Death Of The Internet Greatly Exaggerated (By Those Who Stand To Benefit)
from the check-the-biases dept
Well, here we go again. For well over a decade now, someone will come along every few months or so and claim that the internet is about to be overwhelmed by traffic and will collapse. However, these predictions never seem to come true, and when you dig deeper, you almost always find that the reports misinterpret some data. In fact, when you get down into the details, you'll almost always find that the technology guys say there's little threat of an internet collapse -- but the policy and business guys will often state otherwise. So, take with a large grain of salt the latest research report claiming that the internet will collapse by 2010. Thankfully, Broadband Reports quickly picks apart the report to note that it was funded by the likes of AT&T and Level3, and it's being supported by a group whose job is to lobby for laws that help the telcos. For them, it makes sense to promote the idea that the internet is about to be overwhelmed, so that regulatory subsidies are put in place to help these companies pay for the type of infrastructure they know they need to invest in anyway. In other words, don't worry about the internet collapsing. Worry about telcos trying to squeeze the government for more taxpayer support (as they've been doing for years) to pay for expected business expenses.
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Filed Under: death of the internet, internet, net neutrality
Companies: at&t, level 3, nemertes
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More Concerned
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THE TUBES ARE FALLING!!!
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Utility
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Report not as bad as the news reports
Johna very clearly says she is not predicting an "internet collapse". Instead she's saying that some things we like to do on an unfettered Internet - like sending grandma the actual DV video from a $400 camera - probably won't occur.
She's probably right about that. AT&T has made very clear they do not intend to offer more than 1 megabit uploads to most customers for at least a decade. The download will probably be so slow that if you wanted to watch 3 programs on your TVs in the normal quality of 2012 (HD), it may not be possible. Cable may or may not implement the full DOCSIS 3.0 and will have similar limits.
There were some unguarded comments in the report that can't be sustained, but most of it is a plausible projection of how much bandwidth people would like to have compared to the likelihood of getting those speeds with the current investment by companies like AT&T. She's almost surely right about that, while wrong about any substantial slowdown.
The most visible reporter took the story from the press release, which was clearly skewed. Then he got even the press release wrong in the second sentence of the article. If it weren't that his paper is in the middle of layofs, I'd be making him look very dumb to his editors.
The report has become a tool of unsupportable AT&T propaganda. But after reading it, I'm reporting it a different way - AT&T Funded Reports Criticizes AT&T for Insufficient Investment.
That's much more accurate to the substance of what is there, but not visible until you've read 60 pages (and perhaps interviewed the auther, an acquaintance.) The bad reporting means DSL Reports and now Techdirt had to refute it, and I'm wasting time on similar.
Time to call to task reporters who print too much corporate spin. As well as the money the carriers spend on lobbying and elections. It's literally in the hundreds of millions.
db
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Hey guess what? Everyone's going to the smaller ISPs that offer unmetered, unfiltered, unlimited, and more importantly CHEAPER internet than the major ones want to make us think they can sell us. The kicker? They rent lines from those same overpriced ISPs. Surely they must be overloaded!
Am I the only one that thinks you need to pass an IQ test before being able to be publicized? Or even talk in public for crying out loud... this is getting sad. A paper misinterpreting data being misinterpreted by a newspaper. Someone misinterpret this for me please......
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