Rumors about the Internet's demise have been exaggerated

Everyone seems to be worried about when the Internet will implode.

From the Economist Tech.view:

And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks and podcasts used to be offered for streaming at 128kbps; versions at 256kbps or even 320kbps are now common.

Video has an impact, too. Though online video-rental and distribution has only recently begun in earnest, all those HDTV sets sold over the past few years will shortly make high-definition downloads the norm. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is "4k video", which promises four times the resolution of today's HDTV, and needs a whopping 6gbps (gigabits per second) to fill the screen.

Once again, alarmists are issuing dire warnings about the internet collapsing under the weight of its traffic. But that's nothing new: they've been doing so since the 1990s.

Bob Metcalfe, who invented the Ethernet protocol for local area networks, once claimed that the internet was about to be overwhelmed by e-mail traffic. That was in 1996. A year later, Dr Metcalfe not only admitted the error of his doomsday prediction, but literally ate his own words -- grinding his speech from a year before with liquid in a blender and quaffing the lot to cheers from his audience.

The latest panic started with a scare-mongering story in the Wall Street Journal last year, which concerned the rise of internet video and the inability of the network to handle it, especially at network edges where the internet enters the home. The author talked of the "coming exaflood", referring to the exabytes (ie, billions of gigabytes) of HD video users would soon be downloading.

CNET also quotes Jim Cicconi, vice-president at AT&T (Hat-tip: Slashdot):

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said.

He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. "Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today," he said.

The AT&T executive pointed out that the Internet exists, thanks to the infrastructure provided by a group of mostly private companies. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet--it is no more ethereal than the highway system. It is not created by an act of God, but upgraded and maintained by private investors," he said.

Although Cicconi's speech did not explicitly refer to the term "Net neutrality," some audience members tackled him on the issue in a question-and-answer session, asking whether the subtext of his speech was really around prioritizing some kinds of traffic. Cicconi responded by saying he believed government intervention in the Internet was fundamentally wrong.

Even South Park's latest episode was about the mysterious disappearance of the Internet.

Pluses and minuses of net neutrality notwithstanding, I am not that concerned. Let me quote Robert Heinlein:

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

All the haters who believe that the Internet cannot possibly bear the (ever) impending surge in traffic are just overwrought. While I agree with Cicconi that good things do not emerge by spontaneous generation, he and others like him are in the absurd position of whining about how many people want to buy their product.

When people want to buy what you got, paying for technical improvements shouldn't be too much of a problem.