Internet Capacity

There seems to be an overwhelming movement by Internet providers to alert the public about the future lack of Internet capacity. Even though there may be a shortage of Internet capacity resources to deal with the explosion in Internet traffic, telecoms giants appear to have an agenda. This agenda includes influencing governmental decision makers in a way that increases telecoms profits. If you follow the money, you can usually get to the bottom of stakeholder motivation.

More warnings of a looming bandwidth apocalypse, this time from USAToday, who insists that the Internet “will start to seem poky as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers.”

As we’ve stated previously, most warnings of capacity Armageddon come from traffic shaping companies looking to sell hardware, or industry lobbyists trying to shape policy through think tanks. In this case Nemertes’s study was funded with help from the Internet Innovation Alliance, a group spearheaded by AT&T.