The Net At Breaking Point? Pt 1
There have been an increasing number of articles and reports about the internet reaching its capacity.
The in the USA is trying to raise awareness about what they predict will be a crisis in available bandwidth, which could lead to slow-downs in about three years' time.
The focus is chiefly on North America, where the authors that core fibre and switching/routing resources will scale well "to support virtually any conceivable user demand", but that making sure that Internet access infrastructure keeps up will require an investment by service providers of between US $42-55bn -- about 60-70% more than they currently plan to invest.
This is an issue that seems to from time to time in the UK too, the question being:
Should Internet Service Providers be allowed to start to "traffic shape", single out particular content that their subscribers want to access, and charge the content supplier - or even the subscriber - an additional fee?
Or should they remain effectively ignorant of the content that passes through their pipes: ?
From the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's side, we have been in regular discussions with the ISPs for months about this. All those I've met personally, either individually (e.g. CarPhoneWarehouse's CEO ) or in meetings (e.g. BT's CEO Ben Verwaayen ) said that services like ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer should help drive take-up of broadband, and drive demand for higher bandwidths, and were enthusiastic.
I’ll return to this subject in my next post, but do you think the Internet is about to reach its capacity?
Ashley Highfield is Director, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Future Media and Technology. Part 2 of this post is here.
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