Recap of IIA Symposium The Exaflood: Finding Solutions, Part I

On May 22, the Internet Innovation Alliance convened some of the brightest minds in broadband to discuss the exaflood -the overload of digital data that threatens to swamp the Internet's infrastructure, resulting in congestion and lost innovation for consumers and businesses.  We also addressed how the quickly and probable it would be for attaining the goal of getting truly high speed broadband to all Americans.  And of course, who pays.  By way of summary, these convened experts agreed that there was indeed an exaflood, fueled by the large and growing amount of data flowing over the Internet as a result of video and other applications that were not conceived a few years ago.  The panelists also agreed that there was a huge and promising future for broadband applications and services, but that the financing and business models are not yet clear for infrastructure providers.  All agree that policy makers can have significant impact on the market place and how it responds to the coming explosion of internet traffic.