The Internet Ends in 2010 - Unless you give AT&T what they want
More warnings of a looming bandwidth apocalypse, this time from USAToday, who insists that the Internet "will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers."
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'internet will choke' story has a history in this corpus: The Nation's February 2006 'End of the Internet?' piece introduced the framing, and an August 2007 report already flagged cable operators facing a bandwidth crunch. USAToday's new warning — that video-intensive services could make the network feel slow by 2010 — extends that arc, and its pickup was wide enough to split the coverage itself: Macworld ran it straight while Techdirt's take ('Death Of The Internet Greatly Exaggerated (By Those Who Stand To Benefit)') argued the alarm serves carrier interests.
That skepticism matters because the named beneficiary, AT&T, has been building options on every axis this quarter: a confirmed agreement in October 2007 to buy Aloha Partners' 700MHz licenses covering 196 million people, an undecided stance on bidding in the open-access portion of the same auction, and fresh usage-priced products like the $25/$60 international iPhone data plans introduced after roaming-bill complaints.
First-order effects
- Carriers including AT&T gain a ready-made public argument for usage-based billing, tiering, or paid prioritization just as video traffic grows — the same month AT&T launched usage-metered international iPhone data plans at $25 and $60.
- Heavy video users on cable, phone, and wireless networks are the population the USAToday warning targets; their flat-rate service terms become the contested variable.
Second-order effects
- Cable operators, flagged in August 2007 reporting as facing the crunch first, are pushed toward visible capacity responses (network investment or traffic management) rather than ceding the 'congestion' narrative entirely to telcos.
- The FCC's open-access rules for the 700MHz auction become entangled with the capacity story: AT&T's rumored hesitation over open-access bidding sits against its confirmed $700M-band license purchase from Aloha Partners, making spectrum strategy part of the same capacity argument.
Third-order effects
- If the scarcity framing holds politically, the structural endpoint is a shift away from all-you-can-eat broadband toward metered and prioritized tiers — the outcome critics like Techdirt say the warnings are designed to legitimize, and the one net-neutrality advocates fear.
- Spectrum and wireline buildout decisions (the Aloha deal, the 2010 deadline carriers cite) start being justified by congestion forecasts rather than demand evidence, putting regulators in the position of auditing carrier claims about network capacity.
The trend: Broadband carriers are converging on capacity-scarcity warnings as the public rationale for abandoning flat-rate internet pricing, with skeptics reading each new forecast as lobbying rather than engineering.