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.

Read the article here.

Future Internet Collapse?

Demand for online video websites such as YouTube and Metacafe are putting the internet under so much strain it may collapse within two years, experts have revealed.

They claim that unless billions of pounds is spent on upgrading the copper wires, which underpin parts of the web's infrastructure, an internet meltdown is highly likely.

Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, an American industry group lobbying for universal improvements in the web's network, told The Telegraph: "Our streets in cities like London or New York were designed for a certain amount of traffic. There are times of the day when you can get around and times when there is congestion. London does not shut down, it carries on, but everything slows down. The internet is something like that.”

Irving said that the copper wires were only intended to carry voice calls. The surge in transfers of video-related data means the wires are at risk of becoming overloaded, especially since internet traffic is increasing at a dramatic rate.

Online monitoring firm Hitwise has recorded a 178 percent increase in visitors to video websites in the past year.

Internet service providers (ISP's) are putting in place plans to swap the copper wires for high speed fibre optic cables.

Anthony Walker, chief executive of Britain's Broadband Stakeholder Group, said: "There are big investment challenges ahead. Replacing copper with fibre optic, taking it closer to the consumer, we're talking about billions of pounds over almost a decade."

How to build your own DVR

Ever since TiVo came around, I was eager to jump on the time shifting bandwagon. After all, nothing makes a productivity junkie happier than turning an hour-long show into forty minutes. But for all its loyal fan base, TiVo never seemed like the right fit for me.

For my money, time, and, let's be honest, the gratification of a solid DIY project, I'm a big proponent of building your own digital video recorder (DVR). TiVo is pretty good at what TiVo does, but imagine a world where you can also tweak your TiVo to do anything you can do with any other computer.

With all the potential controversy and uncertainty surrounding TiVo firmware upgrades, the time to build your own DVR has never been better. With your own DVR, you can get all the benefits of a TiVo and more without the recurring cost for subscription. This week, I'm going to show you how simple it is to turn your computer into a DVR. After that, I'll show you a few ways that I use my DVR to take it beyond TiVo.

Whether you're using your current PC, repurposing an old one, or going all out on a dedicated DVR to put under your TV, you can get so much more out of your own DVR than you could ever get out of a TiVo.

NOTE: Keep in mind that the setup I used here is far from the only way to go. After struggling for a while with how to put together an article that would work for everyone, I decided that I would just go ahead and describe how I do things. The main purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to the world of DIY DVRs, hopefully planting the seed for the possibility of a world beyond TiVo. On the other hand, if you do choose to take a route similar to the route I've chosen, this should provide you with a good starting point.

What you need

In order to put together your own DVR, you really only need to add two things to any given computer:

1. A TV capture card
2. DVR software

Add the preceding two components to any PC and you've got yourself a solid, fully-functional DVR; it doesn't get much more simple than that.

Choosing a capture card

First things first. If you're going turn your TV into a DVR, you need a capture card. A capture card is a USB or PCI device that you install on your computer that allows you to plug your TV cable into your computer the same way you would your TV.

There are plenty of cards available, but I've had great experience with the Hauppauge PVR-150, the entry card in the Hauppauge line of cards. To ease the load on your CPU, the Hauppauge PCI cards do the video encoding on the card, meaning TV recording will take up very few CPU cycles (perfect for an older PC). After you've bought it, you are of course going to have to install your PCI card (the Hauppauge PVR-150 is the card I installed in this feature), which is easy enough to do.

Finding the right software

There are a lot of great software options for homebrew PVRs, like SageTV (Windows and Linux, $80), MythTV (Linux, free), GB-PVR (Windows, free), BeyondTV (Windows, $70), and Freevo (Linux, free), to name a few of the most popular.

Although MythTV is probably the most powerful of these programs (and it's free), when all was said and done I chose SageTV for its feature set, stability, and Windows/Linux support. Aside from its very active support forums, you can also get support directly from a real company, which is always a nice option. Out of the box, SageTV installs as easily as any Windows program, and configuring your capture card with SageTV is a breeze.

Basically, if you're looking for a quick and easy, no hassle PVR software, SageTV fits the bill. In short, your PVR will be up and running in no time. [1] However, keep in mind that one of the great parts about building a homebrew PVR is that you do have the option to tweak and fiddle to your heart's content. If that's the case, there's a lot more you can do with SageTV.

Extending SageTV

The following are all tweaks I've made to my DVR. Some are specific to SageTV, while others (Remote control tweaking and Commercial skipping) can be used with nearly any DVR software.

• 
• Customize your SageTV: If you're not happy with the default UI of SageTV, there are some beautiful user-designed packages that are easy to install. The best one I've found is called SageMC16x9.
• 
• Commercial skipping: Automatic commercial detection and skipping is another great feature that's pretty easy to get up and running, but there are a few different routes you can take. The easiest option is to use the ComSkip program, but you may also want to try Show Analyzer.
• 
• Remote control tweaking: SageTV gives you a lot of flexibility for tweaking how your remote control works with SageTV, but there's a lot you can do to tweak your IR remote to work with any program on your computer by editing the irrremote.ini file. After all, it wouldn't be much of a DVR if you had to head for your mouse and keyboard every time you want to use a different program. Since virtually every Windows program has keyboard shortcuts that allow for mouseless navigation, you can easily setup your remote to control them. For example, the Hauppauge remote can handle pretty much any keyboard combination.
• Launch external programs: With SageMC16x9, you've got an added menu option to launch external programs (check post #99). This feature can come in particularly handy if you want to launch your favorite emulator, video game, DVD player, or batch script, again, without heading for your keyboard/mouse.

The cool part about putting together your own DVR is that you're only limited by your imagination, so with a little tweaking you can put together a DVR that perfectly fits your needs. If you've already built your own DVR, let us in on your setup. TiVo users, fight back! What can your TiVo do that my DVR can't?

Footnotes:

[1] If you're looking to take the same route I did, SageTV offers some excellent packages at their online store, bundling, for example, the PVR-150 capture card and the SageTV software at a discount.

Funny Arab Videos

Arabs are bored of too much money so they started some interesting hobies:

Arab bike drift:



Crazy Arab Motorway Skating:



Only In Yemen:



Yemeni Car Dancing:



Arab drifting:




My favourites: