End of the Internet?

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http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/90339

The end of the internet?

255.255.255.255

Half a story.

I heard this story two years ago already. It hasnt changed though; at that time they were saying 2010 was D-day too.

The bulk of the infrastructure is fine. Main trunks are fiber optic, and easier to change. What isnt so great is the cable that is local to your homes. America is badly lagging; to much residential copper has to be dug up and the cost effectiveness isnt there.

My province is much better off, but my town has been suffering under a related issue. Residential and commercial demand is so high that the local providers are getting brownouts; we have had huge growth the past few years. Even the cable company is troubled by it. The problem in this case is that their central system cannot assign enough ip addresses.

But its a story thats a badly spun one. The future of the net is towards direct satellite uplinks.

The net isnt ready to die yet.

Other countries have been upgrading (or installing new, since they didn't have it before) their high-bandwidth connections. The result is that AT&T's (and other companies) infrastructure is out of date and they've ignored the problem for years hoping it won't be a big deal.

The result is that consumers in other countries end up paying less for much more bandwidth.

If YouTube hasn't crashed yet even though it's bandwidth hog, how could the Internet?

That will never happen!

We will be able to e-mail people forever!

remember that one commercial...where the guy was on the internet...and it was going fast...so fast that he reached the end (was told by a pop up window and a puter voice)...so he went to sit on the sofa in a dumfounded expression and the wife goes, "Weren't you on the internet?" and dumbly goes, "I was." and the end! i love that commercial!

"The End Of The Internet?"

Like that will happen.

"The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!! The sky is falling!! The sky is....."
Anyone remember the Y2K bug? or was that non-bug?

As much as I use the internet(and it's a lot), I think the net going away would not be such a bad thing.
It has benefits, yes, but it has also become a cultural cesspool that has dissociated millions of people from the rest of the world, while making us that much more Dependant on machines and electronics and so forth instead of each other.

Don't get me wrong, the net is a great learning tool, it helps us meet people we'd never find otherwise, and so on. I don't necessarily want it to go away, but I think it might not be all bad if it did.

We shouldn't think of it that way!

For me, this is just AT&T's foolishness. <sarcasm> The world is really going to end in 19 January 2038. </sarcasm>

AT&T? Is that the same company that bought out Cingular?

Its navel gazing at its worst.

For example, I've met some, err.. ernest.. yeah, young guys on the net that are certain congress is going to shut the net down, "Its an enemy vehicle!". They dont seem to understand that the net isnt limited to the continental USA. And thus not really subject to the actions of the American congress.

There was an episode of South Park just a couple of weeks ago where they had to ration off the Internet, and it looked like some scene from the 1930s.

I had heard of that!