I haven't read this article yet, but believe me, they want to shut down Internet badly. They've been planning (and building the infrastructure and testing it) for the past three years.
But you're quite right, they can't shut down the Internet completely, it will be there. But, the "national" Internet will be faster, and all official websites (news agencies, banks, etc.) will be forced to support it. I'm sure you won't believe it, but right now there's a cap for Internet access speed in Iran (128 Kbps: 128 Kilobits per second, or 16 KiloBytes per second). If you're a student or you can make a reasonable argument, you can go as high as 1 MBps (and an unmetered 1Mbps access costs about 130 dollars per month, so for most people it doesn't worth it). Now, imagine a cheap, 7 Mbps "national" Internet for everyone. The Internet can't compete with this new intranet...
"128 KiloBytes" per second is a 1Mbit connection... That's more than enough for most people unless you're a heavy video user. I think mine is about 8Mbit, but I doubt I'd notice if it dropped to 1Mbit.
I'm not arguing for the cap. I'm just confused that you think a 1Mbit connection is somehow comically slow?
Sorry. I don't know how I made that mistake... I meant 128 Kilobits per second (16 KiloBytes per second). The best you can get is 1 Megabits per second (128 KiloBytes per second).
I have a 256 Kbps connection. It's really, really slow. It took me 2 days to download OS X Lion from Mac App Store (about 3.5 GB).
I haven't read this article yet, but believe me, they want to shut down Internet badly. They've been planning (and building the infrastructure and testing it) for the past three years.
But you're quite right, they can't shut down the Internet completely, it will be there. But, the "national" Internet will be faster, and all official websites (news agencies, banks, etc.) will be forced to support it. I'm sure you won't believe it, but right now there's a cap for Internet access speed in Iran (128 Kbps: 128 Kilobits per second, or 16 KiloBytes per second). If you're a student or you can make a reasonable argument, you can go as high as 1 MBps (and an unmetered 1Mbps access costs about 130 dollars per month, so for most people it doesn't worth it). Now, imagine a cheap, 7 Mbps "national" Internet for everyone. The Internet can't compete with this new intranet...
[Edit] fix typo