October 24th, 2006
Will YouTube "break" the Internet? Nortel thinks it could
Thanks to all you angels and ministers of grace for the fact that the Internet has not crashed down on our heads with continuous episodes of bandwidth scarcities and resulting gridlock.
That would be one way of interpreting the worst-case- but not implausible scenario- posited by Nortel's chief technology officer, John Roese.
"The only reason YouTube didn't destroy the Internet is because there was a bit of a bubble in terms of excess capacity out there," Roese tells Reuters. "But, boy, don't take that for granted."
BTW in case you are wondering why I chose that YouTube video to make my point, it is by Katers17m, whose YouTube channel's 281,426 views makes it the most viewed channel on YT this week. Plus, the clip I linked to actually shows how she plans for a YT clip.
Back to the suits, and their case. Roese sees an ever-steeper bandwidth "demand curve" in play as users clamor for enough bandwidth to handle online video, music, games and television.
"That's our underlying fear," Roese tells Reuters. "If the industry cannot keep up with the demand because we kind of take it for granted after the buildout in the 2000 timeframe, if we ever hit a wall, the impact on global economies, the impact on innovation is just profound.
"Over the last six months we've absolutely convinced ourselves — and we think we have a lot of empirical data to back it up — that this is not a short-term trend," he adds.
But as someone once wrote, necessity is the mother of invention. Having made a not-unconvncing case, Roese then describes how Nortel's Metro Ethernet unit- which connects short-range networks to bulk up Internet infrastructure, will become attractive to carriers increasingly concerned with whether or not they will have enough capacity to carry and offer all this broadband content.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
