Say Hello to the Internet of AI

Every so often, I would notice that our upstream bandwidth consumption was going up. Average upload usage is growing 21.7% year over year, more than twice the rate of downstream growth. The network is finally tilting toward something symmetrical, after thirty years of being optimized to deliver television to couches. Every new piece of data from OpenVault made me wonder how AI would change the consumer internet. And as an old networking nerd, what really occupied my mind was how AI would impact the network itself. My assumption was that AI would accelerate this. Personal AI agents querying the cloud all day. Smart-home devices streaming sensor data. Wearables, cameras, robots, and eventually cars, every endpoint a continuous source of upload traffic. The next bandwidth hog wouldn’t be Netflix in reverse. It would be your house, talking constantly to a model (or models.) A lot of this is still wishful thinking. I realized I was on the wrong track because I was looking in the wrong…