Bogotissimo!

From The Telegraph:

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

[...]

Ritter’s report will warn that an unreliable internet is merely a toy. “For business purposes, such as delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, it’s useless,” he said.

So, bandwidth is becoming scarce again. We heard all this less than a decade ago: sure, the Internet as it was could still be used for e-mail (the object of choice for derisive comparisons), but when media-rich applications came around, which were just around the corner, things would change. Videoconference research by 2002 assumed expensive hardware and expensive pay-by-minute corporate plans; telephony might change its piping radically, but would still end up being charged as usual; video would be bought and downloaded on-demand. The bubble burst only reinforced the notion that the Internet business model was untenable, and that it was just a matter of time till online services were normalized into the old modes.

Sure, it is possible that at some point availability will be overcome by demand. There will come a time the tubes will be clogged, and we will have to unearth all those regrettable QoS protocols of yore, perhaps even the beast that went by the name of RSVP, and leave anarchic ol’ Internet for people who use email. I suspected at the time, though, and even moreso now, that this was not so much about a short-sightedness over the exponential growth of transmission capacity (brought by innovation in software as well as in hardware), but that there was an eagerness to see infrastructural scarcity back into the game. It was a problem people saw too big an opportunity to cash in with. One will need to do better than this to scare the public into buying it - once people do, though, there will be no technological revolution to revert it.