Category: Technology

The demand for bandwidth usage has been a funny issue of late. Comcast, TimeWarner and AT&T have announced new bandwidth taxing to consumers while on the research side Internet2 and the Department of Energy’s ESnet are planning to upgrade their network to support 200GB/s by 2014. That’s Big Science applications from around the globe taking hold and researchers & scientists to gather gigabytes and terabytes of information. Boy talk about going from one extreme to the other.

This will be an important issue for R&E Networks while consumers are fighting for bandwidth usage taxes. Internet2 seems to be moving forward without reservation to new advanced network backbones linking ESnet and I2’s services to really enhance bandwidth to Internet2 members via Level 3 with plenty of headroom to grow even further:

Internet2’s backbone can easily scale to 400Gigabits/second
–Randy Brogle, Level 3

Why is consumer bandwidth handled differently? Telcos do not have the resources to make fast bandwidth available to all consumers, they are pinching torrent sites and would love to do the same for Skype users. At some point I’m wondering if its a new revenue model.  Comcast has already stating bandwidth tax will go national by end of 2008. I take a full breath of air while sitting and breath differently running, but air is available to me nevertheless.

Bandwidth is the same to me: I need it to breath without restriction.

Tags: Internet2, bandwidth, network, community, globalization, trends