They're talking about dumping $19Bn into a restructure of their backbone!?!

The math on this is amazing, but scary too. I guess if you think about the average household use and soon to be future demands of video, that it is very feasible. Some "food for thought", as it were...

Click the following link, for the stroy :
U.S. telecommunications giant AT&am...ach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

I'll bet that if we could figure out a way to block from people trying to sell Viagra, designer shoes, Rolex watches and mortgages via junk e-mail, we wouldn't need to change a thing about the Internet. I get no fewer than 150 of those per day and that's just to MY account. Think of the billions and billions in wasted capacity that is brought on by these off-shore junk salesmen alone?

I have heard that we are running out of IP addresses. Kinda like phone numbers.

Hahah! I don't think those are the reason for the clogs in the pipes, but darn I wish they'd get cleaned up. It's a double edged sword/slippery slope argument though... if you start regulating e-mails, how far does it go and when does the government take over?

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I hadn't heard that... doesn't seem possible though... wonder if there is any truth to it and what the mathematical high end of the IP address' are?



Maybe I think too much.

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edit -

a quick wikipedia search has explained it and you are right, it is mathematically probable according to them.

The article : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address

quick review - IPv4 only uses 32-bit (4-byte) addresses, which limits the address space to 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique addresses. However, many are reserved for special purposes, such as private networks (~18 million addresses) or multicast addresses (~270 million addresses). This reduces the number of addresses that can be allocated as public Internet addresses, and as the number of addresses available is consumed, an IPv4 address shortage appears to be inevitable in the long run. This limitation has helped stimulate the push towards IPv6, which is currently in the early stages of deployment and is currently the only contender to replace IPv4

Qoute from the article:
"In three years' time, 20 typical households will
generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

I'm no math major, but I just don't see how this is possible. Are these 20 people going to have OC42 connections to their living rooms or what? Seems a little suspicious to me.

I figure that as long as there's money to be made on Internet traffic, the big companies providing the infrastructure will keep increasing bandwidth in their backbones. Like most big companies, at&t is not too fond of government regulation. The comparison of the Internet to the national highway system, however, leads me to believe that they (at&t) want some government funding for these upgrades.

And, yes, IPv6 is on it's way. I think government agencies are set to adopt this in the next few years. The Department of Defense I believe is supposed to deploy it this year. Not sure if they are doing so.

I see this as clearly predictable based on the evolution of on line streaming and downloadable video. I do not know what it is like where you folks are but around here everything is youtube and video on demand over the internet. That eats a heck of a lot more bandwidth and capacity that even millions of spam emails.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

running out of IP addresses is only one of the many problems, but it is indeed part of it.

i remember the days when major corporations had public IPs for every employee. there's still a lot of slack in IPv4 and i have a feeling a lot of it will get chewed up as people avoid the inevitable switch to IPv6 (NAT and CIDR have helped a lot..). we've played with IPv6 here in the shop but don't have any customers who've made the switch yet - the licensing costs on routers are still way too high.

Steve - the backbones for all federal agencies are required by some bill or another to be ready to deploy IPv6 by the end of '08. the gub'ment has even gone so far as to buy their own /16 block to start out with.

that said, this article is based on statements by the "vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T" so i think you can take his warning with a bit of salt. if he thinks youtube is going to kill the net within two years, he's been getting too close to the Liquid Paper bottle. far more traffic is generated by the twin giants that drove the net this far in the first place: porn and piracy.

P.S. - a /16 block in IPv6 is essentially the same thing a Class B network used to be.

The USA is so far behind. Avg user = 1.3mbs download speed here.

Japan = 44mbs avg user

South Korea = 66mbs avg user

If people would just quit sending those stupid "forward to all your friends" emails it would clear up a lot of space.

Talk to Al Gore it was his idea..maybe he has a plan to expand capacity.

Let's not turn this into a political issue!

AT&T's Uverse TV and Internet is awesome in my opinion. I've been waiting for a service other than Comcast and Dish.. They will certainly have to stick a bunch of Money into their network if they are to stay on the cutting edge of Technology.

The "Global Warming" will expand the Internet. After all, Al Gore said he invented the Internet, and the way he goes on about "Global Warming", it shouldn't be too long before he lays claim to the name if not the affect. Too bad it's all a bunch of Political Dung. Last year the average global temp was DOWN 0.7 degrees Centigrade. Temp has dropped every year for the last 10. But, nobody mentions that, do they. John C. (Not Garand)

OK, One more time politely.... Please do not attempt to make this discussion a political foot ball!

Please keep on topic.

I'll second that Bobby! :thumb:

this is great opportunity for a developer that understands networking. we have used very expensive appliances for acceleration and compression for our websites between offices, here is a link to a developer working on building an open source program https://trafficsqueezer.sourceforge.net/ if one could build a program that everyone started using for acceleration and compression we wouldn't need near the bandwidth. that goes for Windows and Linux.

if most people realized the amount of bandwidth that corporations have and use it would surprise most. The internet isn't as complicated as AT&T would make it sound, really it's just a bunch of routers inter-connected, that's all. The bandwidth is one thing but for IPv4 those same corporations have a crazy amount of space.

Great post and info, Thanks!

There are many ways around these sorts of capacity issues. I've heard a lot of things for instance.

You can now buy .us.com domain names. they can do that to no end. (.us.net; .us.org; etc)

How bout this.. the 127.0.0.1 LocalHost Address.
Its actually a local host address Block..

if there was a way to free those Ips up. Theres a million or so.

There are still network blocks that are reserved by the internic as far as I new. I was at SBC and we obtained a new netblock and we had influx of calls because the blocks were not propogating.

I personally oppose IPv6 .. only.. if i have to start calculating subnets in Hexidecimal I am gonna Fart... all day long.

wow i didnt really read that article..

um.. Its a good push by AT&T to encourage others companies to expand the Internet backend.

Although they were pretty instumental in removing that capacity from CLECs like North Point Communication in the early 2000's! !! The largest Nationwide Digital Network.

Call Verizon. Say .. we need more Trunks!!