Myths about Internet growth 384
An anonymous reader writes "An article in The Economist outlines WorldCom's role in starting the myth that Internet traffic doubles every 100 days. This helped inflate the telecoms bubble."
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Myths about Internet growth
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Not to troll, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Are people being stupid, or simply letting themselves get caught up in the excitement?
Networks that were built to support large #'s? (Score:2, Interesting)
In Canada, our telecoms built a network that could support HALF of the current subscribers, and are only catching up lately. In theory, if this statement from the article were true, we should experiencing a GOOD network of Internet access, not the "limiting of bandwidth" we're seeing....
-YoGrark
"Canadian Bred with American Buttering"
Unbelievable (Score:2, Interesting)
Now Worldcom probably tweaked the facts but if some people really believe in this kind of exponential growth then I hardly have any compassion for them, and blaming Worldcom or someone else for your own stupidity is just silly.
Capacity doubled - usage didn't (Score:5, Interesting)
This should have meant high bandwidth and low prices, but as suppliers like Worldcom had to borrow heavily for their infrastructure costs, they were stuck with high prices. Something similar happened with Deutsche Telekom in Germany. They built a fibre network through the former DDR but borrowed heavily to finance it. The things is that nobody was going to pay for that capacity at a premium price. Telekom didn't mess around with their predictions in the way that Worldcom did, but they also came unstuck.
The problem comes down to the revenue models and the telecom analysts in the banks. If I have a bank of 64K connections and I upgrade them to 1024K, I can't simply charge 16 times the price. A few customers can afford this (think banks), but many others can not.
Capacity including dark fibre definitely was doubling every 100 days but usage wasn't and certainly not revenue.
At the University where I work... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe that statement was from the good ol' days of Napster.
Come on. Lets place blame, where blame is due. (Score:2, Interesting)
Price of Bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there a mismatch? Do we actually have a demand that's being held in check by an inappropriate pricing schedule (perhapse even businesses with a lack of vision)? Or does potential capacity fail to overcome the cost of "lighting up" and maintaining these over-built networks?
Re:Not to troll, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, when you hear some group come out and say "1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted every year they're at college," you have to get into Clintonesque parsings of the meaning of "sexual assault", because it means that if assaults are truly random, almost all women will have been victimized by the time they get out of school. Advocates will say "yes, that's true" and invent a reason they think 90% of women don't report an assault.
It usually turns out that assault means "felt uncomfortable and/or threatened in an ecounter with the opposite sex." How many of us haven't felt uncomfortable? I'm surprised the statistic is a mere 1/3.
Then there are ones that advocates make up out of whole cloth or unrepresentative samples, like 10% of us are homosexuals (based on a self-reporting study of inmates defining homosexual as having had a sexual situation or thought dealing with the same sex--IN PRISON) or that there are a million homeless.
In each case, people fail to translate a statistic to its logical outcome or don't apply Occam's Razor to decide that it's more likely someone is inflating a statistic for personal gain (get funding for your issue/company) than it is that life is severely different than we think and we've been indulging in false consciousness all these years.
Re:Not to troll, but.. (Score:0, Interesting)
Correct. Also consider that all Presidents are extremely busy. Most of their facts come from associates, and mistakes get made. Of course perceptions are 99 percent of this anyway. Reagan did no more or less of this than any other recent President. The fact that he was an excellent communicator and really got his points across convincingly is what really irkes the left-wingers.
On the other hand, we do have a recent example of an out-and-out blatant lie, from a certain Democratic President. Does "I did not had sexual relations with that woman" ring any bells?
nope... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now if only the size of my Beowulf cluster would double every 100 days...
Hey, wait a sec... if the internet WERE doubling every 100 days, then wouldn't that mean that they would have to make double the servers every 100 days?....
Worldcom (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is it that we pretend that such over-zealous predictions are unique?
Worldcom is in trouble so attacking them is easy: they have bigger fish to fry. If you go after Sprint this way, those bastards might sue you!
Re:Not to troll, but.. (Score:2, Interesting)
That seems like a reasonable thing to say. Then we get to...
I'm still trying to figure out where that statement falls in between honest mis-statement and blatant lie. :-) Do you really believe what you're saying, or are you exaggerating to make some kind of point? How many politicians, CEO's or doctors do you actually know? Do you speak from experience, or are you just making misleading statements based on false assumptions, just like the people you lament?
Re:Price of Bandwidth (Score:2, Interesting)
Once the infrastructure (or is it extrastructure? but I digress) for bandwidth is there, isn't bandwidth actually free? I mean, I know that there are costs involved with running the network, upkeep of epuiptment, salaries to pay, ect...
But is there really a difference in the cost of providing bandwidth (other than hardware, which is still a fixed cost) if I want a low end ISDN line or an OC3 pipe? I would liken it to cable TV. Somehow I manage to now get digital cable with a few hundred more channels than its anolog predecessor for the same price. The cable company didn't really have to do all that much other than give me a new cable box (which I rent from them).
My phone line has been there for years. Other than a $50 line cleaning kit, what is really the increase in cost for me to get DSL? Other than equiptment that the telco buys to provide DSL. If they buy it to provide access to one user, what is the increase in cost when you add another 300 users? I understand that hubs and routers have physical limitations, but it just seems that we are getting porked.
I might back up the above by comparing it to wireless (cell) phones vs traditional land lines. Don't the cell division make hand over fist compared to the land line division? I mean, they put up a tower that can service thousands of people. No cables (from telco to your phone) and thus significantly less service persons and cost per customer. It makes me wonder if my inflated cost for use of a cell phone (in my opinion) is there to offset the money-sucking land line division... Shouldn't cell phone service be only a small % of the (my) cost of wire-based telephone service in my house?
Hopefully, some of you might be able to give me some insight on the actual difference in costs of providing limited bandwidth vs high capacity bandwidth.
Seems like a giant scam to me.
Of course, I certainly don't want to go back to dial-up. But I would think that the industry's standardization of the costs for these services (at least smacks of some sort of collusion) has set them unreasonably high and thus out of the price range of many consumers.
PC manufacturers have met the need for low cost computing, but what about bandwidth providers who are still giving us the slowest element of our computing architecture.
Failed dotcom visionary. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Not to troll, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard the 10% number over the years and believed it, so out of curiousity I did a little little google search [google.com], and whattaya know, the #1 result was this 10% myth page [familyresearchinst.org] from the Family Research Institute [familyresearchinst.org].
Also featured today on the Family Research Institute [familyresearchinst.org] home page:
You can also check out their " educational pamphlets [familyresearchinst.org]", such as " Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do [familyresearchinst.org]" ... utter homophobia (and a lot of hetrosexual couples have oral sex, anal sex, kinky S&M play, but the text is pure FUD, mostly Fear) I wonder if their pamphlets are made by the
Chick Tract guys [chick.com].
Later on the same google result is this paper which at first appears to be based on some honest research [qrd.org] which claims 5% and goes on to say "On the basis of the Bagley et al.(1994) sample data, it is now known that the recent studies producing 1%(90) to 3% estimates for gay males, or for males who are homosexually active, are seriously flawed." Turns out this one is hosted by the Queer Resources Directory [qrd.org], but the author appears to be dedicated to helping troubled homosexual teens (more google searching)
So I guess I learned something new today. The gay population numbers are in a lot more dispute than WorldCom's traffic growth due to the tension between homosexual communities and homophobic right-wing groups, the 10% number I've always heard before does appear to be a bit high. Hmm. Personally, I'm het, but I'd much rather be around people who are homosexual than people who are homophobic. Fortunately, repressed homophobics are a lot easier to spot.
Very off-topic, someone please mod me down, if for nothing else other than wasting time on this instead of what I should be working on....