Is There A Risk of Becoming Too Internet-Centric?
Rupert Murdoch will soon be making decisions on satellite expenditures for the Sky television/internet/movie offerings his company takes to the world. A satellite launch costs about £1 billion, last time I looked. If he can ram the content down the Internet pipes, it could save him money, considering how many satellites he has to maintain in low orbit.
BT (I am reliably informed) would dearly love to shed its role as maintainer of copper connections to homes and business. Mobile access to the Internet might allow them to do so. The Beeb might choose to cease terrestrial broadcast. Apple Iphone is configured for wireless VOIP, which could… well, you get the picture.
At what point do we have too many eggs in one basket and become hostage to the infrastructure of the Internet? I well know the history and how and why it was built. But if all information everywhere goes through it, even if capacity issues never arise, isn’t that tempting fate a bit?
June 30th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Governments might consider using their procurement power to increase the diversity of routes, operators, software etc to reduce this eggs-in-one-basket risk.
July 1st, 2007 at 7:30 am
Hi Ian,
Actually, I think a plan to mothball physical assets, such as was done with military airfields here and the surplus merchant fleet in the U.S., might work for this, but only if the planning starts now. This sort of feeds into what I think is the only real-world solution to the legacy application issue, which is some government support and direction plus incentives to affected private parties. What do you think?