So much for the famous 2004 prediction at the World Economic Forum that spam would soon be ìa thing of the past.î

To the extent that thereís any good news out of this, itís this: Go take a look at all the email youíve received recently and calculate what percent is spam. Chances are that itís nowhere near 90 percent. Or even half that.

Chances are also that your spam has been directed to a special file and marked with a notice in caps: ìSPAMî or ìVIRUS.î

Credit the steadily increasing efforts of ISPs, websites, carriers and a small army of technology companies keeping a lid on this steadily growing problem. The technology that ensures todayís Internet can handle the spiraling growth of online video and other entertainment also flags email spreading viruses, Trojan horses, and other malware.

Symantec’s report is yet more evidence that the trillions of megabytes sent across the web each week are definitely not created equal.

Essential egalitarian principles, such as unfettered content access, are being trampled upon, only to save bandwidth and money. And who are the nefarious characters orchestrating this online axis of evil? Cable operators? No. Telcos? No. Alas, it is the purveyors of Internet video content themselves.

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Now, courtesy of tech columnist Robert Cringely (real name: Mark Stephens) we have a guess on the technology required to accommodate Susan Boyle’s dream:

“The video file as presented on YouTube is just over seven minutes and 26 megabytes long. Twenty million (and counting!) times 26 megabytes is 520 terabytes or approximately half the size of the Internet Archive. That’s 520,000 gigabytes or the equivalent of maxing-out in a single week the monthly bandwidth allotment of 260 co-lo servers at Rackspace.com. Running at top speed for a week would require 1040 such servers to do the job and we haven’t even made it to a week yet.”

Since Cringely’s blog went up (a whooping 2 days ago), YouTube ALONE has clocked more than 50 million streams. The Boyle phenomenon may be the Net’s first global moment but it won’t be the last. That’s why a few comments are in order about how ridiculous the U.S. net neutrality argument is given the inevitability of more (and more often) Boyle moments.

First, even with scalable networks, there is no way to affordably build the infrastructure necessary to handle future user requirements without considerable data management. That means the companies running the Internet’s backbone need to make decisions about data that have to arrive quickly (paid video) and data that don’t (email).

Even the Japanese with their firehose pipes into the home have recognized the expensive futility of just deploying “dumb pipe” connections. (For more about broadband management, check out George Ou’s excellent report, Managing Broadband Networks: A Policymakers’ Guide.

Second, the Internet has never operated with “all data is equal” protocols. Thankfully. Dedicated high-speed lines have been available since the early days and the revenue these generated helped finance the national broadband build-out that’s benefiting everyone.

This is a key point because net neutrality would rob Internet providers of the flexibility necessary to handle crushes of data like the Boyle video. It would also curb their ability to reach funding agreements to help underwrite the huge cost of expanding affordable access choices.

Choose the result:

(a) Worse service
(b) Less affordable high-speed access
(c) An impact on job growth
(d) All of the above

The number of homes in North America with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections is continuing to grow at approximately 1.5mn annually and now stands at over 4.4mn, according to new figures from the Fiber-to-the-Home Council.

The report also indicates a “substantial” increase in the number of North American homes passed by fibre networks, rising from 13.8mn in March 2008 to 15.2mn in March 2009, and adds that FTTH networks are now available to more than 13% of households in the region, with end-to-end fibre connections now being used by nearly 4% of the residential telecoms market.

A few comments:

First, the fact that this build-out has continued at such a strong clip even during the past year’s overall economic downturn is remarkable. Fiber deployment over the last-mile is an expensive CapEx proposition (one estimate: $817 per household) so the fact that this investment is holding up is welcome news.

Second, with so many policymakers discussing ways to spur broadband deployment, this news is a timely reminder that massive deployment is already taking place! Any new federal policies should at a minimum continue to emphasize the policies and incentives that are already working. As Hippocrates First Law of Medicine puts it, Above all, do no harm.

Compared with Japan, South Korea and the Scandanavian countries, the U.S. is still behind in its fiber optic deployment. But it’s equally important to recognize that we’re ahead of many other industrialized countries. More important, this progress in deploying the advanced lines necessary to handle the demands of tomorrow’s Internet remains strong.

What comes through from at least this first installment is that the state of U.S. broadband clearly isn’t at the level of Japan or Sweden.  But neither is it as bad as some doomsayers maintain:

“As of the end of 2008, 4.1 million homes in the United States had fiber service, which puts the United States right behind Japan, which has brought fiber directly to 8.2 million homes, according to the Fiber to the Home Council. Much of what is called fiber broadband in Korea, Sweden and until recently Japan, only brings the fiber to the basement of apartment buildings or street-corner switch boxes.”

In a nod to this recent fiber optic investment, Hansell notes that average U.S. broadband speeds are increasing and are roughly equal to the EU average.

What Hansell’s blog didn’t note (in fairness, it wasn’t really relevant) is that even in this current downturn, Europe is ratcheting up its broadband investment.

In France, the Industry Ministry set a goal last summer of having four million homes wired with fiber optic connections by 2012. Likely cost: about €4 billion.  Last fall, Finland announced a €200 million fiber optic deployment and this year, British Telecom announced it would wire every home prior to the London Olympics.

For America, as Hansell notes, the good news is that there is still plenty of innovation and deployment of new technologies.  But one look at other nations’ investments should be a reminder that we will not continue improving if the government starts to regulate tomorrow’s technologies.

Click here to read the full article.

Credit the growth of today’s high-speed Internet. The option of video-on-demand and one-click streaming have put lasting cracks in the DVD’s expensive and environmentally dubious business model that requires writing data to plastic discs, putting them in hard plastic cases, shrinkwrapping them and then trucking millions of them to stores across the country.

Meanwhile video-on-demand services rose 19 percent last year to about $1.4 billion, according Adams Media Research.

Of course as we’ve said before, the catch is that this growth puts huge and expensive strains on our communications system. The only affordable solution involves investment – a lot of it – in new technologies that make our networks faster and more resilient. (Even Japan, with its 100mb connections to the home, recognizes the importance of data prioritization across its networks to improve the user experience.)

The DVD will still be with us for years but the next-generation of entertainment is already emerging. Our challenge is maintaining the investment and development climate that allows us to take full advantage of this new opportunity.

• CNN.com reported 21 million video streams, including 1.3 million simultaneous streams. That’s about four times the level from last Election Day.
• MSNBC.com says it served 18.2 million video streams, including 9.1 million live streams.
• Content-delivery company Akami, which cached data for The Wall Street Journal and Viacom, among others, reported seven million simultaneous streams.

Now the lesson: The only reason the Net could handle this unprecedented level of use was the continued deployment ($24 billion invested last year alone) of next-gen systems designed for video streams and real-time apps.

As Congress considers broadband measures to jumpstart the economy, we hope they remember Tuesday and the need to support the private investment that made this success possible.

The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same — nobody is supposed to jump the line.

Vishesh Kumar and Christopher Rhoads, Wall Street Journal
December 15, 2008