FUD.

A rip off of On Deadly Ground... Sad day when the best they can find to make fun of is a Steven Seagal movie. Although that one wasnt as bad as most of them.

T.S.

You should have been investing in infrastructure instead of reaping profits, ya greedy bastids.

Chickens are coming home to roost.

Exactly. The problem isn't that we aren't using the Internet the way that they say we should. The problem is that they're doing nothing to deliver the Internet that we want and need, based on how we're actually using it....

the internet does not have a "physical capacity"... there's nothing in the IT world that can't be fixed by doubling it's size.
I may be pulling this completely out of my ass but doesn't physically doubling ethernet increase it 10-fold? 10, 100, 1000 Mbit, T3 = T1 ^3, etc.? 1 pair of fiber is like 4mm x 2mm. I want to see fiber trunk lines the size of my Volkswagen before I hear "physical limit"

Dont Worry, I saw the ghost.

But, seriously, cant we just avoid this altogether by increasing the storage and continual refurbishment of the current infrastructure? Or am I just talking BS?

max capacity?
the internet doesn't have a max capacity; it's easily growing faster than its being used. It's a million billion interconnected roadways, not one giant highway. The only thing that could possibly hit a wall is bandwidth from a specific ISP. Even that's ridiculous: Comcast is increasing its speed by an order of magnitude (to 160 MB/s) and Verizon is pulling something completely insane out of its ass and telling us that it will have 100 GB/s connections in our houses in 2009. The only thing that's going to hit max capacity are Mr. Cicconi's shitty 256K DSL lines.

@kaneshadow: lol exactly what i was thinking, minus the math... the internet isn't a physical thing, it's data ON a physical thing, and those don't need to double in size to keep up with internet demand. With the way tech is growing (and by that I mean getting smaller and smaller in physical size) to double the amount of internet space, the physical objects wouldn't even have to grow larger than they already are.

those folks have realized that is WAY cheaper to lobby for restrictions than to really upgrade the lines and that is what they are doing and i mean it they are doing it around the globe except of course for japan, lucky bast...

Holograms and lasers!!! What I think ATT is trying to say here is that they don't want to have to think about adding more hardware to a system they already poorly manage. So it's up to us, the consumers of bandwidth, to give them a break and stop making them do their job. Poor ATT guys. We really ought to help them help us. For the good of the intartubez. Oh and what happened to gif pr0n?

OK - I may be stupid here. But can someone tell me WHERE THE H*LL THE GHOST IS??? Just spent (wasted) another two hours of my day trying to see it.

@Roto-Rooter:

One hope's you're joking, for your sakes.

Than AT&T has to stop selling Internet connections or expand the infrastructure or even raise the price so that not that many people can surf.
But their solution is just dumb. They try to sell people the full stuff and than take something from them again.
Imagen someone sells you an orange and than steals a piece of it. Bullshit.

But everyone knows the internet is for porn. Thats its main, if not sole purpose

[www.iconarchive.com]

With the WoW abd Guitar Hero episodes, and now this episode (specifically the scene where he gets into the computer storage room) Randy has become one of the better characters.

"I almost caught the dragon!!!"

@zmarn: I don't like your solutions of no oranges or a $100 orange.

If the telecoms were co-ops then there would be fewer problems. In stead of being held responsible by share holders that don't use the services, they would be held accountable by the users, which are then also the investors.

I'm not worried.

Maybe they should build more internet and quit useing those old fashoned Sen. Ted Stevens tubes and switch fiber-pipes or quantums.

The giant Linksys router giveth, and the giant Linksys router taketh away.

"only use the internet for porn twice a day, max"

That should be the golden rule.

@DeadWriter: How many telecom investors do you think there are that don't use the internet?

@Roto-Rooter:It's not the "ghost" you need to worry about, it's the "ectoplasm!"

aw man, my stupid modem broke!!! And now I have to use my Helio Oceans opera mini app to surf the web.The giant linksy got me!!! or its probably att that cut my services for some reason.
Any ideas on what the problem could be?

[www.wellingtongrey.net]
WiFi routers eat babies! then they grow and take over our cities!

I don't understand why the internet will flood by 2010. With literally new and faster technology being released everyday, don't you think someone will just create faster servers and cheaper so that everything could be sectioned? I don't get this thought process at all, its ridiculous. Just another new tactic to scare off the common torrent users.

Translation: The internet will explode in 2010 because we haven't upgraded the infrastructure like we promised congress we would in exchange for all kinds of corporate welfare. Also please ignore the fact that Europe and Asia are delivering far more bandwidth to many more people much easier.

Just get rid of porn! Except, it practically accounts for the internet's existance.

Strange...I... strongly agree with the government on these issues....

Too bad they don't take the same approach to big oil ^_^

This is all FUD. The company I work for is currently putting in fiber gear that uses DWDM that can put 80 40-gig wavelengths on one pair of fiber. And in 2 years will be able to upgrade to 80 100-gig wavelengths. And the company I work for is big, but not as big as AT&T. So what a crock.

And we aren't even at 50% of our capacity now, with 40 10-gig wavelengths.

Not to mention, TCP was specifically designed to handle congestion by throttling back when links are full. So even if everyone stopped installing new gear today, the Internet would still work, just slower as time goes on.

AT&T is being ridiculous. But they can be when they talk to consumers that have no idea how it works, and will have no idea what I just said.

@pharago: second that

@FilthyHarry: second that

Get ready to dig deep into your pockets folks, ATT has seen the obscene profits the oil companies are making and want to duplicate them for themselves.

ATT's argument is the exact same one being used by the oil companies to justify the huge run up in the price of oil.

That means that instead of working on ways to expand the amount of bandwidth, ATT wants to limit bandwidth and charge us all more for it, because it would then become a limited comodity.

they should create a new linksys internet router just for porn, move it all to the new one and you'll have tons of room for more internet.

They are stackable anyway.

Pure FUD from a lazy, greedy company that want money for nothing. These old men need to be run out of business and replaced with someone who actually wants to get the job done.

@FilthyHarry: Exactly!

AT+T is filled to capacity with con artists and swindlers. They were paid to improve the internet infrastructure in the 1990s, and DIDN'T DO IT. If there in fact an internet fallout, it will be AT+T's fault. The company's suggestion that they can fix the problem they created, but only if we play by their rules, completely defies logic and further reveals them to be the opportunistic thieves they are. Go to hell!

Having too much tits (as in ATT) can lead to undesired consequences sometimes.

ATT is the sumup of "the man" and the death star together. I say! boycott and sue the bastards...
And apple fan boy's through those Iphones in the ocean, or crack them to use another provider..

peace out

In the end of the day the internet is useless without net neutrality; this is just a scare tactic; what we need is tighter controls, so they can't screw us over like they usually do.

Anywho, thanks to new innovations in technology now, things will a lot better infrastructure wise in 2015 or even in 2010.

The day the internet goes down is not one I look forward to. What will I use the rest of my life for? I find friends highly overrated.

We must only fap to pictures of teen girls uploaded from cell phones if we wish to save the interwebs.

Boom!

IPv6. Teh Internets IS running out of IPs.

Slashdot and Ars Technica had articles debunking this.

"Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year, and there's plenty of core bandwidth - now handling about an exabyte a month in fact - but the last mile is still slow."

Why is the last mile slow? Because in dense areas the damn incumbents with their crappy copper wires buy off legislators to keep out fiber competitors. And in less dense areas the money we paid them for infrastructure upgrades for universal access (remember "the digital divide"?) went straight into their pockets.

Whiny corporate bastards.

Sorry, Ars Technica article (where's the edit button!?)

How can the Internet have physical limits? I know this may sound funny.. but isn't the internet a network of servers and well the end user.. which if they upload stuff could be considered a pseudo server? And the lines that connect us, copper and DSL like the roads that carry our information to us and from us?(Except the traffic could be considered perfect drivers who never wreck?) So, as long as the roads are upgraded to match the traffic we should have no problems right?

Like how the states go from gravel roads, to paved roads, to highways, bi-ways, interstate, super highways..(Things have been upgraded as needed) I mean the only time we have a problems is when things are not upgraded.

(Note all the question marks before anyone shoots me down)

Anyways, I'm kind of rambling. I do support net neutrality. The FCC with its regulations.. I guess there kind ok. But we do not need the government involved with the internet on a large scale. Anytime politics get involved, progress slows down!

The world internet servers (there's something like 15 in total, right?) just need to be upgraded drastically. That should solve most bandwidth issues. Of course, there'd be major slowage during the upgrading periods.

Most of the world is in a free market economy so the Internet grows with that. There's more servers and connections as demand grows. You can't "use it up" as more people getting on makes ISP's grow larger to accommodate them.
It's like saying we'll run out of bottled water when as demand grows, more companies get into supplying it. It's a resource like anything else.

So, the internet will stuck up by 2015, first, I want to see if we get past of december 12 2012.

On the contrary, just like everyone says, we just have to upgrade our servers to attend the increase on demand

What AT&T's paid liar means is "We here at AT&T have sold more capacity than we actually have, and if our customers demand that we deliver what we have contracted to deliver, we're going to have to stop paying huge dividends to our stockholders and obscene bonuses to our executives and invest in the infrastructure required to keep us from being sued out of existence by angry customers who have lawyers, or worse yet, are lawyers."

Well, it's a good thing CERN is already prepared:

[gridcafe.web.cern.ch]