeed by undercutting the competition and misleading the customer in order to do so. I don't see that this will change (hell, the cellular operators have been doing the same for years and there's no sign of them stopping any time soon) - my only hope is that the small ISPs can hold their own. The masses can stick to their massively oversubscribed AOLs whilest I use a small ISP that knows what they are doing.

Re:It's not rocket science

The days of broadcast television are dying. Things like AppleTV & YouTube are going to kill it.

The same way internet radio and mp3 kills radio stations? Or wait, I still listen to convetional radio stations at work 5 days a week ~10 hours per day (including traffic and lunch). It's not that easy. Basic stuff like news, weather forecast and hot stuff just coming in just aren't covered on youtube. Youtube may kill "america's funniest home videos" or whatever that show is called. No loss.

Bandwidth is not a limited resource

Available bandwidth is currently deliberately limited by the major incumbents. This manufactured scarcity drives the price up. There is more than enough dark fiber to meet our needs for decades to come.

The incumbents are about to discover that people will only put up with this for so long before they mandate municipal information infrastructure. Fiber is the bridge to the global economy and building bridges is one of the justifications for government exist. If your state and local governments won't do it, mine will - and your kids will find it that much harder to compete with mine.

Fiber is not made of some rare mineral. It is processed sand.

By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast

They certainly have had time to deploy it.

Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast

"IP Multicast is great to stream shows on a scheduled basis."

Once you start using MythTV or other capable PVR application you change your view of 'tuning in'. You simply dont do that anymore, you just mark what you want and treat it as a delayed-scheduled download service. Heck, the next step in that evolution (as storage grows the next order of magnitude) is simply using multiple tuners and pre-recording everything, so you can, in effect, decide what you want to watch post-multicast.

tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted

How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet?

Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted

More times than I care to count. I suspect it's to do with "We've got the solution to this imminent catastrophe, and will sell it to you for 1 billion dollars."

Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted

Dont forget the study was done by Cisco .. now what is Cisco's business????

Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted

Exactly my idea. Their gear powers a sizeable chunk of the internet, so of course some people (Pointy-haired Bosses?) will say "That probably shows they know what they're talking about." Problem is, do you know if it's their engineering or marketing guys that are doing the talking? I'll give 'em this, it's a brilliant sales strategy. Now all they have to do is make sure the death of the internet isn't imminent too often, since it failing to die too often is going to get noticed at some point.

Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted

45. Don't forget the 3 redundant slashdot stories today.

Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted

"...and 1000s of Deaths Expected in Hati from Cat5 Hurricane.!

Is this why the internet is gonna crash? Coz all the ethernet cables blew away?

If unicasts overload the network...

then let's have multicasting. There you are, another good reason for IPv6. Get to it.

Simple partial solution

Internet providers like Comcast will simply do what they've been doing. They've been throttling bittorrent because of the bandwidth it can take up. They'll simply throttle or block any internet TV that they don't specifically provide since it would be considered competitive to their cable TV offerings.

Re:Simple partial solution

I have the feeling it's not so simple as that. I'm on the Comcast 8 meg tier and have also noticed no difference in behavior. But then again, where I live I have lots of broadband options (I didn't plan it that way but there it is.) I doubt Comcast is going to screw with me too much because I could switch to a more congenial provider with a phone call. On the other hand, if you're someplace where Comcast (or any other ISP) is the only game in town, I think it might be a different story. Besides, Comcast is huge and is under no obligation to apply any policies equally across their entire network. You and I could be among the lucky ones (for now.)

Re:Simple partial solution

Internet providers like Comcast will simply do what they've been doing. They've been throttling bittorrent because of the bandwidth it can take up. They'll simply throttle or block any internet TV that they don't specifically provide since it would be considered competitive to their cable TV offerings.

Yes, that is likely what the will do. However... when online business in Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia, Eastern Europe etc. overtakes that of Western Europe, Australia and North America then everyone's going to be sorry.

If they put their customers first -- and tried to compete with ISPs in countries that are already far ahead of, and far cheaper than the west -- then they'd make lots more money and there would be no question of us hearing this "breaking the internet" nonsense.

If you work for an ISP in the west then listen! Listen closely. Shhh! Hear that? That's the sound of the World's smallest violin.

Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted

Choice quotes from this article written at the close of 1995:

http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/me tcalfe/bm120495.htm [infoworld.com]

Dazzling product literature and advertising require at least ISDN speeds. But the major corporations upon which we are relying to upgrade Internet access past 28.8Kbps are the local telco monopolies, which like our postal service and public schools have become little more than jobs programs. The local telcos will escape demonopolization in 1995 and, while they pursue long distance voice business in 1996, their motivation to lower costs on high-speed Internet access will wither, fatally constipating the Web.

You've read that the Internet was designed to survive thermonuclear war, but it's repeatedly been brought to its knees, its circuits choked, for example, by the reaction to one measly jury verdict in Los Angles. The Internet is intermittently overloaded, and the TCP/IP architecture doesn't deal well with overloads. Furthermore, the Internet's naive flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won't be, so no problem.

One of two bad things will happen with video over the Internet during 1996. Either the Internet's attached computers, operating systems, and applications software will fail to deliver video, or they will succeed. If they succeed, the packet-punctuated pre-Asynchronous Transfer Mode Internet will fail to carry it. In either case, without video the Internet will lack the energy needed to sustain its current expansion.

The Internet traffic carrying arguments about pornography on the Internet will during 1996 swamp the actual pornography, so even the most sophisticated Web search engines will too often fail to find any. What quicker road to collapse?

More gems to be found via http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=imminent+demi se+of+the+internet+predicted [google.com]...

Re:Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted

Dazzling product literature and advertising require at least ISDN speeds. But the major corporations upon which we are relying to upgrade Internet access past 28.8Kbps are the local telco monopolies, which like our postal service and public schools have become little more than jobs programs.

Damn, it's still just as relevant today!

My alternative...

I've spoken with a few engineers in the IPTV business... they're al about multicasting and QOS delivery. I'm going to go out on the limb and say... uhhh.... no. Why?

Because that's NOT what internet TV is all about. Sure, for some content think it's great. Like ABC, Fox, whatever - they can do the multicast. But for the rest of the content providers, it's going to be on-demand. And that solution is really quite simple. And it makes money.

Basically you take an Akamai like model and extend it. Deploy caching servers right to the ISP's - on the customer doorstep. Offer subscriptions to the customers and the ISP gets a chunk of the monthly. Customers get instant access to the content from the caching server. Content people get a chunk from the number of views statistically. ISP's only have to move content over their uplink once for all their customers nearby.

Best part is you could do it securely for the media providers, and give people a reason to use the service (more shows, better quality, faster delivery). Eventually you offer sell-up items like movies, sporting events, etc. In other words it would be better than cable, cheaper than cable, and far cheaper to operate.

There's all kinds of great stuff you could do here - and you could do it on the cheap and make beaucoup bucks. So, ya know... send me a bag of gold hehehe.

I smell baloney

I wonder with telco/cable company this "research" firm was paid by. This bit of disinformation helps support their case for why we need to turn the net into an information superhighway dotted with toll booths. However, there are better ways to do things.

Isn't funny, that a country of South Korea does just fine with super fast broadband connections many times faster than ours in both directions? No problems there. Unfortunately, this country's moronic embrace of unfettered capitalism and foolish trust in corporations to deliver essential public services is stopping us from seeing the best approach to delivering an infrastructure that will serve people well.

Already crashed...

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 238) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

/efytimes/fullnews.asp, line 76

easy to delay

Seeing as tv over the intarwebs will be plagued with DRM and propriatery code, why not have the shitty pointless advertising and tedious channel logo 'establishing shots' cached locally? Hey presto, a 80% reduction in traffic.

not likely

The internet will never be heading for a "crash", all that will happen is broadband customers will have their packets throttled to whatever limit the upstream provider wants. This has already been happening for almost the last ten years. It's convenient for people who want the broadband providers to upgrade their bandwidth to reference this "crash" idea but it is impossible to ever actually happen due to the traffic shaping already in effect at most (if not all large) ISP's today.

Do the editors hold shares of LVLT?

This is the second article [slashdot.org] recently where bandwidth shortage has been cited as a threat. Methinks someone scooped up shares of Level 3 Communications [yahoo.com] well below $5 during Thursday's selloff. It's the ultimate "hope" stock.

The internet is alive

Here in france, you can get 30meg for 30E.
And it's no crappy bandwith.
Because here there is a real competion between internet providers.
The internet is pretty stable even with people uploading and downlonding (up cap is 1meg).

The probleme is that internet service providers in the US and UK don't want spend money to put in fiber optics...

In Japan, most of the people get a fiber to there home... And they get 100meg both ways (not 100% sure..) and they don't have problemes...

The hole internet is going to collapse is FUD. It's only because service providers don't want to evolve.

That will be solved once peer-matching improves

BitTorrent and eMule could prioritize downloading from people on their ISP's subnet or from people with a low ping/traceroute or the same city.

Live TV could solve its problem with multicasting.

Google/YouTube, I don't know how they can solve problems their model creates.

Re:The real problem

Scaling up bandwidth isn't the final solution, though. As backbones scale up, so do end user connections. You're always going to have bottlenecks. If I'm downloading a DVD over the Internet, that bottleneck is usually my DSL connection. If a thousand people spontaneously decide to download the same DVD (assuming simple unicast), the bottleneck might be at the server's end.

Unless you know of a way to transfer data infinitely fast, these bottlenecks will always exist and will always constrain bandwidth. The trick isn't an arm's race, it's deploying technologies like QoS to allow services to work as anticipated *despite* a congested link. When your 10Gbit SuperDSL line becomes fully utilized (aka congested) with a BitTorrent transfer, you want your 10Mbit IPTV stream to proceed without any packets getting delayed too severely, right? You have to prioritize. That's what QoS is for.

Except the extreme net neutrality crowd doesn't want to allow that.

This problem only exists because some people think the idea of congestion control is evil. (Or people think the idea of providers arbitrarily *degrading* service is evil, but the proposed solution also outlaws legitimate congestion control.) Scaling up bandwidth doesn't solve the problem because certain types of bandwidth-unconstrained services (such as BitTorrent or even a simple HTTP or FTP transfer) will attempt to use as much bandwidth as it can between the hosts. You're going to have a bottleneck (congestion) somewhere. "Infinite bandwidth" is silly. "Lots of idle bandwidth" is stupid and expensive.

Re:The real problem

I never said it's a final solution, but at this point with bandwidth being overcommitted 100:1, no amount of QoS will even come close to solving the problem. 6-8 Mbps down is adequate for most uses today but 80Kbps (your approximate share of the ISP's upstream bandwidth) is nowhere close. Today's 1Mbps up is not quite adequate (we might be better off with a 4/5 split). There is no Qos or congestion control that can make 80Kbps adequate even with multi-casting once phone service moves to VoIP (consider a 2 teen family) especially when people will inevitably want a webcam feed to go with it soon enough.

Large scale content-neutral caching at the ISP level would help a lot for other sorts of content (and will STILL be useful even with $9/Mb upstream) but of course, you can't cache a real time videophone conversation.

The one and only reason net-neutrality advocates object to QoS and congestion control is that they are WELL aware that ISPs will use it primarily to double dip and avoid getting more upstream even if the price drops. Further, they will blame poor application performance on any/everything BUT their own craptastic policies and will deny that they even know what QoS is.

Further, since it's much easier to plausibly deny poor bandwidth than an outright null routing, you'll see content the isp doesn't like not quite disappearing (since that would be telling) but becoming so difficult to successfully access that most give up on it.

It's also worth noting that QoS isn't a free lunch either. There isn't a well utilized router anywhere on the net that won't have to be upgraded significantly before it will have the raw power and buffer space needed to actually do QoS. The deeper a packet must be examined, the more silicon you must throw at it. Something has to count those egress tokens and the queued packets have to be put somewhere. There's a reason Cisco is such a big fan of QoS!

A GOOD way to deploy QoS is on the client side. If MY box that *I* have root access on re-prioritizes traffic then I win. Even incoming bandwidth usage can be sorta managed by playing with window size in TCP.

It might be that the problem of ISPs playing dirty with congestion control and QoS can be controlled by forcing them to advertise customer share of the upstream rather than the raw line speed. Where that varies by destination or protocol, they must advertise the smallest allocation. That way if they try to sell fast ethernet to the home but only allocate 2.5Kbps per customer, they are forced to advertise 2.5Kbps service and endure the competition (fairly) comparing them to a mid-'80s dialup service.

The sky isn't falling

In a well-known fairy tale a boy enjoyed the attention he got when he cried out there's a wolf in the village! - but after a while, people stopped listening to him, and when there was really a wolf, no-one believed him, and the wolf stole his shoes and socks and his ipod and ran off with them into the forest.

The problem with people saying such-and-such will mean the certain end of so-and-so is that, like the boy in the story, they weaken our credulity. What is really meant here is that, if the growth of video downloading continues at the same rate, and no other changes happen, the current system will bog down. And maybe that's true.

I remember a huge thread on Usenet lasting months and months, or so it seemed, Imminent death of the network predicted, and that was in the early 1980s.

Yes, video delivery is something to take seriously. The distinction between downloading a movie for later viewing (I would probably want it to be error-free) and watching streaming video (compression is OK, and I'd want the network to drop packets if I got behind, which is part of what IPv6 quality of service is about) might be part of the solution here. Of course, as people get larger desktop screens with higher resolution, the demand even for static images is increasing. 640x480 doesn't cut it for most people today. And most computer users have stereo sound. Or play games in which network latency is significant. Violent games in which you pretend to be a wolf! And videoconferencing, TV-on-demand (as per original article, e.g. joost), and maybe soon 3d holographic pornography is coming.

The music and video industry would do well to spend a fraction of their current legal bills on researching more efficient delivery. Maybe encouraging deployment of IPv6 multicast, for example, so a single stream can go to thousands of users. Or paid subscription p2p networks. Or cascading servers. For that matter, probably we-who-write-the-standards could help by defining cache protocols that can interoperate with advertising, and can reliably send back access logs, maybe anonymized. Video CEOs, I know you read slashdot :-), how about it?

But, shouting "wolves stole my socks" or "the sky is falling" won't help. Although if either of those things does happen, make sure to put the video up on youtube, OK?

What happened to all that "Dark Fiber"?

I seem to recall all this gnashing of teeth about all this wasted "dark fiber" that was laid as 2000 approached and the bubble was growing without bound, that went unused after the dot-com bust. Surely there's already tons of bandwidth lying around out there unused still? Or has that all been used up, quietly, without anyone saying anything about it? I find that difficult to believe.

Re:What happened to all that "Dark Fiber"?

Dark fiber is still out there, and your question is a very valid one. Here's a FAQ I turned up on it:

Dark Fiber FAQ [canarie.ca]

Web Crash 2007 - all data lost

According to ONN [theonion.com] the Internet already crashed.

US ISPs Suck

Why is it that I hear about ISPs in Japan, Korea, and Europe offering bandwidths up to 100Mb/s for prices under $30/month and in the USA we're still stuck in 1999 pricing and speed-wise? Could it possibly be that the PHBs at the various ISP corporations are deliberately screwing us to avoid actually building out their backbone networks properly?? Just asking...

how to sell the Huge Fucking Router

A team at Cisco decided to build a big router. This was all the engineers wet dream, and management didn't really think it was any need for anything this big. But since this was in the middle of the .com boom, the team got the green light. Engineering called it the "Big Fucking Router" or BFR, and marketing called it "Big Fast Router".

The 12000 or the GSR was introduced in 1996(?) it was wildly successful, and generated 1 billion dollars in sales the first year, and went up from there.

As a result, when the engineers introduced their next wet dream, the HFR or "Huge Fucking Router", the argument was "We can build it faster and bigger than anyone will need, and by the time it is introduced it will hit the market window perfect, and with great success"

The HFR, or CRS-1 is a 100Tbps router. (500 developers for 4 years or $500M).

Only problem: the boom is over, and few are buying.
Solution: Create doomsday scenario that only the HFR can cure.

Just some multiplication: A Youtube stream is 100kbps, so the HFR can handle a billion of these. That is more than there are internet users in the world.