The Blob Returns - YouTube is Eating the Internet

Personally on my own little website, with our minuscule level of traffic, we've nevertheless seen a tremendous growth in bandwidth - from 392.67 MB in January 2007 to 1.31 GB in February 2008. Sure, we should adjust for a doubling of traffic in the last year (don't get too excited, the numbers are still fairly trivial). Nevertheless, it's easy to see that the big leap was in October last year, when I started adding YouTube videos to the site - we went from 653.8 MB to 928.1 MB in one month, from Sept to Oct.

When I adjust the data for growth in visitors to my site, we see a 37% increase in bandwidth used by this site each month...

Let's check back again about the time that college football season starts (September 1) - YouTube traffic should be at 30%, given the political season and the current growth trends?? Care to make any bets??

Besides being fun to track, why should this matter? Well, it does ...

As more and more Internet traffic is video traffic, and as more and more subscribers start using broadband to gain access to the Internet, we will face some mixture of these consequences, to an ever growing degree.

1. Network performance degradation, most likely in the form of slower uploading and downloading
2. Pressures to manage the Demand Side
a. Moves by ISPs to suspend heavy users or cut them off entirely (see Putting a lid on broadband use)
b. Political pressure to allow ISPs to charge varying rates for different levels of service (see Civil Rights Groups Side With Comcast's Net Neutrality Stance)
c. Political pressure to prohibit different levels of service (see Save the Internet)
3. Incentives to manage the Supply Side (my preferred alternatives)
a. Growing business incentives to build more last-mile broadband infrastructure
b. Political pressure to fund or otherwise stimulate broadband infrastructure build-out

Clearly, when it comes to broadband, I don't understand why we would spend so much energy and effort at trying to fit all of our traffic into an ever tighter tight box (i.e., current network capacity) and so little energy at trying to figure out a way to get a robust sustainable infrastructure built out.

Folks, we're going to have to spend the capital on broadband, so let's get busy talking about the best ways to get this infrastructure built! There will be plenty of time to keep arguing about how we use it, but let's all agree that we need more broadband infrastructure NOW, not later. The time has come to get busy and start building!!