[1st-mile-nm] Bandwidth - How Much is Enough?

[Dale Carstensen]

I'm looking for a URL about a speech given in England sometime since
last October, about how traffic at a single home will exceed all
current backbone internet traffic by some date in the near future.
The speaker was a manager at a US telecom company.  Maybe AT&T,
maybe Verizon, maybe Qwest.  I guess those are the only three,
and how long will it be before there's just one again??

I haven't found that yet, but I did find an amazing review, which
appears to have been written around 1999 (the web page is dated
Oct 18, 2002), about a paper written at Bell Labs in 1961 predicting
telecom traffic demands for the year 2012.  The title is "Through a
Glass Darkly".

 <http://www.boblucky.com/Papers/green.htm>

In addition to that entertaining digression, I'll mention that I
think it's pretty silly to keep installing copper when fiber is
cheaper.  And with fiber, the question is not on the order of
kilobytes, it's on the order of gigabytes and tens of gigabytes,
and it won't be long before it's terabytes.  Per second.

Now, I think it is also silly to ship hundreds of copies of the
same huge file (a movie, for instance, or updates to Microsoft
Windows or Apple Mac OS or Linux) to the same small city from a
centralized data center several states away.  But maybe if "the
phone company" began thinking it's in the communications carrier
business instead of something it did decades ago.  That is, the
advertising, billing, satellite TV, "bundling" or other marketing
schemes and string between tin cans business seems to be what they
think they do.

Maybe if they concentrated on being communications carriers,
the incredible bandwidth of fiber, that wouldn't cost as much as
the copper they're still installing, would handle the delivery of
those duplicative huge files, and the demise of theaters and
television could proceed, the same way cell phones have just
about eliminated pay phones.

Or, the remnants of the Bell system can just disappear when some
other company does what they should have done.

If I find that URL about the coming exaflood, I'll pass it along, too.
Oh, searching for exaflood on google will yield some related reading,
too, I'm sure.

  Mr. Dale