Exaflood

Check out Cisco’s new estimates of Web application trends and Internet traffic growth in the “Exabyte Era,” as they call it. — The Exabyte Era — The methodology We couldn’t help noticing a similarity to our work on the “Coming Exaflood.” There’s lots of great stuff in these reports, but one projection struck me as extremely conservative. Two-way video conferencing won’t take off until 2015 or after? I doubt it will happen next year, but I also doubt it will take eight years. Anyway, Cisco’s new 15 Mbps synchronous Telepresence videoconferencing system is apparently sci-fi awesome.

From today’s Wall Street Journal: Web Growth Fuels Cisco “Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers in a conference call said the Internet is entering its second major phase, brought about by new technologies like social networking and online video. He said such trends will result in innovation and productivity increases for businesses, which will also be a boon for Cisco. “We believe there’s an opportunity to be an instant replay to what occurred for Cisco in the very early 1990s,” when the company experienced rapid growth, he said.”

The U.S. ranks 11th worldwide in fiber-to-the-home penetration, according to a new study from the globe’s three FTTH Councils in Europe, Asia, and North America. With tens of billions of dollars worth of new optical networks under construction by the major telcos, we should move up the list smartly in the next few years. The biggest obstacle to an improvement from No. 11 and an unleashing of an exaflood of rich new content and services is, of course, Net Neutrality regulation. -Bret Swanson

The Fiber-to-the-Home Council has a new video clip nicely summarizing the impact rich video will have on Internet traffic and the resulting need for massive new network investment. In this, it follows the themes of an article I wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 20 called “The Coming Exaflood.” Prolific blogger Tim Lee doesn’t like the “exaflood” idea and compares it to “peak oil” theories, which is funny because in my previous Journal column I debunked “peak oil.” Tim says peak oil assumes insatiable demand for oil, but in fact what peak oil asserts is that even though there is more oil in the ground, oil production will soon peak and begin a long, slow downward slide. Although Read More ›