Life just wouldn't be the same without an Internet scare story popping up now and then and while some, such as the lack of IPv4 addresses (original news) may have a degree of merit, others can go a bit wide of the mark.

This week it's the turn of US telecoms giant AT&T, which has warned that the Internet's current network architecture could run out of spare capacity by 2010. Sadly AT&T's Vice President of Legislative Affairs, Jim Cicconi, damages any credibility the prediction may have had by saying this:


No Jim, we don’t think so! Perhaps he meant 20,000 or 200,000 because at present that prediction would require 20 households to consume Petabyte’s of data and not even a particle accelerator generates that much information. It’s a shame too because the underlying argument about Internet capacity becoming strained by the growth in video content and new medias is credible.

In reality most major operators, such as BT, are investing billions into infrastructure improvements and are generally not completely blind to the problems. The Internet will not grind to a halt in 2010 but there are issues, such as the lack of IPv4 addresses and a failure by some ISPs to adopt IPv6 before that happens, which could come back to haunt the market.