Sean Feeney
Architect of the digital age

AT&T: Poor Estimation Skills

21 April 2008

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

That figure is grossly overestimated. Do we need to invest more into the Internet backbone? Absolutely. Could 20 households in 2011, using a time machine to return to 2008, overload our current infrastructure? Absolutely not. Even with 4 laptops, 4 desktops, 4 cell phones/PDAs, 5 kitchen appliances, and 8 gaming platforms each hooked up to the Internet and downloading large amounts of HD content, those families would barely fill a T3 connection. Let’s just say the Internet’s pipes are quite a bit larger than a T3 pipe.

This is what happens when you let executives speak about technical topics.

Posted in att, Internet backbone