The Internet will reach its maximum data capacity by the year 2010, according to Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for US telecoms giant AT&T.

“The online content surge is at the centre of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” said Cicconi at the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 in London last month. He added, “Eight hours of video are loaded onto YouTube every minute. Very soon everything will become High Definition [HD], and HD is seven to 10 times more bandwidth hungry than a typical video. Video will be 80% of all traffic by 2010, up from 30% today.”

Experts agree that, as with any form of infrastructure, investment in the Internet must increase in line with demand. But some are now questioning the motives of telecommunications giants such as AT&T predicting the ‘death of the Internet’.

AT&T and fellow US telco Comcast are vocal opponents of the proposed legislation protecting ‘net neutrality’, which would bar them from charging content providers a premium for preferential traffic routing and improved service quality – a potentially lucrative business. Doing so contravenes guidelines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but the pressure to back these up in law is mounting.

If AT&T’s predictions come true, they might provide US senators with an incentive to oppose such legislation: as the Internet approaches capacity, it makes economic sense to allow big business right of way on the network, especially if they are prepared to pay for it.

But with regards to the specific prediction that the Internet will reach capacity by 2010, the corroborating evidence comes solely from a study published in 2007 by Nemertes Research and backed by an organisation called the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA). The IIA is a telecommunications lobbying group that warns of a coming ‘exaflood’ – a catastrophic explosion of data that kills the Internet – and whose members include none other than AT&T.

The experts' response

Jan Dawson of telecommunications analyst company Ovum believes AT&T’s comments relate to its position on net neutrality

The underlying point of these remarks is sound – massive investment in the network capacity of the Internet will be needed in coming years. But AT&T is in the minority in suggesting that a new business model is required to fund it all.

It’s worth noting that Cicconi is responsible at AT&T for regulatory issues, not network investment, making it more likely that this is further positioning in the net neutrality debate.

Michael Holloway of the Open Rights Group believes that technology developments will pre-empt the death of the Internet

Doomsayers periodically claim the net is reaching maximum capacity. This is a poor argument for networking filtering or preferential traffic routing because, as has historically been the case, new technologies will ensure capacity stays ahead of traffic growth. History also shows that network monopolists such as AT&T are uncomfortable with the disruption and financial cost of keeping the net up to speed

Further reading

Google backs IPv6 to save the web

IP opportunity Now the foundation for enterprise communication, Internet protocol is revolutionising working practices

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