It’s that time of year again. It’s getting colder, people are buying lots of food… Not Christmas — oh no — but Armageddon. This time there’s a pant-soilingly disturbing report saying that the internet won’t be as fast as we need it to be by 2010.
As a result of this, we will see a massive slow down, eventually ending in gridlock on certain services unless the companies that provide these services pony up to the sum of $137 billion (globally) primarily for broadband access.
As reported by Karl on DSLReports.com, this report was partially funded by the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA). Karl goes onto mention that AT&T were the creators of the IIA. I’m going to hand you over to Cynical-Oli now.
AT&T people! The very same people that have been lobbying in the US to stop net neutrality. The same people that would limit your connection to certain online services on a whim, or worse yet, because a competing service paid them to. Yes, indirectly, AT&T does seem to be paying for research that they can use to say “We need to limit the internet before we run out of megabitz!” **sigh**
That said, this report does have some truth in it. Broadband access it crap. I need a 50-100megabit connection and I’m stuck with a 1.1mbps, turd-handling ADSL connection. I’ve already written how ADSL is holding us back and how we need to get down and groovy with the fibre-thing.
But although the report summary mentions the backbone (the “series of tubes” that connect ISPs and then countries together to form the internet), it doesn’t seem to be saying that it needs improving any faster than the current rate…
I can’t help but think that this report backfired on AT&T because its finding all seem to point out that these ISPs really need to do a better job at deploying their network. They have invested money on filtering out traffic they don’t like rather than sorting the problem for more people. It’s not the users’ fault at all.
So if anything, this means more money from paying customers! What’s the problem?
