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Bird Flu Pandemic Could Choke the Net
PetManimal writes "If a pandemic were to occur, many companies and organizations would ask their staffs to work from home. The impact of millions of additional people using the Internet from home might require individuals and companies to voluntarily restrain themselves from surfing to high-bandwidth sites, such as YouTube. If people didn't comply, the government might step in and limit Net usage. The scenario is not far-fetched: last year at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, a group of telecom and government officials conducted a pandemic exercise based on a hypothetical breakout of bird flu in central Europe. The results weren't pretty." From the latter article: "'We assumed total absentees of 30% to 60% trying to work from home, which would have overwhelmed the Internet,' said [one] participant. 'We did not assume that the backbone would be gone, but that the edge of the network... would be overwhelmed... The conclusion [of imminent collapse] was not absolute, and the situation was not digitally simulated, but the idea of everyone working from home appears untenable,' [he] said."
Why would people work from home because of bird flu? This is the most ridiculous piece of tabloid style nonsense I've seen on Slashdot for some time.
I remember you couldn't get anywhere on news sites during the 9/11 attacks on the WTC; even Google was horrendously slow. Non news sites all started relaying the news so that people could get hold of information.
:-).
Working from home in times past relied on dialling direct to a modem pool at the office. The telephone network could probably handle a fair amount of teleworking like that, particularly if the old school model of connecting, uploading and downloading email & files, and then disconnecting was adopted.
If there were a pandemic, I doubt that people would necessarily be surfing YouTube. It'd be no loss to me to not have that kind of site available anyway
Sounds a lot like scaremongering to me. In the event of a pandemic, net habits would change beyond recognition, so mentioning high bandwidth leisuretime sites seems a bit strange. It's not out of the question that certain services could be restricted though... but you can't analyse current surfing habits and apply them to bandwidth use when teleworking. If I'm working from home I'm not on YouTube, and use very little bandwidth.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
are by far a larger and more present danger than a flood caused ... it chocked a few networks.
by a human epidemic. just remember the mssql virus from a few
years ago
come on, with all the downloads and botnets running from a home PC,
will ANYONE AT ALL notice the few extra clicks from the humans?
What makes these people think that workers don't waste time on YouTube when they're at work?
You do understand, right, that such a pandemic would last for many weeks at least, and probably many months? It's great that you have the savings (in cash, at hand) and the supplies to not have to worry about interacting with the outside world for months on end ... but most people would still be seriously hoping to preserve their career and make sure that the company or organization they work for is still intact and able to cut them a paycheck when the dust settles.
This sort of thing isn't like a hurricane or a 9/11. Just read up on the 1918 pandemic. "Heading for the hills" sounds great... which hills are you going to head to? What food, potable water, and shelter will you and a few tens of millions of other people (who will be bringing the virus with them) be using once you get there? If it gets into human-to-human pandemic mode, you're right that YouTube won't mean much of anything (especially because Google will probably just shut the damn thing down) - but I think that the normal keeping-the-family-alive stuff is also going to be a lot more challenging than most people are prepared to even consider. Of course, any preparation that includes stopping people from congregating in public or that regulates where and how you line up for food will just be seen by the shrill idiots as more of Teh Evil Fashionists taking power. No-win. Can't prepare most people, and can't save 'em, either. Oh well.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Agreed. Instead of surfing the net from work, everyone will be surfing the net from home. All the "Net traffic has been shifting to the suburbs" talk is just stating obvious: have you had a look at flickr or youtube or *puke* myspace lately? Plus, anyone on here who claims they've never used bittorrent is lyin' like a politician. All that crap (and other streaming media) gets blocked at work by a lot of companies, so if folks vpn in from home to work, it'll stay blocked.
Speculation tag indeed; I hate journalism when you don't have a story.
Anybody remember 9/11?
Sure, its my birthday, happens every year. Best day of the year!
I can't be the only one that found many services to be borderline useless that day. Our backbone wasn't even maxed out and I still issues using VPNs between our offices (which weren't maxed out either). IM, various websites (the news ones), IRC. They were all sluggish and non-responsive at times.
Oh, the terror attack thing in 2001? Now I got you.
OK, what ~3,000 people died that day and your poor IM, VPNs and web access was slowed down.
But screw that, that does not even register on the radar of a pandemic. I would guess a pandemic is what ~20-30% of the population dead? So ~1 to 2 billion people dead?
And we are concerned about how this will hurt the internet?
Fuck you people. I'm worried who is going to pump my gas to fill up my Hummer, and how much a kilo of cocaine will cost when this pandemic happens.
Priorities people. Think.