Science Quote by Jon Postel

Postel is doing what the best infrastructure people do: warning you that your shiny new convenience is about to break everything upstream. The line reads like a calm technical aside, but the subtext is a quiet siren. “As soon as we got that higher speed access to the home” isn’t optimism; it’s inevitability. Give ordinary users a fatter on-ramp, and they will immediately try to drive the whole internet through it. The “tremendous crunch” isn’t theoretical congestion, it’s the predictable collision between last-mile ambition and core-network reality.

What makes the quote work is its reversal of where the drama is. Consumer tech culture loves the doorstep miracle: faster modems, better Wi-Fi, smoother streaming. Postel points to the less glamorous truth: the bottleneck migrates. Every upgrade at the edge becomes an obligation in the middle. “Backbones” is a revealing word choice, bodily and structural at once: the internet as something living that can be strained, even injured, if you don’t strengthen its spine.

The intent is also political in the small-p sense. “People really ought to be planning for that” is Postel’s gentle indictment of short-term thinking in telecom and policymaking: selling speed without funding the unsexy capacity, standards work, and coordination that make speed meaningful. Coming from one of the stewards of the early internet’s plumbing, it’s a forecast of today’s recurring cycle: bandwidth demand doesn’t arrive politely. It arrives all at once, as culture - video, sharing, always-on presence - finds whatever pipe you build and instantly asks for more.