The nabobs of negativism, the panic-stricken shrieks about the Internet becoming full, the fear-mongering about broadband pipes becoming clogged because the kid down the street is running torrents again.  We’ve heard it all before, and as we’ve always said, technological advancement always seems to find a way to resolve the “crisis in bandwidth” before big businesses resolve it themselves by rationing, capping, or overcharging for access.

And so it has again.

AT&T, in association with Corning and NEC today smashed all prior records of fiber optic transmission capacity by successfully transmitting data at 114 Gigabits per second over a single strand of fiber for up to 580 kilometers over an optically amplified link.  The standard fiber optic cable AT&T used for the test contains 320 separate optical channels, meaning through the use of just a single optical cable, it is possible to sustain a transmission rate of 36480 Gigabits per second!

That exceeds by 25% the last record setting transmission rate test and effectively doubles the distance the cable can maintain data transmission rates without unacceptable loss.

AT&T announced the results as part of their technological solution for broadband growth — deploying 100 Gigabit networks across the country to accommodate growing demand for the Internet.

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Todd Spangler, who we seem to spar with on a semi-regular basis here, has another blog entry up expanding on his views of why Time Warner Cable’s metered pricing experiment failed.  Of course, completely missing from the list is the fact most customers do not want it.  That’s dangerous to say in a cable industry trade publication like Multichannel News, however.

Todd still thinks it’s all about how they did it, not the fact they did it in the first place that created what even he admits was a “category five” storm of backlash.

Clearly, the company’s idea — given that these were trials — was to have the flexibility to tweak pricing, adjust specific cap levels, etc., and not have these things set in stone. But the ad-hoc communications on the usage trials was perhaps the biggest reason this blew up.

The only “trial” here was on the customer, and the jury was stacked with Time Warner Cable executives who already found themselves innocent of extortionist pricing and market abuse.  The “tweak” most customers wanted was none at all.  What was set in stone, until the groundswell finally achieved temporary results, was that the caps were coming no matter what customers had to say.  Just ask people in Beaumont, Texas.

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The same old fundamental misunderstandings about the Internet that got former Sen. Stevens into so much trouble with his pronouncement that the Internet was a “series of tubes” that were being filled up by commercial providers, which is somehow why we cannot be for net neutrality, comes back time and time again with alarmist rhetoric about exafloods, brownouts, global data slowdowns, and the risk of the collapse of the Internet itself.

Just you wait and see.

And folks have been waiting and seeing since 1996:

• 1996: Full Capacity
• 1997: Overheated demand
• 2002: Soon be a shortage
• 2002: Shortages could start appearing later this year
• 2007: Internet could run out of capacity in two years
• 2008: Internet to hit capacity in two years

How can we be saved from the broadband collapse, drowning in exaflood tidal waves and zetaflood cataclysms when the funeral service was held more than a decade ago?

Using fear to advance a corporate or marketing agenda is hardly a new concept.  Unless we do “x,” “y” will happen and ruin your life has been used along with alarmist rhetoric to justify virtually everything.  For broadband usage capping and metered service, it’s front and center.  In fact, wherever service is lousy with limitations and someone has their hand out looking for more of your money, you can be sure the “clogged tubes” argument is going to be a big part of the snowjob.

Snow isn’t a big problem in Australia, but that doesn’t stop the blizzard of nonsense from showing up down under, where the Internet is a particularly lousy experience for Aussies forced to endure draconian caps from monopolistic providers.  Exceed your caps there and your connection slows to near-dial-up speeds.  Never trust a guy in a ludicrously loud shirt, nor someone who channels Sen. Stevens in calling the whole thing a series of “pipes.”  Maybe Pete Blasina got the shirt from Cisco, who he also conveniently notes is supplying switches to save us from impending doom.  They also happened to supply him with a lot of his talking points.  The bit about YouTube traffic in one month equaling Internet consumption in 2000 came from them.

Duncan Riley (who was the source for the history lesson on exaflood threats) does a fine job debunking the same nonsense we have to endure in North America.

The story is nearly always the same: telcos and infrastructure companies fund research that finds that the latest trend online at the time (audio, video, HD video, P2P, Sykpe and social networking are some previously used) is too much for the Internet to handle. The reasons behind the studies are usually variations on a theme: Government regulation or Government financial support. Which is where we start our story on how Sunrise played a role in the latest outbreak of industry astroturfing.

But how did a primarily American focused astroturfing campaign end up be served to Australians on breakfast television?

The outbreak of “Internet is full” stories this time was remarkably subdued. The last research paper was released in November 2008, which might account for part of the silence, although Sunrise says there’s a new report coming (the contents year to year ultimately deliver nearly the same doom and gloom message.) Given strong coverage of the 2007 outbreak as being an astroturfing campaign, news rooms may have been a little wiser this time round.

Duncan doesn’t realize the Internet is Full Crisis ’09 started last week with the latest Nemertes report we debunked a few days ago as a whole lot of industry-sponsored nonsense.  But it’s remarkable the astroturf campaigns have enough industry cash behind them to push this stuff worldwide.  Duncan’s piece links some other outbreaks of astroturfing so check it out.

StoptheCap! must organize a Truth Squad of volunteers willing to confront sloppy journalism, lazy reporters, and Kool-Aid drinking consumers hoodwinked into actually believing that metered pricing is about saving them money instead of fattening broadband provider profits.

Your job: To find press accounts that might as well have been rewritten industry press releases, those that adopt the premise that the provider is pushing, and exposing industry talking points that go unchallenged in the media.  Then the call to action goes out to bombard the reporter with protest e-mail, confront the bias in the reporting in letters to the editor, and pro-consumer pushback in comment sections where the public can learn some facts for a change.

The Kansas City Star utterly failed in its report on Saturday, lapping up industry talking points and presenting them in a myopic view of the future of broadband.  Reporter Scott Canon quoted opposition from one public statement on the Free Press website, one sentence from a group called Knowledge Ecology International, and a sentence from a press release from Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY).  After that, he paddled around the pool with one industry talking point after another.

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StoptheCap! reader Tim wrote this morning to alert us that Fox News had picked up a story from the Sunday Times of London warning of the great Internet brownout about to afflict us all.  It turns out our old friends at Nemertes Research have trotted out another sensationalist study (right on cue after a month of nonsense about it from Time Warner Cable) predicting our online demise from too many users.

But is it any good?

The original article sure wasn’t.  John Harlow, who needed reporting assistance from Adam Lewitt, couldn’t be bothered.  Lazy reporters who reprint sensationalistic theories as fact without ever bothering to ask any questions about the source or challenging the theories, is a hallmark of sloppy, never break a sweat journalism.  Even Ted Ritter, quoted in the story, called the journalism sensationalistic and said the reporter “took great liberty with my quotes,” and he’s the guy pushing the theory!

I keep asking, “where’s the media” on so many issues that deserve more than a slapdash reprint of the cheat sheet on the study, toss in a few quotes and call it a day.  But then I realized in this day and age, we are the media.

So I plodded my way through the report.  It’s the same alarmist stuff as the last one, and the one before that.

They said it in 2007 and the only scurrying that came after it was from Nemertes’ clients running to Kinkos to make copies and get them into the hands of legislators to justify whatever political agenda they were selling that season (no to net neutrality, yes to bandwidth caps, yes to government funding or tax credits for private broadband, etc.)

And that is exactly the problem.

Nemertes’ findings are like magic sprinkles on top of a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone.  They work with every flavor to justify whatever you want.

On all such matters, the only fact you have to remember is to “follow the money.”  Who pays for this research?

Ted Ritter from Nemertes answers:

Our research is funded by our clients: Vendors, service providers and fortune 500 enterprise.

And the results of this research are celebrated by all of the above:   Equipment suppliers love it because they can trumpet the scary findings on their “upgrade now” brochures. ISPs love it because they can claim they have to cap and tier customers in order to buy equipment to combat the “exaflood.” Proponents of government funding for the Internet love it because it hints major funding to subdue the crisis might be needed.

Without those supporters, this study would never have been done in the first place.  Additionally, Nemertes appears to have an additional revenue stream from licensing the results of the study to interested clients, who wouldn’t bother unless they had a vested interest in trumpeting the findings.

In other words, this is a classic case of “conflict of interest.”  But if you order in the next 20 minutes, you also get these extra benefits:

Since we all know the results are made public, and media availabilities are prominently mentioned on the website, a paying client has the bonus of a seemingly independent third party who will be available to discuss the findings and results.  That’s a quick path to media coverage, the more sensational the better.

Since it’s Nemertes saying it, that keeps the clients’ hands clean when they license a purportedly independent report and mention it prominently when delving into public policy lobbying, public relations, and marketing strategies.

It’s also unsurprising that Nemertes stays out of specific public policy recommendations, because that is exactly what clients want. They’ll provide their own spin as they see fit, just as happened in 2007 and will no doubt happen again.  Why pay for a study that makes a public policy conclusion you oppose?

It’s all very neat and tidy, especially when Mr. Ritter complains that the media was sensationalizing the results.  I’m sure his clients think exactly the opposite.  But then sensationalism and spin follows Nemertes’ report wherever it appears. It drew panic headlines in 2007, was dredged up again by a few marketing people to justify broadband usage caps in 2008, and largely the exact same panicky coverage is appearing now, coincidentally in the same month Time Warner used Nemertes’ theories to justify their Internet rationing effort.

One local Rochester television newscast even suggested a router failure responsible for a Time Warner service outage this past weekend might have been the result of an Internet “brownout.”  That was Baskin-Robbins Flavor #7, “Very Berry Strawberry.”  See, it does work for everything!

The Sunday Times doesn’t have time to check the facts with anyone else, and there are many others who have a different view on this.  Andrew Odlyzko is a professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota, and has been tracking Internet growth since 2001:

Nemertes Research has an updated version of their study from last year, and continues to predict a collision between demand and supply, unless dramatic increases in investment are made. The basic, and highly debatable, assumption behind their work, though, is that traffic is growing at 100% per year or more, and will continue to do so for the next half a dozen years. So far there is little evidence of that, though.

Nemertes waves away Odlyzko by claiming that their discrepancy in data with his comes from the ‘secret Internet’ private backbones. Of course, that data Odlyzko can’t get from them is the same data Nemertes cannot get from them either. So we are left with an assertion without raw data.

The creepy part of all of this is, I could use Nemertes’ study to help the cause on StoptheCap! Nemertes says nothing about the need for usage caps and limits — it instead suggests that insufficient infrastructure spending will cause the Internet to brown out causing loss of innovation, jobs, and all the rest.  So I could use Nemertes to justify why cable companies have a basic responsibility to stop cutting infrastructure spending and start increasing it, instead of capping people to ration the net.

But I won’t, because I have integrity.  I realize that no report is worth mentioning as factual and accurate without the underlying assurance of its independence and lack of bias.  As I wrote Mr. Ritter:

If you want to do reports for clients who subscribe to your service, then send them the results and don’t make them public. Let the clients make the report public, because they are effectively paying for it. It prevents the accusation you are astroturfing on their behalf by insulating their involvement and investment in the findings.

Otherwise, a list of all supporting clients by name, in addition to whether they have been licensed to use the material, absolutely must be added to the bottom of your findings, or those findings are rightfully dismissed out of hand as bought and paid for.

Alternatively, if you are doing this in the public interest, do not accept funding from those with a vested interest in the findings, and do not license their use by anyone. Let people read them on your site, in full and in context, not after some marketing group has massaged the relevant points for their latest strategy.

Ultimately, I think Nemertes basic conclusion that the Internet is growing, and fast, is borne out by reality — just not at the panic stricken pace they suggest.  I also think that just like every other technological challenge we have faced, innovation will bring solutions to problems we fear and panic about today, but aren’t that big of a deal tomorrow.

The short answer continues to be, upgrade the network.  The bad answers include another effort by some of those that we’re likely to discover paying for Nemertes’ studies to advocate supersizing profits through reduction in competition, installing artificial usage limits to retard the growth curve, and trying to legislate protectionism for incumbent providers.