QuicklyBored

A new report from AT&T says that the Internet will have reached capacity by 2010. Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, said that by that date “20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.” Most of the increase is supposed to be from the emergence of video, especially high-def video, which is much larger. It strikes me as a rather laughable claim: with just over one billion users of the Internet all told, and assuming an average of 3 users per household, each and every one of them would have to increase their usage 21,000,000 times beyond what they currently use to reach the numbers Cicconi is suggesting, unless my math is wrong (a strong possibility). Mobile phones have certainly helped to increase Internet usage, and it will only get worse as 3 and 4G networks start being used and as mobile video/music/gaming continues to expand, but to say we’re about to run out of bandwidth is hard to swallow.