AT&T: Internet will hit full capacity by 2010

April 18, 2008 Cnet News: 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."

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said.

He claimed that the "unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic" would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. "Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today," he said.

The AT&T executive pointed out that the Internet exists, thanks to the infrastructure provided by a group of mostly private companies. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet--it is no more ethereal than the highway system. It is not created by an act of God, but upgraded and maintained by private investors," he said.

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WD launches the 640GB HDD

Western Digital has bumped up the capacity of its two-platter SATA drives to 640GB, an increase of almost a third, and is planning more drives based on its latest 160/320GB disk technology.

The new 640GB Caviar SE16 drive, which lists for £85, follows on from a single-platter 320GB model. WD said that it offers a 3Gbit/s data transfer rate, spins at 7200 RPM, and has 16MB of cache memory.

Although it might look like a 320 with an extra platter - and indeed, the platters and heads are the same - the 640GB drive is actually a separate product with some new parts, such as the motor, said Ted Deffenbaugh, WD's senior director of product marketing.

He explained that single-platter drives are aimed at the entry level market, where "acoustics are critical", so they are tweaked to run almost silently at the expense of a little performance. Two and three-platter drives are "more performance-optimised, even though that means a bit more seek noise."

Deffenbaugh acknowledged that 640GB is a rather unusual capacity point, and said he doesn't expect to sell too many to commercial desktop buyers.

Digital information exceeded the avaible storage space

For the first time, the amount of digital information created each year has exceeded the world's available storage space, according to a new IDC report.

"This is our first time ... where we couldn't store all the information we create even if we wanted to," states the report, titled The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe.

The amount of information created, captured and replicated in 2007 was 281EB (exabytes or 281 billion GB). This is 10 percent more than IDC previously believed - and more than the 264EB of available storage on hard drives, tapes, CDs, DVDs and memory.

IDC revised its estimate upward after realising it had underestimated shipments of cameras and digital TVs, as well as the amount of information replication.

The 2007 total is well above that of 2006, when 161EB of digital information was created.

We're not actually running out of storage space, IDC notes, because a lot of digital information doesn't need to be stored, such as radio and TV broadcasts consumers listen to and watch but don't record, voice call packets that aren't needed when a call is over, and surveillance video that isn't saved.

But the gap between available storage and digital information will only grow, making it that much harder for vendors and enterprises to efficiently store information that is needed.