Why the Coming Data Flood Won't Drown the Internet

High Waters writes "Ars Technica examines predictions of an 'exaflood' of data that some alarmists believe will overwhelm the Internet. A closer look reveals that many of those raising the alarm about an exaflood are generally doing so to make the case against internet neutrality regulation. 'There's a reason that "exaflood" sounds scary. It's supposed to. Though Brett Swanson's Wall Street Journal piece tried to avoid alarmism, it did have an explicitly political point in mind: net neutrality is bad, and it could turn the coming exaflood into a real disaster'."

Brett Swanson?

[MECC]

That name doesn't appear in the linked-to article.

Bring On The Exaflood!
...
By Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving

There is more info at Ars, [arstechnica.com] and they also mention Brett Swanson's name - he's from the 'discovery' institute. [discovery.org]

ams-ix

[wwmedia]

checkout the massive growth [ams-ix.net] for last year at the worlds biggest Internet exchange

Re:This is a really old story

[juan large moose]

Credit where it is due.

    http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt [umich.edu]

Re:powers of 2 not ten

[charlesbakerharris]

Nice try. 1000 times is perfectly correct in SI (see the title of my post).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix [wikipedia.org]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix [wikipedia.org]

Re:Genie is out of bottle

[vtcodger]

***And people in rural areas will most definitely see the difference. I live in a small town (10,000 people) in Iowa ...***

Excuse me, but you are NOT really a rural customer and 10,000 is NOT a small town. I live in town of about 8000 and yes we have cable and DSL as well as natural gas, paved streets, sidewalks, street lights, and way too damned many traffic signals. I think we may get fiber in the next decade (but only, I suspect, because the largest surviving industrial plant in New England is about a ten minute walk from the town hall.)

But I worked for a number of years in a genuine small town about ten miles further out from Burlington. Not one inch of cable. No DSL. The FCC's statistics say the town has broadband because the school and a mail order business have managed to conjure up T1 lines, but the folks out there do not have broadband in their homes and aren't likely to get it any time soon.

Regretably, from what I can find out, their experience seems to be more typical of rural America than yours or mine. So I think that the parent post is correct. Rural users won't see much change. They don't have broadband now. They won't have it then.