TDP - 'Exaflood' Could Be 'Zettaflood' By 2015, Swanson Says

ORLANDO - Before a friendly crowd of fiber deployment supports, the coiner of the term "exaflood" - the predicted expansion of Internet traffic to levels that would overwhelm existing infrastructure and last-mile bandwidth - today called for a pro-investment regulatory policy that would include a renewal of the Internet tax moratorium, the streamlining or elimination of video franchising requirements, and no net neutrality requirements.

Speaking at the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council's FTTH Conference here this afternoon, Bret Swanson, a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Technology and Democracy Project, said Internet traffic would reach 700 petabytes per month by the end of the year - an annual rate of 8.4 exabytes. (A petabyte contains 10 to the 15th power bits, while an exabyte is a thousand times larger - 10 to the 18th power bits. A petabyte a million times larger than a gigabyte.) He cited estimates by Cisco Systems, Inc., that U.S. Internet traffic will reach 6 exabytes per month by 2011, with worldwide Internet traffic at 11 exabytes per month.

Driving this growth in Internet traffic will be a wide variety of applications, from YouTube downloads, video conferencing, remote backup and storage, and amateur video to commercially produced motion pictures, Internet protocol TV, online gaming, and virtual reality, Mr. Swanson said. For example, if Netflix snail mail shipments were converted to high-definition Internet downloads, it would amount to 55 exabytes a year, he said.

On top of those applications, Mr. Swanson said, will be the "Global Sensorium" - a worldwide network of sensors collecting, exchanging, and analyzing data from mobile phone cameras, personal cameras, surveillance cameras, medical equipment, automobiles, PCs, and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. On top of all this, the expansion of the possible Internet addresses through the transition to the IPv6 standard will mean that an increasing number of devices can be connected to the Internet.

All told, by 2015, Internet traffic could total a thousand exabytes a year, Mr. Swanson said. "When we meet again in 2015, I think we may be talking not about the exaflood, [but] about the zettaflood" - 10 to the 21st bits, or a thousand exabytes.

Speaking to reporters after his public presentation, Mr. Swanson said that the Internet was able to expand to handle current traffic levels because cable television companies were not subject to the common carrier requirements that prevented the kind of traffic prioritization and blocking that net neutrality supporters fear could happen on the Internet. "The Internet is so big and so powerful that nothing was going to completely stop it," he said. If net neutrality were mandated, "the Internet would still grow; it just means that it would be set back five years or whatever," he added. "Nothing is going to grind the Internet to a halt."

Asked how broadband Internet access providers will get the return on investment they need without instituting per-bit pricing, Mr. Swanson said, "I think there will be a number of new paradigms for pricing." He suggested that content might be bundled with Internet access and that "instead of paying $40 or $50 [a month], we'll be paying $100 or $150 for much higher[-speed] connection." Asked how such a price increase could be reconciled with the much lower prices subscribers in other countries, such as Japan, pay for higher-bandwidth connections, he said, "In some places there is one provider and prices are regulated. Also, they get a lot of their services such as video over that connection from a different provider," and they pay that provider separately. "I'm not predicting that broadband prices necessarily will go up," he added.

Just before Mr. Swanson spoke in the open session, FTTH Council Chairman Kathy Harriman, who is also a senior vice president at EPB Telecom, said the council message on "so-called net neutrality" is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Lynn Stanton, lynn.stanton@wolterskluwer.com

Reprinted with permission of TR Daily. See www.tr.com