Now for Comedy Relief We Present…

Don’t get me wrong I love the Register! They poke fun at the upper crust of the IT industry, which is richly deserved. Even when they are having fun they present a kernel of truth. Then sometimes they lay a bomb. But that’s the nature of being a comic, you can’t hit every joke out of the theatre.

Here’s the problem with the analysis:

• All sorts of dark fiber is lying around major metropolitan centers of the US. Most of it going unused. Most was laid during the 99-00 time frame of Internet Gold Rush I. Tapped we’re talking TB of capacity.
• AT&T and Verizon are betting billions on the rollout of FTTH. Depending on what you want you can get 100mb/1Gb/20Gb from them now. Verizon just finished a test of 100Gbs over the same residential fiber. And folks that does not even consider doing color frequency based multiplexing over the same fiber.
• DSL is slowly being bumped in speed both here and on the other side of the pond. Read the bottom of the article. BT is increasing bandwidth as needed. Technology is not the limitied factor right now. Price points are.
• Now if we want we could open up the MBone network on the internet backbone. We would have to tariff it so that the interbackbone providers can assure scaling of the service. But even here there is an existing infrastructure that could be applied to the problem. Akami might need to participate in that cash stream. But with the right arrangements they too can scale up. With appropriate forward caching of content long haul data can be managed.

There is plenty of intervening technology and resources yet untapped. Let’s not press the panic button yet, ok?