^{Democracy & Technology Blog} Estimating the Exaflood

Bret Swanson and George Gilder predict that the U.S. Internet of 2015 will be at least 50 times larger than it was in 2006. Their report, “Estimating the Exaflood: The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet — A ‘zettabyte’ by 2015?,” estimates that annual totals for various categories of U.S. IP traffic in the year 2015. It projects:

• Movie downloads and P2P file sharing of 100 exabytes
• Internet video, gaming and virtual worlds of 200 exabytes
• Non-internet IPTV of 100 exabytes, and possibly much more
• Business IP Traffic of 100 exabytes

Gilder notes that an exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes, or approximately 50,000 times the contents of the U.S. Library of Congress.
This report expands on Swanson’s article “The Coming Exaflood,” which was published in the Wall Street Journal on January 20, 2007.
Let Technology Revive the Economy
Swanson and Gilder point out that the network isn’t currently designed to handle this increase.

Internet growth at these levels will require a dramatic expansion of bandwidth, storage, and traffic management capabilities in core, edge, metro, and access networks. A recent Nemertes Research study estimates that these changes will entail a total new investment of some $137 billion in the worldwide Internet infrastructure by 2010. In the U.S., currently lagging Asia, the total new network investments will exceed $100 billion by 2012.

Wow, this is roughly comparable to the projected cost of the economic stimulus bill now winding its way through Congress ($146 billion). But I’ll bet no one’s thought of empowering the telephone and cable companies to revive the economy. That would mean scrapping welfare for Silicon Valley (aka network neutrality legislation) and eliminating discriminatory taxation of communications services. Nah, not as long as they can contribute boatloads of cash for politicians through their political action committees. Swanson and Gilder correctly point to a fact that’s lost on the political class:

Technology remains the key engine of U.S. economic growth and its competitive edge. Policies that encourage investment and innovation in our digital and communications sectors should be among America’s highest national priorities.