Quote:
Originally Posted by Ledgem
It's not just what people always do, it's what the telecomm companies have already done. They received quite a bit of money from the government (I believe it was in the billions) some time ago (90's?) to upgrade their infrastructure. Based on what others have said and based on what things seem like, they basically took the money and didn't really do much with their infrastructure.
|
They have upgraded infrastructure, however the growth rate is beyond what anybody expected, I think. The amount of data moved across the internet these days could never have been predicted in the 90s when there was next to no content online, comparatively. P2P aside, just the 'web' itself, we have very graphically intense sites, image galleries, flash, streaming video, dynamic pages, all sorts.
In the 90s I'd be lucky to go through a couple meg a day in my browser. Just today, I've used 70Mb since I woke up a few hours ago. This year to date, I've used over 30 gig... and I don't stream video. I hate video streaming. That's just from forums (granted, image threads) and galleries, webcomics etc. Just browser traffic.
The modern internet is a very bandwidth intensive place, whether people realise it or not. The bandwidth has to come from somewhere, and a lot of people seem to think it will always be there. Well, guess what? It won't.
A lot of people take water for granted, but I live in a country where every capital city is on severe water restrictions; nobody's allowed to water their lawns, can't wash their cars, and are charged huge excess fees if they use too much in the house (bathing, toilets, etc etc). Why? Because nobody respected the supply, and there was not enough planning put in to the infrastructure when the cities were built and the way people have lived for the past 100 years.
The internet is exactly the same. Bandwidth is a resource just like water. It has to be managed properly or it can run out.