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."

Comments

And a butterfly could cause a hurricane

[pifactorial]

Seriously, I think we need a "speculation" tag...

Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane

[sarathmenon]

And worser, this is extreme shorthandedness of the telcos. They've been false marketing broad band connections for years. Where they have a 1mbps speed, the telcos consistently say that they provide 5mpbs (with the fineprints about bandwidth sharing, actual dedicated availability buried inside). All this is fine when the customer uses the connection for light speed surfing, and for 3 or 4 hours a day - the telcos can absorb the end user expectations without any degradation of performance.

But at some point of time reality has to sink in. If people start using the connections in the ways they were promised, ISPs will feel the heat, and a sudden lack of bandwidth. All this FUD should be directed back at them, they should get to fix the problems caused by them. Asking for more funding is a lame excuse - they should not provide something which they don't have in the first place.

FIrst post

[killa62]

no wonder i got it, everyone else's net is choked

Bah!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I thought it was a serious exercise, but perusing the second article:

...war game, held in January in Davos, Switzerland, by the World Economic Forum and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.

[emp mine] Double bah!

A bunch of telco management consultants, playing a "war game" (yeesh) to drum up business (Oh wow, lets recommend investments in Telco infrastructure!)

In fact, the second page of the second article even states the obvious:

"You can see the Internet as a self-regulating supply-and-demand mechanism," Froutan said. "The more people use it, the slower it gets, so the less people use it. If 10,000 people go to a site that normally supports 100 users, 9,000 will give up, while the other thousand will get very slow connectivity but will keep going until they get the job done."

Better to bury it on the second page hey? Might spoil the sensationalist headlines a little.

What the hell is this doing in slashdot's science section?

Absolute nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs are already well able to throttle usage so as to manage demand in excess of capacity. In the listed scenario all that would be needed would be management to limit the use of p2p, usenet and certain kinds of streaming and the problem.

The real problem in such a scenario is that most workers would simply not be able to work from home - they and their employers wont be ready or equiped to do so.

Only affects windows users

[MSRedfox]

Thankfully Linux is immune to Bird viruses.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because of likely recommended or enforced government quarantines or other advice for people to avoid unnecessary contact with each other in an attempt to try to stop or slow the spread of the disease, which will be airborne and spread at places where people congregate?

Just a guess.

Re:Why

[timmarhy]

because most epidemics are spread via work places and public area's.

Oh Noes!

[DevelopersDevelopers]

Yes, this could really be a pandemic for all those of us currently connected to the internet only by IP over Avian Carriers.

Re:Why

[Bronster]

Indeed, you probably picked up apostrophiti's there.

Re:I really can't believe I'm reading this...

[jonoton]

Believe it.....

The institute I work for will be sequestered by the government in the event of a pandemic.

We've ring fenced large quantities of diskspace, and other resources to cope with the demands that are likely to be put on us in this event. However the one resource that's going to be vital we have no control over - the ability for our staff to work from home. The last few months I've been asked repeatedly if our remote access solutions will cope with 90% of the staff working from home, the answer has been 'if the internet copes'.

It doesn't take much contention on a DSL circuit to make video conferencing or IP telephony unusable, theses are the sorts of collaboration tool that will be required in this event.

It's only sensible for people to be planning for this scenario, it's something that can only be controlled by the telcos, and they won't do anything unless it is mandated by government.

Ironic...

[evilviper]

Wow... How's that for ironic?

A chicken is going to choke the internet...

Must... not... make... "In Soviet Russia..." joke...

Re:9/11 caused net stoppage

[Bastard of Subhumani]

I reasoned that the BBC's website probably wouldn't be heavily flooded with North American traffic, and that it would be the middle of the night on that side of the pond.

The 9/11 attacks happened in the morning (local time), which is early afternoon in the UK.

Re:9/11 caused net stoppage

[Eivind]

I remember it too. The Internet held up remarkably well. And did indeed route-around damage, in the sense that when channels failed, they where made up for by literally thousands and thousands of mirrors and alternative routes.

• Thousands of people spontaneously decided to mirror important sites that experienced problems.
• IRC-channels got hooked up to major news-sources (even those normally only for subscribers)
• Email surged trough the tubes (Hah!), for a few hours the majority of email in the world was *NOT* spam.
• Hell, even MUDs and MMORPGs spontaneously converted into information-exchange centres.

Internet was severly strained in some areas of the USA. So people routed around it. I personally helped getting 3 people living in NY get a decent net-connection, by *modem* to a Norwegian modem-pool. Yes, sure it was 28.8. Yes sure it cost $0.10/minute. There's some situations where youre honestly *happy* to pay $6/hour for surfing the net at modem-speed. (I know, in some areas phone-service was also spotty)

It was impressive. I think, on that day I realized the net had grown up. When disasters strike, and people go turn on their laptops, you realize this thing ain't just a toy anymore.

Re:Why

[ScentCone]

Bird flu is the new Y2K

Ah, here we go. Look, what do you suppose would have happened to the economy if no one had done any Y2K remediation? I was very busy in advance of that roll-over, and a good number of the clients I worked with would have been out of business without substantial system upgrades. Not just BIOS patches, but extensive code reviews and fixes to giant, sprawling, interdependent systems. For companies that operate (as so many do) on a just-in-time basis for goods and materials, even a week's downtime could mean bankruptcy. Multiply that times thousands of businesses, and you've got a major hit. Some of those are companies that supply medical materials, or deal with food processing, or deal with fuel. You surely aren't one of those people who thought it all could have been simply left well enough alone, are you? I directly experienced work that, left undone, would have resulted in financial ruin for organizations employing thousands of people and delivering important products and services to millions of people.

275 cases of it out of 8 billion people does not a pandemic make

And right up until the flu pandemic of 1918 killed millions of people, it wasn't a pandemic either. Do you approach everything in life with a "we'll deal with it after it happens" strategy? Sometimes that's not as effective. Like, when you can't pay your employees after 1/1/2000, or you're dead from a highly contagious virus and whatnot.