Broadband industry lobbyists and PR departments have ceaselessly predicted a bandwidth crunch that never seems to arrive, usually because they're trying to justify a new policy or rate hike, stave off regulation or in the case of hardware vendors, sell network management hardware. While this stage play continues, techs and people studying these networks say everything is fine.

The Star Tribune has an interesting article on the research of Andrew Odlyzko, who tracks Internet growth from the University of Minnesota and notes that growth is actually slowing. Odlyzko makes all of his research data freely available at this website:While that's still significant, it's nowhere near the apocalyptic catastrophe being hoisted upon the public by think tankers with policy agendas. "Somehow, I get the feeling that the technology guys have a lot better handle on this than the lobbyists and the politicians," notes Mike Masnick over at Techdirt.