There is a piece in today's Communications Daily [subscription required] concerning whether public policy is causing EU countries to fall behind in fiber deployment. I may have more to say about this in the future.
But I was really struck by this statement in the article: "Cisco forecasts that global Internet traffic will grow by 30
percent per year to 1.36 zettabytes by 2016, [DotEcon economist Christian] Koboldt said. That means that the
gigabyte equivalent of every movie ever made will cross the Internet every
three seconds, he said."
It is hard for the average person -- or at least an average Joe like me -- to even comprehend what a "zettabyte" means. But I do have a sense what it means to talk about the bandwidth required to handle every movie ever made crossing the Internet every three seconds.
And I have a good sense that it will be important to have in place public policies that provide sufficient incentives for broadband providers to invest sufficient capital to continue to build out high-capacity networks.
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