AT&T's vice president of legislative affairs Jim Cicconi recently told a UK audience that the rising volume of digital video content on the Internet will completely clog the tubes by 2010 unless significant investments are made in new infrastructure. "In three years' time," warned Cicconi, "20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today." Cicconi also criticized the notion of net neutrality and implied that government regulation might impede AT&T's efforts to remedy the upcoming bandwidth shortage.

AT&T has consistently used these "video and P2P will drown the Internet" speeches to argue that invasive network management practices and a variable pricing model in which content providers are forced to pay more for prioritization are the best way to prevent the Internet from suffocating in a pool of its own data like a washed-up rock star with a drinking problem.

But in talking to networking and Internet traffic experts, we've consistently found that any real bandwidth crunches occur in the last mile, and AT&T has shown that it would rather invest its money into building a monopoly through acquisitions than into more backbone and last-mile capacity.

Although the total volume of content being pushed through the tubes is still growing, the growth rate of traffic through the Internet's backbones has actually slowed in recent years. The real bottleneck is the so-called last mile, the edges of the Internet, which is mostly copper and is limited in its scalability. So despite Cicconi's grim words, the so-called exaflood just isn't likely to drown AT&T's backbone.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic is a major contributor to last-mile congestion, but there are some effective technical measures that can be used to address that problem without resorting to blocks and other consumer-unfriendly tactics. Verizon has proposed using network topology information to facilitate more efficient P2P communication, a solution that researchers believe will be less costly and more effective at unclogging the tubes than invasive traffic management practices that rely on deep packet inspection.

Verizon is also tackling last-mile congestion by replacing the copper with fiber and rolling it out directly to homes. AT&T, however, has been reluctant to make a similar long-term investment in proper next-generation network infrastructure upgrades. AT&T's fiber-to-the-node upgrade strategy, which will provide less traffic scalability than Verizon's approach, has been spectacularly botched.

Analyst Daniel Beringer argued in a 2006 article that network maintenance and upgrade expenditures are a lower priority for AT&T than attaining monopoly control of the market through acquisitions. "The Bells only invest in more monopoly which usually means buying each other. The track record shows steadily lower spending on networks to increase free cash flow for acquisitions. The $140 billion SBC spent acquiring Ameritech, PacBell, SNET, AT&T Wireless, and AT&T lifted the company's market cap by only $40 billion," wrote Beringer. "SBC missed an opportunity as $140 billion happens to be about what it would cost to run fiber to every home in America."

So now we are supposed to feel sorry for AT&T and tolerate tiered network pricing because they claim that their service is so popular that they may actually have to (*gasp*) make and sell more of it? I can't really muster much sympathy at this point.