Talking up the looming Internet gridlock

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 06:22

Opinion and Analysis

Apparently Cicconi made no reference to net neutrality in his speech but when the obvious question was asked came out firmly against any attempt by government to mandate it, a question being hotly debated in the US at present. "I don't think government intervention is the right way to do this kind of thing. I don't think government can anticipate these kinds of technical problems. Right now, I think Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem."

Cicconi, however, seems to be creating a problem without positing any solution. He's put figures on the massive anticipated increases in traffic and on the massive investments that will be needed to carry it, but hasn't indicated what needs to be done, if anything to ensure that these investments get made.

Maybe the problem is nowhere near on the scale that Cicconi suggests and his speech is just one tactic in a long campaign to 'soften up' the market for new charging models for Internet services.

The technology developments that drive down the price of PCs and drive up the processing power memory and disc storage capacity every year have a similar effect on networking equipment, but you never hear carriers bragging about how many more megabytes their future networks will be able to carry for the same megabuck investment as yesterday's.

And while AT&T might be talking doom and gloom about the Internet, its' busy investing billions of dollars in fibre to the node networks in the US that will give customers access to increased bandwidth and will exacerbate the 'problem'. I don't think it is anywhere near as worried about Internet gridlock as Cicconi would like us all to believe.