Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

[atreyu42]

A Nemertes report has warned that Internet will run out of bandwidth in 2010. Also AT&T recently said so.

Is there any financial instrument to "hoard" bandwidth? Is investing in telco stocks the only way?

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

A Nemertes report has warned that Internet will run out of bandwidth in 2010. Also AT&T recently said so.

Is there any financial instrument to "hoard" bandwidth? Is investing in telco stocks the only way?

BDH is an HLDR ETF, which is so thinly traded I took it off a list I follow. I haven't looked to see what it tracks.

[metalman]

Re: Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

BDH is an HLDR ETF, which is so thinly traded I took it off a list I follow. I haven't looked to see what it tracks.

waiting to see what itulip turns up in the buildout of comms as part of the new new deal.

[*T*]

Re: Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

A Nemertes report has warned that Internet will run out of bandwidth in 2010. Also AT&T recently said so.

Is there any financial instrument to "hoard" bandwidth? Is investing in telco stocks the only way?

I think hoarding bandwidth, were it possible, is like hoarding processors. You will get overtaken by events fast. The internet is not going to run out of bandwidth, because there is no limited supply. Refutations here and here.

Also note that Scandinavian countries, Korea, Japan & other nations have typically 100Mbit connections to the door in urban areas as opposed to the crappy 2Mbit in the US/UK that we have to put up with.

Discussion on bandwidth as currency:
here
upshot:
"The advantage of currency is that it allows getting past the inefficient mechanism of barter. Bandwidth can be bartered, but it can't be stored, for instance. Unused bandwidth is forever wasted. The only way to prevent it being wasted is for someone to use it."

[Spartacus]

Re: Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

My first reaction - I'd look at who sponsored it and the proposed solutions - do they want Google to pay for preferred access? Sounds like another "pay-for-educated-sounding-opinion" salvo in the ware for "network neutrality" (somebody wants the government to hand them windfall profits)

Also, lots of places in the world already have broadband to the home - many have optical fiber to the home (I think almost all of urbanized Ireland and most of recently-built-out India have this).

A Nemertes report has warned that Internet will run out of bandwidth in 2010. Also AT&T recently said so.

Is there any financial instrument to "hoard" bandwidth? Is investing in telco stocks the only way?

[atreyu42]

Re: Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

Refutations here

From the website:

Nemertes says its study is independent, funded by the firm's diverse client base of enterprises, vendors, service providers, and not-for-profit organizations. Yet the two chairmen of one of those not-for-profits, the Internet Innovation Alliance, which bought "distribution rights" to the findings, are quoted prominently in the Nemertes news release. A check of the IIA Web site reveals an organization whose members include Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Corning, Nortel, and other telecom infrastructure suppliers that would surely benefit from tens of billions of dollars in additional Internet infrastructure investment.

Very good rebuttal. Thanks.

[seanm123]

Re: Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

Tiered Internet pricing means a big payday for the ISPs and backbone providers. Not much needs to make it happen on the equipment/hardware side and may already be in place at some ISPs like Time Warner who I believe is testing it this year.

They could easily triple revenues with the existing customer base.

[Adeptus]

Re: Internet will run out of bandwith in 2010. Time to "hoard" bandwidth?

"The internet will run out of bandwidth" ??!? That's a pretty rediculous statement from people who don't understand how the Internet actually works or the infrastructure behind it. I've had hands on experience configuring and installing Telco backbones that connect to the Internet. Believe me, there's still a LOT of dark fiber left from the .COM days that's not yet lit up.

Also even if there were no more dark fiber available to light up, the thing about internet speed is, if you want more, you just change out the end devices of a fiber. In 2001 you could send up to 10 Gigabits/sec accross a Telco's backbone (OC192). These days with WDM (wave division multiplexing) you can send many dozens of 40 Gigabits along the same physical fiber, and 100 Gigabit light-wave transmissions are just around the corner (2009 the standard is to be finalized over fiber). Then multiply 100Gigabits x# of lightwaves and you got Terabits of backbone speed.

Look, peer to peer software like napster/kazaa and more recently utorrent/azeurus, have increased Internet bandwidth usage by more than a factor of 100, and still the Internet kept on going. The next big thing is TV over the Internet, and that will be a structured roll out to some significant degree. So there's plenty of pipe left for that too.