The internet will stop in 2010 – I'd throw your computer away now if I were you
The internet is going to explode in the three seconds!
No, of course it isn’t but these are the kinds of things some newspapers would like you to believe.
The latest piece of semi-cataclysmic fear-mongery comes from the Metro and – just in case you weren’t worried enough about climate change, terrorism and immigration – they’re asking you to add to the list that the internet is doomed to grind to a halt in 2010 and it’s all YouTube’s fault. Of course it is.
The facts upon which this spurious speculation are based are that there is only a limited amount of copper wiring in the ground to take all the electronic information from internet servers to the luxury of our own homes and, as we drain more bandwidth with our increasingly broad demands of video streaming and downloading, eventually we’re going to overload it.
Well yeah, we would but we’ll just add more or come up with more efficient ways of data streaming with less infrastructure. Indeed, the Metro goes on to tell us of fibre optics that carry information 10,000 times faster than copper but just when you think they’ve taken their feet of the fear pedal, they floor it again because BT say that a national fibre optic network is 20 years away and could cost £20 billion. Shock horror!
I’ll bet it will cost less and even if it doesn’t, the Government will find the money or a cheaper way of doing it because the bottom line folks is that the internet and high-speed data transfer is just too damn important to say, “You know what, it was fun while we had it but we’ll just have to turn off the world wide web now.”
Any country, foolish enough to play that game, simply condemns themselves to economic destruction. God damn it, this kind of media nonsense really gets my goat and I tell you, these days I’ve precious few of the little bleaters left. People are so backward in looking forward.
(via Metro)
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4 comments
Only thing is: the last mile doesn’t have to be wired – a wireless last mile is perfectly acceptable (probably more so), and much cheaper to install.
Dead on WG, there are papers to be sold. It’s just a real shame that there’s no social conscience about the fear they induce in people that last a lot longer than the paper it was printed on.
In a way, it’s not so bad when it’s on a subject like the internet where most readers are relatively enlightened. Think of all the damage done about paedophilia. Parents are scared stiff thinking there’s a man in every bush waiting to kidnap children.
And hj, interesting point about digging up the roads. They seem to be doing that all over the place. Might as well bungs some fibre optics in while they’re at it.
Daniel Sung.
What get’s me is this kind of thinking about the issue from BT:
‘There will not be a fibre-to-the-home network in the next 20 years,” according to BT spokesman Mike Bartlett. “It would be a massive call to say, “Let’s fibre up the nation.” It would take many years, cost billions of pounds [actually estimated at around £20billion], involve digging up all the roads and we don’t know if people really want it.”‘
It’s that last line – “Don’t know if people really want it”. Well isn’t running out of bandwidth a fairly strong indicator? This kind of stupidity reminds me of what they were saying in 1999 or thereabouts where at a conference the head of BT said as much as that the Internet was a gimmick that would fade away in a few years so there’s no need to move any faster with DSL roll out because most people don’t want or need it.
This company are obviously totally clueless – at least about the Internet.
There’s a lot more media alarmism out there I’m sorry to say. The world economy is gonna collapse right before we die of climate-induced starvation, right before we’re all vapourised in a nuclear bomb. The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling!!! I’m even begninning to wonder about climate change: even when you speak to climate scientists who support the idea (not politicians or journalists, scientists), their views are actually moderate. We should be very careful how we treat our highly complex planet, but the sky is positively NOT falling!
As regards the internet, I couldn’t agree more. Do we honestly think that any government would sit back on their arse and let their economy melt just because BT has a fear of spending money? If BT don’t do it then the government will find someone who god damn will. Quickly. It’s surpising how quickly the powers that be can mobilise when the need arises.
Point of note: in the highly business-competitive (internet) age, it is in the media’s “best interests” to be alarmist and to exaggerate (this is kinda ironic with regards to this story). That’s why we all think the world is getting worse when it is actually getting better (see the TED talk by Stephen Pinker). Fear sells newspapers/gets wesite hits, delete as applicable.
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