[w8rbt]

Great quote from the article, "The internet as we know it in the industrialized world is a product of an abundant energy supply, a robust electricity infrastructure, and sustained economic growth. It cannot survive if these conditions change."

Sort of like sending Morse Code over a radio hooked to a 9 volt battery. Twenty words per minute seems slow until that's all you have.

The other important point to take away from the article is that most of humanity is in slow/no internet regions.

[schiffern]

>The internet as we know it in the industrialized world is a product of an abundant energy supply, a robust electricity infrastructure, and sustained economic growth. It cannot survive if these conditions change.

I was going to run the numbers for Elon Musk's 4000 satellite low-latency global gigabit pizza-box phased-array rooftop antenna internet, but I think that's even more dependent on those conditions. SpaceX is shooting for a new hardware spin every 5 years.

[mikegioia]

    Musk's 4000 satellite low latency global gigabit
    pizza box phased array rooftop antenna internet

I don't think you can give a better description than that.

[Retric]

Many places with declining GDP still have great internet because it's just not that expensive. Also, bandwidth's utility is generally a log function. Don't forget the telegraph was valuable enough to run under sea and cross country cables starting in 1850 and that's ~10bits per second with several cables being run in the next few years.

By 1901 we had a global network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable... (all this for ~10–12 words per minute.)

[spacecowboy_lon]

The internet is not a high energy industry when compared to a steel or aluminum plant.

And the rest of the article is naive at best and seems to ignore that PTP radio has been used in telecoms for decades.

[pjc50]

"sustained economic growth" is the most likely of those to be interrupted, which is concerning. As is the extent to which we're dependent on free VC-funded ad-supported services.

[mkj]

I don't see a justification for "sustained economic growth" being a requirement?

[Natanael_L]

As long as bandwidth requirements don't grow too much, solar panels can keep most routers alive, and most of the hardware don't need much maintenance. So ever increasing profits isn't exactly a requirement.