Industry experts and pundits continue to choose sides in the ongoing rumble over whether or not video will kill the Internet store.
Weighing in this week with a no way is CIO Insight, whose writer asks and answers the critical question: “Is it time to panic? Probably not.”
But as in the case of the most notorious prognostication of impending disaster, made in 1995 by Ethernet co-inventor Robert Metcalfe, the doom seers seem likely to eat their words. (Metcalfe famously did so quite literally, putting the column in which he made the prediction into a blender and consuming it in front of a conference audience.)
My Network World colleague Jim Duffy reached pretty much the same conclusion earlier this year in his report headlined “Don’t expect video to exhaust fiber glut.”
“In long haul, there is still plenty of fiber,” one expert tells Duffy. “If you look at the total Internet traffic in the U.S., it could be squeezed down one or at most two fiber strands. And on most routes you have hundreds of strands.”
Nevertheless, lining up with the Sharks against the Jets are such notables as Robert X. Cringely, who predicts that 2007 will be: “The year the net crashed (in the USA). Video overwhelms the net and we all learn that the broadband ISPs have been selling us something they can’t really deliver.” And, the technology wing of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, which predicts Internet video “may overwhelm some of the Internet’s backbones” this year.
Some of this may be a half-empty vs. half-full debate, since no one will argue that there are not issues or that the major carriers are not moving full-speed-ahead to address them, witness the recent announcement from Verizon Wireless of a $6-billion network upgrade.
Of course, if the doomsayers are correct then perhaps the best idea would be to scrap the current Internet altogether and start with a clean slate: Researchers at Stanford have that base covered, too.
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