[Rpm] The Bust of the Bandwidth Bubble (from Bandwidth by Dan Caruso)

[Frantisek Borsik <frantisek.borsik@gmail.com>]

A couple of tweets:

*https://x.com/fikocian/status/1977486591083041077*
<https://x.com/fikocian/status/1977486591083041077>

"THE BUST OF THE BANDWIDTH BUBBLE

It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.

—Warren Buffett


Years before the Bandwidth Bubble had begun to take shape, data had
surfaced that indicated something major was amiss. In 1998 an AT&T Labs
Internet researcher named Andrew M. Odlyzko published a paper debunking the
widely held view that Internet traffic was doubling every three months.
Odlyzko explained that the implications of this rapid traffic doubling
would imply that by 2001 Internet traffic would have grown by a factor of
seventeen million. The amount of Bandwidth, Odlyzko calculated, would
require every Internet user on Earth to stream video twenty-four hours a
day. Clearly, that wasn't the trajectory.

"[Doubling every three months] was an extremely convenient myth," said
Odlyzko. "Every entrepreneur who was getting financing could quote it." In
contrast, Odlyzko's analysis suggested Internet usage was doubling only
once a year.

Odlyzko's inconvenient truth was either unnoticed or, more likely,

ignored."



*https://x.com/TimoVainionpaa/status/1977495705104122281
<https://x.com/TimoVainionpaa/status/1977495705104122281>*


"The telecom crash was before the dot com crash. Om Malik wrote a great
book about it too, Broadbandits. The telecom stock analyst were a big part
of it, propogating the "internet is doubling every x months" to justify the
huge fiber overbuilds."



*https://x.com/trengriffin/status/1977716537197814226
<https://x.com/trengriffin/status/1977716537197814226>*



"I remember like it was yesterday the night I discovered that Internet
capacity was not increasing as fast as UUnet/Worldcom was claiming. This
was the key sentence in the paper written by Andrew Odlyzko that I read
late one night in August of 2000:
https://25iq.com/2017/11/11/the-1990s-telecom-bubble-what-can-we-learn/amp/"



"In the intermediate run, there would be neither be a clear "bandwidth
glut" nor a "bandwidth scarcity," but a more balanced situation, with
supply and demand growing at comparable rates.
My reaction after reading Odlyzko's paper that night was: "Holy crap. UUnet
is lying." What I said was similar to the reaction I had when I read about
a deal
between Enron and Blockbuster for internet bandwidth since I knew that
Enron had no bandwidth to sell.
Again, "Holy crap."



All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik


*In loving memory of Dave Täht: *1965-2025

https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/


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