Will Internet TV Crash the Internet? 267
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 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not rocket science (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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We saw this all about 7 years before the first dotbomb, with web businesses. We're seeing it now with new online video businesses. The people who learned their lessons last time are selling their acumen this time around, selling the datacenter space and storage acumen to people willing to pay on credit
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There's money to be made here, but only on people who can fuck their shareholders gently (and give them some smooches too).
Re:It's not rocket science (Score:5, Insightful)
-nB
Re:It's not rocket science (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sanity from Cringely? You don't say. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 ?
Most people are happy with the service they're currently paying for. What the ISPs need to start doing is accurately describing their services. If your network only has the capacity for users to download 30GB/month, then start advertising it as a 30GB/month service, not an unlimited one.
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Re:It's not rocket science (Score:5, Insightful)
The Army Reserve used to advertise:
Then, it became:
Then, it became:
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 (Score:4, Funny)
"You will serve up to 15 months at a time in various warzones."
Re:It's not rocket science (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/products.asp?typ eid=35&kt=323&gclid=COyx-ev4gY4CFQ0eEgoddkfJOw [broadbandchoices.co.uk]
£24.00/month, even at today's rates, is still only $48.00/month, and with a little research you can probably do much better than that. That's a far cry from the $720 you're looking to charge. Oh right, the US has artificially killed the high-speed broadband market. All hail the FCC and the Bush administration...and America's entry into the technolo
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Cogent is $10/mbps @ 1gbps commitments ($10,000/month) for bottom of the barrel pricing
Sprint/Qwest/ATT/UUNET all hover between $24-$32/meg for 1gbps commitments ($24,000 - $32,000/month).
Verizon DSL 3.0mbps is $19.95 so $6.65/mb but they overcommit
Comcast is 6.0mbps for $49.95 $8.32/mb also overcommited
My point was, if you actually paid for the bandwidth you use (i.e decicate
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Re:It's not rocket science (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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If internet TV or other high bandwidth medias take off, I have a feeling more ISPs are going to start doing the same, which will kill it real fast.
Try that math again with these figures (Score:2)
100mbps (both up and down!) starting at $39.95/mo [homenetnw.com]
Apparently not everywhere.
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that is CONSUMER bandwidth, it is OVERCOMMITTED. It has to be. Probably 100:1 which means it is really 1mbps for $39.95
I can guarantee that you can't run that 100mbps connection full rate, all day and not get shut off.
With my GigE from Sprint & Level(3) I can, because it isn't consumer grade bandwidth. It is also not $0.3995/mb
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???? An HDTV signal eats up 20.4mbps Say, roughly 50 on a GigE.
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You mean just like video killed the radio star? Oh wait...it didn't...and neither will video over the Internet kill tradit
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This works great, because all the customers are near each other. You would also seed the content centrally, but you wouldn't need gobs of bandwidth from the central office to the customer, just between the customers.
Too bad ISPs are start
Multi-Pay-Per-View (Score:3, Interesting)
Why can't multi-cast be pay-per-view? You download a key you pay for ahead of time and then decrypt what is streamed to everyone. Moreover you could download a broadcast and then pay later for a key to decrypt it. You could even have the cost for live events go down by how long the delay between the download and buying the key.
Granted there will be piracy, but for live sporting event
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No.. that's not right. Can anyone think of a better one?
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Bandwidth is not a limited resource (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast (Score:4, Informative)
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And, of course, channels are certainly not going to go away...
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A Tivo Season Pass type model also works well for this.
It will obviously not work for 100% of the cases. True on-demand viewing, like browsing through YouTube, won't benefit much from multicast. But, they could cut down a huge percentage of bandwidth usage by usi
Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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You can use multicast quite effectively for distributing like this, as long as you don't want streaming. Split the file into n chunks, and simultaneously send it to n multicast addresses. Clients join 1 to n of these groups, depending on their bandwidth and download the data in chunks.
As the other poster said, you can also have ISP-run caches in the multicast group, allowing their customers to download from a local node, reducing the strain on the backbone.
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Only if you're dealing with popular content. If you have a single file that tousands of people are requesting at roughly the same time (i.e. maybe within a day, if you want to allow to to a day to download it) then a system as you describe works ok.
However, if you have relatively unpopular content then it doesn't work too well - to take things to the extreme, lets say you only get 1 download a day. Sud
tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted (Score:4, Funny)
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I wish I had taken a screenshot of last night's Google News default page. Dead Miners, Death Trap on I-35W, Vick is a Dog Killer, Los Angels Man Dies of West Nile, Firefighters die at Ground Zero Fire, Passengers tell of coming close to death, Breastfeeding moms taking codeine could kill their babies, and 1000s of Deaths Expected in Hati from Cat5 Hurricane.
This is just YAHTTAD (Yet Another Headline to Talk About Death). It's tirin
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Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted (Score:5, Funny)
Is this why the internet is gonna crash? Coz all the ethernet cables blew away?
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Effort already being applied to reduce user ..... (Score:2)
http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbthread.pl/
Re:Effort already being applied to reduce user ... (Score:2)
If unicasts overload the network... (Score:4, Informative)
Simple partial solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple partial solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Simple partial solution (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've had less luck with Comcast's DNS and mail servers, so I don't use either of them. But that's another issue.
Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted (Score:5, Informative)
Choice quotes from this article written at the close of 1995:
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/mRe:Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, it's still just as relevant today!
FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
The amount of bandwidth available internally to a Cableco/Telco and what's generally available between the source (some video streamer) and the ingress of the Cableco/Telco are apples and oranges.
My alternative... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I expect Apple to buy Akamai and use their network to distrubute iTunes TV/Movies to feed AppleTVs. Once that is in place there is no need to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. TV Show producers can sell their show to Apple and bypass the middle man. Straight to the consumer/per-click payments
My ISP pushes 200-300mbps (not huge by any means) and the Akamai boxes in my network save about 10% of that (20-30mbps)
Buy Apple & Akamai stock now, they have the tools to flip the broadcasters on their heads.
This
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Those of us who actually have a hint on how much providing reliable video download services cost to provide are laughing sadly, and selling our services dear to clean up the messes and salvage *something* out of it. I wish I had a nickel for every recruiter who's tried to hire me the last few weeks for these thngs. I'd have.... enough to pay for n
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This model they want to deploy is hard to get right. And I don't believe it's the solution for the midterm, especially when you start promising on-demand and HD quality. If you calculate the bandwith for 32 channels, multicast, at 24x7 versus on-demand caching - there's no comparison. Multicast would greatly increase the base bandwidth required to operate an ISP.
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Comcast already has the most comprehensive on-demand services, and it's quite expensive for the end-user. $6 to watch a HD movie. Why would they open up that door to equal competition? As competitors pop up, they'll always be able to undercut them because they don't have to pay a 3rd party
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So we've written a BitTorrent extension that uses cryptographic signatures to provide infalsifiable upload statistics. Those upload statistics can then be used to reward uploaders. ISPs can set up the caching servers you're mentioning, and get paid just like a
Web TV? (Score:2, Funny)
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I smell baloney (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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How about trying South Korea's infrastructure in a country that has nearly 100 times the landmass, with a population density that completely destroys the cost effectiveness of close-in networking topographies? Right: it doesn't work. And of course, ask people in the most rural areas of South Korea if they're seeing anything like what someone in a beehive-like apar
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New Jersey [wikipedia.org] and South Korea [wikipedia.org] have about the same population density (1,200 vs 1,000 persons per square mile), yet New Jersey's internet sucks.
Of course a better comparison would be to ask why Finland (who has a population density of 40
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Are you saying that fake UFO videos, footage of idiotic junior high school students lip-synching, dogs doing tricks, and pirated re-runs of The Simpsons are an "essential public service?"
Bread and circuses.
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Why is the US so far behind in internet connectivity? I believe, and a lot of people on Slashdot seem to agree, that it comes from the fact that when you want internet, you can either choose between the phone monopoly, the cable monopoly, or options with severe technical limitations like satellite.
Why do we have phone and cable monopolies? Because the government didn't trust in unfettered capitalism and instead granted those monopolies becaus
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There are all kinds of stupid rules about who can provide what and where. Until the FCC starts cleaning house and gets rid of regulations that support the big telco's well never see service improve quickly.
Already crashed... (Score:4, Funny)
[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.
easy to delay (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait, what? (Score:2)
A better question would be ... (Score:2)
Will CEOs with no vision cause the Internet to crash.
Broadband Over Powerlines... (Score:2)
not likely (Score:5, Insightful)
cisco predicts problem if no one buys their gear (Score:2, Flamebait)
Do the editors hold shares of LVLT? (Score:3, Insightful)
The internet is alive (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Live TV could solve its problem with multicasting.
Google/YouTube, I don't know how they can solve problems their model creates.
The real problem (Score:2, Insightful)
If indeed the internet is heading for a crash, it won't be IPTV's fault.
If you want to blame someone, blame the backbone providers who can't (or more likely WON'T) find a way to get the cost of bandwidth into the single digits per meg per month for any reasonable bulk amount. They'll cite all sorts of reasons involving "five nines" availability and blah blah blah, but I would gladly accept 2 or 3 nines availability and be triple homed if I could get decent bandwidth for $9/Mbps/month (consider, even thoug
Re:The real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The sky isn't falling (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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"? (Score:3)
They can't afford to light it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What happened to all that "Dark Fiber"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Dark Fiber FAQ [canarie.ca]
Web Crash 2007 - all data lost (Score:3, Funny)
It's ok... (Score:2, Funny)
email signatures used to be a threat 2 net (Score:2, Insightful)
Read my lips: Internet can take it
As long as there is demand for more bandwidth, there is a cable guy happily selling it.
Cisco's wish to have their customers buying more transmission hardware
is comparable with Apple's wish for consumers buying more iPhones.
US ISPs Suck (Score:4, Insightful)
how to sell the Huge Fucking Router (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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