From internet to into debt

posted on 7th April 2008 by Nick

Well brace yourself as we may have a huge invoice on our hands, an invoice to the tune of £20,000,000,000 (£20bn). Its becoming apparent that the amount of bandwidth being used is clogging up our copper pipes. If i’m still being a little too technical I’ll tone it down.

In the UK, we have traditionally used underground copper pipes that aid the transfer of internet-data and traffic, otherwise known as bandwidth. Recently, a huge rise in bandwidth from websites such as YouTube and other streaming-media websites means that we are putting an immense amount of pressure on our pipes. The internet is doubling in size every two years. 2007 saw YouTube using the same amount of bandwidth that was used for the entire internet in 2000 - that’s a lot of bandwidth.

Bill Thompson of City University said “I think we’re in trouble. If you’ve got kids on YouTube and parents on iPlayer, it all starts to go very slow”. But fear not - help is on the way thanks to recent discoveries that are set to revolutionise the web.

Cern are a nuclear reasearch organisation, they have created servers that are linked by fibre optic cables that work upto 10,000 times faster than the broadband we know. Here’s the part that isn’t quite as cheerful - BT are estimating that to install a national fibre optic network the costs could mount to the £20bn mark. Ouch.