Category Archives: Capacity

Communications Monopoly

Adm. Elizabeth A. Hight Here’s what happens when you have a communications monopoly:
The Defense Department isn’t trying to “muzzle” troops by banning YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing, and other “recreational” sites is purely at attempt to “preserve military bandwidth for operational missions.”

Computer_center_400x Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like “could present a potential problem,” at some point in the future. So the military wanted to “get ahead of the problem before it became a problem.”

— Military Defends MySpace Ban (Updated Yet Again), Noah Schachtman, DangerRoom, 18 May 2007

How much bandwidth is it using? We don’t know; the Admiral won’t say.

Now if the U.S. military’s real reason is to keep the troops from posting information that could get some of them killed, I could understand that. But if so, why are they trotting out this lame excuse? And for that matter, why is the U.S. commander in Iraq saying military blogs are providing good accurate descriptions of the situation on the ground? Continue reading →

Industrial Internet Policy

Susan Crawford posted a laundry list of countries that have an industrial policy (she prefers economic policy) involving the Internet:
  • South Korea: “the government said where they wanted to go, invested in research and development, [and invested money and made micro loans], and they’re now seeing 70% of adults (not just kids) involved in online social networks. Very high speeds, very low cost.”
  • Hong Kong: “also not embarrassed to talk about economic policy and telecom.”
  • India: its “government ‘proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009.’”
  • Japan: Have I mentioned lately that almost every Japanese can get broadband, and usually it’s ten times faster than what we can get stateside?
Now the point here isn’t whether the specific country government policies are good, bad, etc. Continue reading →

Control to Pay for Capacity?

Save the Internet found a recent quote by new AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson
We’re going to control the video on our network. The content guys will have to make a deal with us.”

— AT&T’s New Boss Wants Your World Delivered to Him, Save the Internet, 27 April 2007

Some say this is necessary to pay for infrastructure. Continue reading →

Ramping Capacity

Hands Off the Internet notes that all major TV networks suddenly (since last year) stream programs over the net, and concludes:
But it’s also a timely reminder of how these deals are placing unprecedented strain on the web’s capacity. Internet traffic growth surged past capacity growth last year. Average traffic was up 75 percent while capacity grew only 47 percent, according to the folks at TeleGeography.

— Katie Couric, Expensive Date, Hands Off the Internet, April 20, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Poor telcos and cablecos; straining to keep up. Continue reading →