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How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?
lopy writes "First Google claimed the internet infrastructure won't scale to provide an acceptable user experience for online video. Then some networking experts predict that a flu pandemic would bring the internet to it's knees and lead to internet rationing. We used to think that bandwidth would always increase as needed, but what would happen if that isn't the case? How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage? Would you be willing to voluntarily limit your internet usage if necessary? Could you live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access?"
I guess I'd have to stop reloading slashdot every 10 seconds.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?
Simple, I wouldn't put up with it. I would demand that they make technologies that do scale. With all the breakthroughs that we've seen lately in storage, CPU power and bandwidth on I2, I just can't believe these kind of statements. These kind of fear tactics I believe are meant to help drive up the price of bandwidth when people are driving it down.
GET STUFFED! I moved to the boonies and put up with dialup for 2 weeks, then satelite for 6 months till I finally got on the supernet.
You can pry my bandwidth from my cold dead hands!
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
We get what we want, and everyone else goes without. Nobody here cares if Nepal is cut off, right? Right.
The number of people that will go home and play real-time online games during a pandemic is the best threat!
But on a serious note, this is why the PC was invented. Remember?!?!? To detach us from SkyNet!
Hello!
We need more software that can work in an offline or semi-offline fashion. NOT more integrated software.
HELLO!!!!!!
"Could you live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access?"
I Live in the United States you insensitive clod!
bandwidth is an artificial limitation to a point (ie: you can't have 100 people soaking up a 100MBit line at 100MBit each and expect people to be happy). But the ISP's are limiting everything on purpose to insanely slow speeds in comparison to what they can actually do.
re: I worked for an ISP until recently.
They're just cheap when it comes to actually upgrading the infrastructure.
Did 9/11 choke the Internet? I'd say that was a heck of a lot more of an immediate go-to-your-computer-for-news crisis...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
We gotta save bandwidth!
I can remember ten years ago being told that you have to trim every extraneous character from messages, refrain from quoting more than one sentence, and keep your sig to three lines, all because we were worried that we were gobbling up precious bandwidth.
Now I routinely e-mail 5 meg attachments and download DVDs and movies (PD of course).
Why am I not worried?
Three Squirrels
No, I wouldn't curb my internet usage, I'm an american, damnit, I take what I want, when I want it, and how I want it, and ain't nobody stoppin me.
Suck a lemon?
Return to text based services to minimize my bandwidth usage
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Short term be more patient. /var/cache/apt/packages as an open bittorrent for others.
Large files would likely switch to bittorrent like downloads.
I wouldn't mind if debian/ubuntu left
As long as the packages are securely signed I don't see a huge issue with it.
Renewed focus on efficiency, more compression.
Look at the topology of the Internet. The tier 1 ISPs (Sprint, MCI, etc.) will upgrade their backbone pipes, and the same will happen in a trickle-down effect, as it always has.
Seriously...this is a pretty lame attempt at a "What if" scare-tactic article!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
...cheap and plentiful broadband access. At least in the USA since we are 12th in the world according to an earlier ./ article. It is true too. Just look at Japan or South Korea. For the same cost as our 8megabit cable modem we could have 100megabit feeds in either of those countries. And not only that, but pretty much anywhere in the country as well.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
No i wouldnt voluntarily limit my bandwidth usage. but as the demand for bandwidth rises and if you are right and the supply cant keep up, market forces will make the price rise. When that happens I will make a choice but it wont be voluntary it will be asimple cost benefit analysis.
We already saw a regional bandwidth shortage with the Asia cable cut last year.
If the crisis lasts more than a few days, I expect national and local leaders to order ISPs to throttle bandwidth and reserve enough for "emergency services." Email and low-bandwidth web sites will get through but there may be annoying delays. It will feel like dialup. Youtube? Fuggetaboutit. Since it's a crisis most movie downloaders will stop for the duration once their government leaders tell them to stop. Viruses that automatically swap files will still be a problem, as will people who forget to turn off their torrent programs.
In areas without local outages, there will be a high demand for video from local TV news stations.
10 years from now this won't be nearly as much of an issue since a lot of "major" sites will have "regional caches," making much of the end-user-generated traffic truly local or at least regional.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Spammers to stop soaking up bandwidth with their stupid jpeg emails, I think that would be a start.
All they're doing is playing to the audience in saying "we need you." This is not a problem for which there are not solutions. In the case of this article it's a solution (Google partnering with cable companies) in search of a problem (lack of bandwidth).
people would trim those stupid html backgrounds from their email, stop sending the page instead of a link to it, cut out Flash on web pages,
and we'd finally decide to cut spam at the source instead of letting it clog the tubes up to our mail reader before trashing it.
I think the answer is obvious: You just build more tubes.
Maybe this resource could have a price applied to it and thus we could use an amount that made sense for us given the cost of the resource and the resources available to us. Perhaps, we could pay for this resource in a medium of common exchange. In otherwords, because bandwidth like almost every other resources is scarce and has alternative uses we should use the market to allocate it efficiently. Pricing it will avoid any sort of bandwidth "shortage".
'ping -b 10.255.255.255 -s 65537' accompanied by a scream in the other room improved my network bandwidth.
back in the 1980s people communicated via bulletin board systems over 300 baud modems
...and still are satisfactory for our requirements, if you consider what you actually "need" to do on the web: communicate via text
if it is true that the internet won't scale in the scenarios outlined above, it won't scale only in a specific context: the context of bps hungry applications
ok: so you won't be able to watch the latest youtube laugh video. whoop de friggin doo
you'll still be able to communicate, plain text emails, simple html pages, etc.
in other words, applications that use very little bandwidth, that, until a few years ago, was more than satisfactory for our requirements, will do just fine
no MMORPG, no video, maybe no audio: oh well
remember: the internet was originally conceived to survive a nuclear strike
i think the internet (as we need it, maybe not as we want it) will survive youtube + WoW + bittorrent + huge spam hordes, or the Flu Armageddeon Telecommute Scenario (tm), just fine
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?
I'd stockpile porn and make a killing selling DVDs to all the geeks in the neighbourhood suffering from withdrawal..
Jst rembr 2 spl rite. Evry chr cnts!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't do any serious work on the internet as it stands. It's basically just a source of mindless entertainment, like what TV is for the less nerdy masses. Every now and then over my summer break I spend a month at a country property my parents own. It doesn't have a phone line, or a computer and they've only recently bothered getting a TV. Anyway, whenever I'm there I don't miss technology at all, in fact I enjoy the fact that there's no temptation to waste half my life sitting in front of a screen.
:p.
So yeah, I'd probably just end up doing more "real world" activities. Join the local archery club, do more bushwalking, go to the beach more etc.
The only serious effect it would have would be that I would no longer have a convenient place to publish my photography and make it available to the masses, therefore subjecting my family and friends to it more
This is a silly topic. A more relevant one would be, "How would you handle a fresh water crisis?". I find it hard to believe that ISPs at all levels can't or won't continue to add bandwidth. Internet use has exploded in the past decade, and the ISP's have kept up. As long as people are willing to pay, usage will continue to grow, and ISP's will continue to provide access to make money.
Now, all that being said, I still wouldn't build a business that relies on the Net quite yet. We're still in the infancy phase of this new phenomenon, and there might be some serious hiccups in the near future (liability problems for free, open wireless connections will happen very soon, for example).
I don't respond to AC's.
I'd send special forces to permanently take out all spammers worldwide. Voilà! Global bandwidth usage goes down by 50% or more.
(Of course, I favor doing this today, regardless of any crisis.)
This might seem a little silly, but during a viral pandemic or any other event that causes massive social upheaval you may actually have more important things to worry about than checking your myspace.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
There is no way I'm giving up my precious bandwidth! They'll have to pry my speedy 28.8k modem from my cold, dead fingers!!!!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
OMG - such bullshit. Run out of bandwidth? Hahahahahaha. Ok, which telecommunication giant started this thread?
Reminds me of when we had the energy crisis in California. Energy Companies (and Democrat party) "Ok slaves, conserve power! We don't have enough to go around! Mother earth may punish us if we don't conserve a little! - do your part to help us make an extra buck!"
If there were a bandwidth shortage, ISPs would probably raise their rates. I would cancel my service and steal internet access from somewhere. Not only will I not live without broadband, I WILL NOT pay more money for less bandwidth. Progress or death, I refuse to take a step back.
Frag 'em all...
Seriously, this?
We're discussing what would happen if we failed to lay more and more fiber as needed?
Are we really this fat and bloated our new fear is what would happen if rich content and media couldn't be downloaded on demand?
Honestly?
Two stoners sitting in a park late at night would come up with a better conversation piece that "What if we ran our of bandwidth, dude?".
Is anyone really stimulated by this?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
In case of a bandwith crisis, Microsoft will have a 5 gb automatic update patch ready.
God spoke to me.
Hell, boys and girls, thanks to this robust economy some of us are afflicted with, some of us are already making do with limited/no broadband access. Its just not in the budget.
My home computer already lives on a dialup diet.
I wouldn't notice a change
Since when are emergency services hosted on the public Internet? Who thought this was a good idea?
.. You created it, you fix it !!!
Just like they do today?
Some company makes it so I can download HD videos straight to my computer. But god it's slow on my old 1.5/384 DSL. So I go to my phone company and say, "hey, can I get something faster?" They then hook me up with 10/1 fiber or some such at a higher price. Meanwhile, they go and buy more bandwidth from their upstream providers. The upstream providers buy more pipes to connect to their peers, etc. Simple supply and demand.
Invariably fluctuations will cause bandwidth, latency, etc, to fluctuate, but it's in the interest of network companies to minimize that to keep customers (at least where competition exists).
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I know it's really expensive to upgrade infrastructure to provide extra bandwidth, but I can't believe people would pay for slow internet and I can't believe some company wouldn't put in the investment if it meant stealing all those millions of angry people whose ISP is outdated with clogged pipes.
Kill the torrents. Shutdown Micro$oft Updates. End of problem.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
If more ISPs would drop the "all you can eat unless you exceed the secret cap" plans and adopt real $/TB pricing, we'd be a lot better off and ISPs could better plan for growth.
Here's my "ideal" price plan:
Minimum consumer package: 1 month, enough bandwidth for 95% of consumers, enough email addresses for 95% of consumers - probably 5 or 10, a web page for every email address, and 100 MB or more of disk space, security software, parental controls, and consumer-grade customer service all for a low price.
Additional charges for additional services, but not more than 2x the charges for 2x the services. In other words, if it's $30/month for basic service and you use twice your allocated bandwidth, you pay no more than $60. If you paid the full $60 you'd get twice as much disk space and additional email and web addresses for the month also.
Uber-users that keep their 6MB/sec connection going full blast day-in-day-out will be billed at the actual usage, around 15.5TB/month. If that's 10x the "95% of consumers" limit, they get to pay $300/month, but they get 1GB of disk space and 50 or 100 email and web addresses and customer service to match.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
another "b" to band and another "d" to width"... More bbandwiddth is better.
Or, I would buy more of those fatter pipes that can handle 5,000 TB/PSI.... hehehhe you know, the kind that Senator or Senator's writing staff invis..., umm, envisions
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Would you be willing to voluntarily limit your internet usage if necessary?
Yes, on two conditions - First, such "limiting" occurs on a fair, rotating schedule such that I can surf unimpeded for at least two four-hour blocks a day. And second, that my broadband provider drops my monthly fee by a proportional amount (eg, for only 8hrs a day, it should drop to a third of the current price).
Since I don't see either of those as likely (especially not the second point), I think we can safely answer "no way in hell" to the initial question.
How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage?
"Global bandwidth shortage" really amounts to a meaningless phrase, boiling down to one of three concepts: Do we mean the "last miles" have saturated? If so, upgrade them, entirely a local ISP problem (and changing ISPs might help). Do we mean the backbones have reached capacity? If so, upgrade them, entirely a problem of the Tier 1 and 2 providers (and changing ISPs might help). Do we mean a few key endpoints (such as Google) have reached capacity? They'd damned well better upgrade to handle the load, or people will naturally switch to their competition.
So in two of those three scenarios, the right answer amounts to "call my ISP and bitch loudly".
Yahoo ground to a halt, literally, couldn't refresh. Most news sites were pretty difficult to get a hold of.
It was congestion, clearly. I know I was working at an IBM hosting facility and it wasn't a good day for us.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I'm worried about a viagra shortage.
If slashdotters don't show at least as much skepticism about this as they do about global warming, my faith in the rationality of man will be forever lost. The loss of cheap plentiful bandwidth would be... bothersome. Only to be solved in a few years by investment in more capacity by the networks. If we are going to worry ourselves about future crises, let us make them crises worth worrying about, m'kay?
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
The last paragraph should say 6Mb/month and 15.5Tb/month. Unless you are in South Korea, where MB and TB might be correct.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Consumer-To-Consumer. That can save bandwidth, and scales well. Now you should think of some way to make the "content" unwatchable... I mean, uncopyable, and you're done!
There can only meaningfully be a bandwidth issue between the endpoints of a transaction.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Wait ... where did you find cheap bandwidth? I need some of that!
or lynx. :)
No flash, no popups, no pics, no spyware. Just text.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Back in the early '80s and probably for decades earlier, AT&T would prioritize dial-tone during times of emergency or other busy times. If you had a "special" line you got dial-tone immediately. Otherwise, you had to wait until someone hung up.
Other utilities also had "priorities" for repairs or rationing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Due to some unfortunate divorce circumstances and wacky judge's decisions and the associated financial repercussions, I was forced to live a little bit "off the grid" in a cottage for awhile; a challenge indeed, with four children. I had no running water (I carried in every ounce I used, and heated it with a coleman propane heater), composting toilet, and the only high speed available was via satellite. (I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Direcway.) Anyhow, when Hurricane Juan hit the Maritimes, power was out, phone lines and internet was down, roads were blocked.
:) Due to flakey power at the cottage, I had a generator, so I had power, lights, etc. when Juan hit. Fireplace and propane for heat, no problem. I had a water supply carted in, heated by propane, so I was the only one getting hot showers. And with the satellite internet (linked to middle america), I had no interruptions in my internet service, while everyone else was down for a week or two. I kept working without a hiccup. It was a bit ironic, that this down-to-earth living was impacted so little by a disaster like this, even in high tech ways.
:)
My "off the grid" living was barely impacted
But in the end, such living had more benefits in a spiritual and gratitude terms. I'll never flush a toilet or take a long hot shower again, without being very thankful.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I love my tubes, but if the internets get clogged it might even take a day for an internet that I send to one of my friends to get untangled with all that stuff floating around. We have to do something before it's too late!
Allow everybody to copy everything and pass it on! Would mean the end of DRM, hihi.
Establish the death penalty for convicted spammers. Crisis averted, next issue.
start a video blog about my growing withdrawal issues.
So now that is cleared up, what would we do?
If there was a flu pandemic the last thing on my mind would be internet access.. What a lame topic. Give me a break.
"I'm sooooo sick and my family is sick to. We all feel like crap and might die... but what makes it worse is the fact that my internet access is now rationed and I can't get my stock quotes or my bittorrents. Oh the misery... oh the horror..."
I'd dust off the vcr and box of VHS pr0n and eliminate the need for the internet altogether.
It's really not a difficult problem. It's just that bandwidth has been so cheap, links so fast, and ever expanding, that there's been no motivation until recently.
/. will be in huge demand to work out solutions.
First: QoS. Edge routers can do it all. Make sure each group, sub group, sub-sub group (etc) gets only an even share of the available bandwidth, then downgrade speeds as needed.
Second: Caching proxies can make a huge difference as well. In this day and age, with incredibly high-capacity hard drives being dirt cheap, it's unbelievable that every ISP doesn't already have caching proxies with dozens of terabytes of data stored.
Third: Multiple speeds. Right now, it's just as fast for me to download an ISO from the other side of the planet, as it is to download it from the data center a few blocks away. ISPs need to change their bandwidth rules, so that traffic over the backbone is limited to whatever speed (eg. 756k) but traffic that doesn't exit their own network is unlimited. It certainly gives huge incentives for people to actively try to use their ISP's caching proxy listed above. It will keep the vast majority of P2P traffic in-network, as you can download 90% of the file from your neighbor more quickly than 10% of the file over the internet. This may just happen naturally, as 802.11 becomes more popular, and it's faster to download most large files from your neighbors than from your ISP's wireless router (ie. the internet).
And finally, but perhaps more importantly, we should finally fix TCP. Using dropped packets to regulate traffic flow is pure nonsense, caused by a historical fluke. Purpose-made congestion notification (like source quench) would result in much higher utilization of existing links, nearly to their maximum. Unlike the current system, communications wouldn't go from perfectly fine, to utterly impossible, when line congestion reaches a certain threshold.
Hell, I like the idea. When throwing bandwidth at these problems no longer works, most people on
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I could severly cut down on my bandwidth usage simply by going to http://www.slashdot.org/palm as opposed to the usual front page.
622677120
Seriously, if it is just for awhile...like say for example some disaster. I would go outside for awhile, write a few programs that I've been meaning to get to, etc.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
You see the Internet is a series of tubes. It's not like a big truck you can just dump everything on.
Limiting my access to a website hosted in the same city I'm in won't free up bandwidth for someone across the globe (unless they're also trying to access said website). How about we call it what it is, a lack of capacity in specific geographical areas? And while we're at it, make a few mirrors of Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe wouldn't hurt.
I guess I'd have to stop idly browsing for meaningless garbage from time to time. Jaysus, the tone of this article makes it sound like bandwidth is the new water.
What is it that you do on the Internet that's SO valuable that it just couldn't stand the test of rationing? Aside from online businesses, I believe that the importance of the Internet is wildly overstated in today's office. I'm a tech writer and our ISP shit the bed the other day -- we were without any Internet service whatsoever for two days (but still had company internal e-mail, sadly). We're still in business! Can you believe it?
I'm willing to bet that 99.7% of the world would get along just fine without this Internet-thing, or if they had to severely decrease consumption. Maybe, just maybe, they'd even get a tan.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
I was assuming links/lynx and/or pine/elm. (IIRC, links is actually better than lynx.)
I actually still use pine. First time I used elm was around 1988 or so. Only had one other friend with an e-mail account, though. I used lynx back in the day when I only had dial-up. I've since done a few things with links where I wanted some automation control. (Haven't touched it in several years, however.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Who is it here that has this wonderful siggy? "In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 2000s it triumphed over democracy."
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I'm a telecom SE guy, and I can tell you right now that this is bullshit. 90% of the fibre installed in North America is not currently in use, and is in fact locked down by treaties between the telcos and the US government because everyone was afraid it'd cause such a stock market crash that we'd be in 1932 all over again...which was bullshit, but either way, there will NOT be a bandwidth crisis in our lifetimes.
Could you live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access?
I have neither cheap or plentiful broadband access, thanks to American style "competition." The ones holding all the marbles are too busy trying to figure out how to lock the customer in rather than compete with one another.
How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage?
Allow the market to set the price of bandwidth. Duh!
--fatboy
how can they say it doesn't scale? back in 2000 i was stuck on 56kbps, now i'm sitting on 24mbps, a factor of 300x faster in 7 years. i'd say it scales pretty fucking well. once ftth is wide spread i could be sitting on gbits/sec.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If it was to happen (the risk of that isn't somethink one should worry about) I would get along just fine. Most of what I do on a daily basis over the internet can be done with a dialup modem.
I reckon most people are "addicted to the internet"; They have access to something that they percieve as a need, and to fill that need they need more of it (take warez, music, video, porn etc.) and faster connections to fill the need.
You might want the net or video/whatever over the net, but you don't need it.
And if the internet was to "break down", there is still old tech That Just Work tm, or you will get private or corporate networks to fill the void. BBS anyone?
The internet is a luxury, the world can and will survive without it.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Many government web sites, many news web sites, particularly those run by news organizations that cooperate with governments in making official announcements, any internet usage needed by any utility or other entity for the purpose of maintaining essential services. Examples of the latter might be a web site to report utility outages. If your telephone stops working the phone company would like to know. Web sites by airports and airlines that announce changed flight information also count, as would at least 1 official weather-information web site. Also, internet connectivity used by hospitals for urgent patient care qualify. I can think of many other examples.
Those users would get priority in any rationing scenario.
My downloading War of the Worlds from NetFlix doesn't count.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some organizations already limit their users bandwidth, for example the college I attend limits all traffic (less operating system updates, but you have to get special permission for anything else) to 700 Mb total in and outbound daily. Granted, it's a small college, but it was put into place to both allow for the person who just thinks computers are for this new-fangled thing called e-mail to access when they need to at a reasonable speed and to discourage "illegal file-sharing programs". If we had similar restrictions worldwide, I think I'd get by. (Pretty simple, just spoof a MAC address of someone already registered using DHCP and you get their IP address, voila! More Bandwidth!) There will always be ways to bypass the system, as long as there is a reason to in someone's mind and a strong enough will to.
Since a shortage isn't likely to happen why don't we have fun with this fictional situation? Track down all spammers put a thermite grenade on each of their servers and soot the bastards. That will free up close to 30% of whats wasted today. Tomarrow go after all online advertising the same way.
I seriously wonder if the scare mongers who put this stuff out have ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
We don't have a bandwidth shortage. We have a few big telecoms sitting on something like elevnty hojillion gigabit-miles of intercity dark fiber that nobody wants to pay for, and cable operators with massive bandwidth in the last mile capping connection speeds because they're too cheap to pay the telecoms for more upstream bandwidth.
If the government wanted to do something about this "shortage" they could solve it pretty easily by ordering the telcos and ISP to either light up the unused fiber and raise consumer connection speeds across the board or immediately repay all the tax breaks and grants that we have handed out over the last 10 years to pay for fast, cheap, universal broadband that they have thus far failed to deliver.
0 1 - just my two bits
I guess IP over carrier pigeon would be out.
Their they're doing there hair.
I love Bush bashing
Surely the correct way to deal with the situation would be to:
1. Condemn some cyber-terrorists responsible for attacking US websites, spilling us bandwidth.
2. Attack a country with a ccTLD not related to the originating "cyber-terrorists" but rich in bandwidth reserves. Terrify the population with assertions about the Code of Mass Destruction, with testimony provided by Bill Gates.
3. Launch operating "Shock and Awe" with Microsoft as a major private contractor. Bring it on!
4. Plunder the reserves and wonder why the Code of Mass Destruction can't be found.
5. Make noble statements about the fight to install cyber democracy.
6. As mass hackings occur across the country, recommit to fighting the terrorists against the tides of public opinion and target another country allegedly creating Code of Mass Destruction.
7. Await cyber Armageddon!
I've seen people posting "you dont _really_need_ MMORPG, streaming audio/video" .
Those people can fuck off and switch back to dialup.
I am certainly not gonna give up my bandwidth.
From my home I have vpn's connected to 4 remote locations. Video confrencing and shared whiteboards are used on a daily to weekly basis, and VOIP is used almost non-stop. From anywhere in the world, I have full audio-video communication with anyone at those location.
I LOVE the technology, I LOVE my 10Mbit internet connection.
My family lives very far away, without audio/video communication i would only get to see them once a year, and I moved around alot while growing up so many of my good friends also live far away.
[ VPN + 10Mbit internet + Streaming audio/video ] has changed my life.
when I get home at the end of the day, I call my brother on skype, video loads up. skype is on auto-answer, so it picks up and i can see him 6 feet away playing xbox-live, i speak loudly into the mic "Hey bro!" he looks over at the camera quickly waves yells " hey! give me 5 minutes" and continues playing. meanwhile over the vpn, I upload some photos i took at lunch to the server at his house. then using vnc i remote into his system and import them into picasa for him. 5 minutes later he shows up and we start chatting. while chatting we see my sister sign into skype, so we start a confrence call and she shows us some new purse she baught.
My brothers in california, sisters in pennsylanvia, and i'm in canada.
Without internet we would be reduced to an expensive long distance phone calls, and snail mailing CD's with photos.
I will not surrender my bandwidth.
How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage?
With all this new time on my hands I'd go out and kill more people. Less people, more bandwidth. Problem solved.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It is telling that nobody suggested porn rationing as a solution to BW trouble...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
A LOT of companies build out an absolute ton of fiber during the bubble. To this day much of those networks remain dark. The whole idea that we need to get rid of net neutrality is a total boondoggle.
Downloading the internet, so when the normal one goes down, i can still use the backup one. 200Gb HDD should hold all the non-commercial info.
Blah! there its the solution! remove all ads from the internet.
There's no bandwidth shortage or any prospect of one. The scare talk about one is just propaganda from the backbone owner cartel trying to get even more government subsidy than the billions already shoveled on them in "broadband investments", fake taxes, tax immunity, and every other telco/cableco handout they've collected like gold rings over the past century.
Just ask these telco/cableco backbone masters whether they'll cut back the crapola TV channels they want to flood our homes with (without any regulation like that which controlled them in broadcast) to preserve the Internet bandwidth we all prefer. I bet suddenly they'll find all kinds of ways to ensure we keep our "Internet dialtone". When a bandwidth shortage threatens them, rather than serves them, I'm sure it will disappear instantly: like vapor.
--
make install -not war
1 OC-192 = 10 Gbps
1 Fiber Running 40 Wavelengths = 400 Gbps
1 Fiber Running 160 Wavelengths? = 1600 Gbps
And I'll forget about those OC-768s for now.
On most fiber routes they have so damn much unused capacity that its not close to a crisis.
If you look at Level 3 in particular, they have been buying up competitors to help improve their pricing ability. There is no shortage, other than one they'd like to create.
Now, lighting this fiber up costs lots of money. If you can make it worth someones while, I'm certain it can be arranged.
Supply and demand is an amazing concept.
My workplace has a website frequented by thousands daily. The splash page for this website is the main entry point and it is a whopping 1.23 MB of crap. Why? good old 03.swf eats 1.02 MB of the breakdown, while images take up most of the remainder. There is only half of a kilobyte of real text on the page and that is precisely the text people come to look at.
The MySpace profile of my fiancee was only 160 KB. What does this tell you?
I suppose I would have to get a real life without the internet. Supposedly there's trees, people, and stuff out there, that don't exist on the internet.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
maybe if we start now we can stop the crisis before it starts...
I wanted to add a bit more to my answer and I want everyone to think about something. The Internet is distributed, not centralized. If one provider of content, like Youtube, is reaching the point where its impossible to scale any further from one point (10Gbits/sec sustained or something like that currently), then it should put a mirror of its content in another backbone, thus distributing the load over the net. And if they happened to saturate all the backbones, then there is obviously enough traffic (and revenue) to cause providers to grow, creating more "backbones". And besides, if Youtube reaches a limit, competitors will come along to supply content for the demand.
To say that the Internet is not scalable is just rediculous talk. Its like saying cities are not scalable. Maybe nobody can build buildings more than 100 floors, but that doesn't mean the city can't grow. Its scaleable to the point where there is a Youtube mirror and 10Gbit/sec provider for every major city on earth. Sounds kinda like how TV is distributed via affiliates huh?
Wait for the technology and infrastructure to evolve beyond my 14.4k modem. In the meantime, switch on CNN.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Well, I'd probably start by looking at all of the other *real* global crises and them promptly get the fuck over it.
No sig.
I suspect that the ISPs rely on users who get a huge bandwidth allowance, but use a fraction of that. My ISP has irritated me enough lately over the whole ADSL2+ fiasco that I now ensure I use my entire 30GB every single month. I have to download a lot of stuff I don't want (and delete) in the last few days of the month, but I'm committed now to ensuring that I get every single damned byte out of my ISP that I'm paying for.
If the day comes when all of an ISP's customers use all of their allotted bandwidth, then the ISP has to survive or perish. Good planning would ensure that they've actually got the ability to supply 100% of the bandwidth they sell, but I suspect few ISPs can. If they can't back their sales with the service we're paying for, then they deserve to go under should any 'bandwidth crisis' hit.
If I had limited bandwidth, I'd fire up my laptop, and play some Civ4, like I do when I'm on the train. No need for teh Intarweb when that damn Monty needs killing.
Just EMP the entire would. Economics dictates that if there is no demand, can not be a shortage, problem fix...
1. We are always short of bandwidth. If I had a 1 Gb/s connection instead of a 768 Kb/s connection, I could download the torrent that's running in the background much faster. As it is, I had to stop seeding 3 others to grab this one before my 1 TB disk array arrives.
2. My grandparents stood on the beach in Galveston, TX and wathed 80% of the merchant marine traffic sink within sight of the shore due to German U-Boats (WW2.) Today, we expect that high speed internet will always be available. We don't even bother to keep a few months of food around. There is a problem here.
3. We should keep the resources that can be kept local as local as possible. There's no reason to go to http://www.bartleby.com/ to look up a word in a dictionary, when you can download a dictionary program. I mentioned my 1TB disk array. I'm archiving the educational basics (OCW, eTexts, audio books, online resources, digitized lectures, etc.) and storing them on my USB hard disks. Someone did mention a 200GB HDD and downloading the non-commerical parts of the internet. That's where I'm headed, kinda. Right now, we assume that we will always have PCs that are always connected to the Internet. I am trying to replace that model with PCs that connect to a disk array for reference, and then occasionally connect to the tnternet for real-time stuff. For example, my tablet computer only needs 11GB for its software (Win, Office, Adobe Suite, VS.NET, and a dozen free apps) the rest of my HDD is data I transfer back and forth as I expect to need it from a disk array. At the very least, companies who know the are reliant on certain reference sites can set up local backups. Schools and libraries can set up local archives. This will never replace Slashdot, but it will add reliability to Wikipedia during a crisis.
Andy Out!
ASCII pr0n
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Take emacs versus vi, for example...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The domain in your sig has expired. It's a shame too, it's a cool idea.
I would stop downloading Full HD Television shows.... But thats about as far into the dark ages as I want to go.
> But in the end, such living had more benefits in a spiritual and gratitude terms.
Your story reminded me of growing up on the farm in the 60s. We burned our trash in barrels, drew water from a well, wrapped our school sandwiches up in newspaper, and read books next to kerosene lamps. And yes, the spartan life truly is the spiritual life. I do miss it so at times.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
Ever read RFC 791? I did the other day, it's not that long really, and you already know most of it anyways. Here's the thing, ever try to use more than one default gateway?
We wanted to do exactly that on our Pix at work. It can't do it. At least not without having an upstream router with both links (Ie. separate address spaces) that was doing policy based routing. If it was our ISPs that managed the upstream routers then we wouldn;t be able to do that. ISPs don't like to cooperate just because they share customers...
My point is, sure some businesses with an OSPF/MPLS/IGRP network might be able to modify their routing tables as links to their multiple ISPs go down, but a majority of businesses have one ISP, one firewall doing NAT, etc, and don't expose their cloud to the ISP... Realize this is just a generalization, your company may be different.
The theory may be that the global IP network could survive catastrophic loss of peering points, but the implementation wont. The Internet is a tiered architecture, not a mesh.
Bummer on that one.
Just stockpile as much bandwidth as possible ahead of time. Doh.
2 years ago, Cisco introduced their CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System 1) routers. The tagline was "What would you do with 92 terabits per second?".
Well. That should be enough for serving a few million VOD H.264 1080p or something.
I can only assume they refer to the Internet. If you are in an emergency, and you have something to communicate that must be sent over the Internet, you don't have emergency communications. Your communications should take priority, sure - and I think that if there was such a bandwidth shortage, it would be a matter of only days before thousands more miles of dark fiber were lit up and the Internet restored to normal.
As for REAL emergency communications - matters of life and death, and of serious health issues - there is an infrastructure in place that has been for nearly a hundred years, consisting of radio communications between amateur radio operators, military personnel, FEMA and other government organizations, and a variety of independent relief organizations from the Red Cross to Worldview. And unlike the Internet, this system has strict rules about what gets priority - first, matters of life and death, classified EMERGENCY, second, other emergency-related messages, labelled priority, third, status messages, labelled welfare, and last normal traffic. In even the worst disasters, from Katrina to September 11, 2001, this system has never been overloaded. And yes, radio amateurs served during both disasters.
The big telecom companies need to stop spreading FUD so they can get bigger subsidies. And frankly, so what if people can't get to work? If there's a worldwide flu pandemic, there won't be many customers until it's over anyway. And yeah, businesses will lose money. But all of them will, so the playing field will remain level. It worked in Western Washington - anyone from around there remembers the snow in November and the wind in December - between the two storms most of the area's businesses were closed for at least three or four days, and life went on.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
When The bandwidth crisis comes our lord and saviour Google of montain view will decent from heaven with plentiful fibre and smite the ISPs, other search engines, and other assorted prime evils. And there shall be porn and on demand pirated music and movies for all. All our lord shall ask is to implant a small chip in our brains and google ad our day to day life.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
How about ISPs take down botnets, not hard to detect. 80% spam gone.
... one day 100% of users will be on highspeed internet ... dialup is on its way out once all areas are accessable
Throttle p2p during peak hours.
enable speed bursting for short downloads when bandwidth is free.
upgrade backbones to acount for more uses
I'd finally go outside and breath some fresh air!
solved this problem2 27.shtml?tid=126&tid=133&tid=186&tid=95
http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/03/31/2224
Surely it can't be too hard to raise pigeons, how much freakin investment do they think they need?
load "$",8,1
Democrats' Solution == War Games: "Gentlemen, I wouldn't trust this overgrown pile of microchips any further than I can throw it."
John Kerry's Solution == Dr. Strangelove: " Sir! I have a plan! Mein Führer! I can walk!"
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
How much bandwidth is used by sending spam with large images to millions of people? If ISPs are really concerned about bandwidth, they should develop ways to detect the beginning of a spamflood from a compromised machine and shut down its connection before it can spew out millions of spam messages.
If there's a need, bandwidth will increase. Hardware isn't a living organism.
Many bandwidth problems can be solved by sneakernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet. This is what netflicks does. For very high throughput, use snailmail. This also goes for meaningful (other than just "Hello, we're here.") intersteller communications absent much more powerful signals than we use today.
s -selling-solar.html
In the case of a flu epidemic, sneakernet is not so attractive, but much communication will be one way, and will come over broadcast media. A can of lysol kept handy by the mailbox might still handle the odd DVD or two worth of data that you just can't do without.
--
Solar, broadband power. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The free market has its flaws, but the Internet a place where they are manifested.
If my ISP is too slow for me (as a consumer or content provider), then I will terminate my contract and seek a better provider. It is in a provider's best interest to provide a good product. Those that continually fail go out of business, and those that install adequate capacity at reasonable prices thrive.
It is through this mechanism that the internet flourishes, and in this context the question itself is somewhat ridiculous.
Another way to look at it is: which links have a crisis? Let's upgrade those or seek alternate link providers. Luckily the internet is very easy to trace.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
If the demand gets to the point of saturating supply, the Backbone vendors will start to raise prices. The price now is artificially low due to all the fiber laid in the late 90's by companies that went bankrupt. Plus, the ability of vendors to increase data rates on a stand of fiber keeps increasing dramatically.
DogShit, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Billge Gheyts! Quit taking DP from Balmer and Gheyts feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how you're too stupid to use LInux. Wasn't it you who said that the OSS cummunity believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
Go outside and enjoy the polluted air generated by the engine that runs the internet (energy).
No, really, go outside and enjoy the peaceful/chaotic thing we call nature and ignore the chatter for once (sigh).
Simplicity. It's a good thing against entropy
That's how I would deal with a global bandwidth crisis.
Would it work? No. But here in the US, that's what we do when we have a crisis - we attack countries whose names start with the letter I.
And then we torture them to find out how they stole the high-speed out of our cable lines. Did they siphon it off and sell it to China? Don't know, but we may have to ship them to secret bandwidth camps, where we will play John Phillip Souza band music and force them to watch non-anorexic models from Southern states until they crack.
Why? You got a better idea? Then that means you're against US!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just surround the globe with 840 satellite.
s _n1_v16/ai_15958051
G'uh.
or is that to 1995?
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/i
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe it is TV Stations global conspiracy because Internet video take off the people from TV.
Serial Tech Killer
Are we speaking going from Swedish 100 MiB/s (1 Gbps D/U) to American 100 KiB/s (1 MiB/s D/U) or what?
I'd invade Iraq.
...make a hard copy of the Internet and browse it on the john.
DISCLAIMER: joke appropriated from Dilbert
"Could you live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access?" Unfortunately in Australia, we already do.
In california I had 9MBit, 29.99 a month.
lets see:
Area of Japan:234,010 square miles
Area of US 3,537,441
No company will pay for the complate infrastructer need to cover the most of the US. Can't charge enough to return your investment.
In Japan it was government mandated.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Genocide.
I am not a network guru, in fact I know sh*t about networking, but I always thought that improving bandwidth can be easily solved by laying down some more cables. Am I missing something?
"Whiskey is for drinking, Water is for fighting."
My adendum:
"Whiskey is for drinking, Water is for fighting, Internet is for Whining."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
BT is efficient for bandwidth distribution, but not storage space. The typical bit torrent file is stored on 10s - 1000s of different computers. For a huge collection of videos, like youtube, dozens of copies are wasteful.
...is reaching the point where its impossible to ...
... is reach the point where it's impossible to ...
... ...
Its like saying cities are not scalable.
It's like saying cities are not scalable
Its scaleable to the point where
It's scalable to the point where
The best connection available here is 28.8 kbps dial-up. If there ever were a porn, fluff movie and rap CD (bandwidth) crisis, I'm pretty sure my mostly text only use of the internet would be pretty much unaffected.
Hi. My name is Bob, I'm a salesman with Cisco Systems. Give me a ring and I'll help you increase the capacity of your network.....
The price doubles once we hit "crisis levels"...
I would start a company that drives truckloads of hard drives across the country. They didn't say anything about a latency problem...
Rent a video. Go to a movie. Watch television. Listen to the radio. Read a book. Write a story. Ride my bike. Go for a stroll. Do the dishes. Play solitaire. Reorganise my rock collection. Ignite my farts with a decorative candle....
...I guess I'd have to start going to the adult bookstore again.
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and whi
I'd build Fidonet 2.0 and found an online service. 99% of the Internet is crap. That includes 99% of the web and this near pointless service riddled with spam, called Email and 10 bazillion bittorrents with porn floating about plus countless Intraweb bw-hogs and VNC connections of Windows users that still can't do proper remoting as in *nix due to crappy ancient OS remoteing concepts.
... In fact, I think the world would handle a fragmentation of the Inet pretty well. No more Browser Wars, unified client-server architecture, everyone pays true usage, instant revealing of spammers and blackhats, decentralization, etc. ... Not to shabby, eh?
On the other hand, imagine an entirely citizen driven international net like Fidonet with todays technology and a single standardized reader/browser/client/usernode. Just imagine taking Firefox 2.0 and turning it into a point programm for exatly that. I'd trade Email for encrypted crashing (direct depart to destiny node transfer of messages) of a modern equivalent of Fido messages in an instant! And best of all: no more botnets! Remember when the one or other rare wiseass spammed Fido? The community came down on them like a pile of bricks.
I tell you what: For us geeks the online experience could easyly increase would we be forced back into citizen driven landline networks. People would set up modern local BBSes, local direct connect gaming and appservers
And, curiously enough, those who'd probably notice the least would be AOL users. LOL!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The Internet provides vital services for millions of businesses and individuals that take little bandwidth. If video applications take too much bandwidth then why not cut them out for as long as it takes to increase the capacity. Something has to give, and cutting off video is relatively easy. Sure ... there will always be some legitimate uses for video streams, but if it's really important they'll make themselves heard and then we can see if we are going to make exceptions.
And why not? The Internet is too precious a resource to waste on illiterates. Those who can't read can always watch the news on TV.
Just in case anyone else was wondering exactly how bad it is:
The text on this page, saved using Firefox, came to 140kB. The HTML, not including the CSS and other stuff, is 196k. The whole thing, including all Slashdot graphics (but not including ads) and all the referenced CSS, was 792kB.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Ahh, and I thought I wouldn't get to talk about usenet again until the retirement home...
If I'm a cable TV company with 10,000 Internet customer who are mostly idle, I can afford to spend a lot less on overhead than if I have 10,000 customers who are maxing out their bandwidth.
Why? On the local side I'll need fewer neighborhood access points in the "last mile" since more customers will be able to share access points. On the peering side I can get away with cheaper or fewer routers, since they won't be taxed nearly as much.
It's the difference between a restaurant that has 1,000 patrons a day who each spend 30 minutes a day at a table and one with 1,000 patrons who spend 60 minutes a day but order the same food - the 2nd restaurant will have higher overhead costs in the form of table space, lighting, and air conditioning in order to provide acceptable waiting times.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Mirror Wikipedia on your home PC, and you can still have vast information resources of varying reliability at your fingertips. It's a lot like the Web in that way.
That's a very interesting diagram. Pretty fascinating, actually.
What raised my eyebrows is that, if it's accurate, there are a whole lot of junction points under the water, which strikes me as impractical. Is that how things actually work? Are there actually cable junctions, with switches and routers, on the seabed? Or are there just a lot of point to point links, routed as if there were direct links between each station and a central trunk?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Make everyone use Lynx. Starting with Vista users.
And just how would you deal with a global road shortage? Imaging not being able to take the car to the supermarket down on the corner! Starvation, my friends.
Seriously, are we predicting the end of human civilization because we have an infinite demand for youtube and P2P? It's a non-issue. Get any major trouble with congestion, and broadband subscribtions would simply fall back to capped bandwidth.
The article seems to ignore the fact of all-we-can-eat subscribtions. And then worries about how we're running amok with it. Duh. Because it's free, stupid.
However, to prevent the imminent destruction of humankind, I propose:
1: That damn dirty pirates only download things they're actually going to watch, instead of attempting to build a local copy of media history. (Est. bandwith savings: 60%)
2: That governments introduce makes it a felony to upload tasteless content on youtube. (Est. bandwith savings: 30%)
3: That the US declares War on Spammers and puts its military to some proper use. (Est. bandwith savings: 20%. And world peace)
I lost my sig.
WMD and Terrorism so they can invade whatever country they want.
Oil crises, so they can up the gas price whenever they want.
Time crises by inventing silly deadlines, so they can feel in control of project scope.
And now Bandwidth, so they can find a way to charge for the net.
Next it will be cd plastic shortage crisis, so music goes up in price... Oh wait...
They Lie and Lie... and then Lie some more. I call Bullshit.
There's plenty of dark fibre around, it's dirt cheap to lay more, at least when you amortize it against its utility.
This is just a pathetic attempt to astroturf someones corporate or political genda.
I wouldn't piss on them, if they were on fire...
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
I would expect that people sit on the internet just as much at work as they would at home.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Bandwidth aritificially limits YOU
Basically there is plenty of dark fiber in the ground. During the .com boom fiber was laid every where but I would say the majority isn't in use. The deal is that companies don't want to pay for more bandwidth that would be required when video becomes more in demand. It might cut into their profits. Those greedy little hobbits :)
I have plenty of tin cans and string.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Where is bandwidth cheap and virtually unlimited? Not here in OZ. It's already rationed, with small download limits and marginal speeds.
After watching the Internet grow up these last 15 years we still are no where near being able to utilise the Net in the ways the technology is capable of allowing us. And we won't be for a while yet. Video-On-Demand? VOIP? Music and video downloads? Pipe dreams. I'll visit this planet again in a decade or two and cross my fingers for you.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
-
The prices we pay for access to bandwidth would increase, affecting both consumers and producers of data.
-
Services we are accustomed to using could degrade, if sufficiently enough, to cause us to seek alternatives.
-
Some users may be priced out of the market, causing demand to fall back and easing the effects of shortage.
-
Industry would begin innovate novel solutions and workarounds to alleviate the effects, such as improvements to the way data is modulated onto the fiber infrastucture, how network processes are automated and serviced by technicians, etc.
Ultimately, an equilibrium would be reached where bandwidth supply and demand re-balance. A change in the situation which originally caused the shortage to develop, be it a flu pandemic or something else, may cause the supply-demand equation to tip once more, deepen a shortage or creating a supply glut (and cheaper access!). Market forces again would act over time to equalize things (i.e. offering higher quality YouTube video if a sudden supply glut caused bandwidth access to get cheaper). So in short, I would do nothing special, except react to my experience as I'm having it and adjust useage or find alternative to my activities as appropriate or as forced into by financial conditions (some people still use dial-up because they cannot afford cable-modem broadband service...thank God I'm not one of those!).USNG: 14TPU4605
I guess that means I should cut back, then.
...Nah! Gotta get my cache stashed for the bandwidth apocalypse...
Hey! Maybe
Server Response: "Lameness filter encountered. Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."
Demented But Determined.
In Japan it was government mandated.
Ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
The government needs to do the same thing they did with electricity to the internet. Mandate it. No company will ever want to distribute high speed access to everywhere in the nation. But it is something that is increasingly needed as an infrastructure for the future of the nation itself. Just like phone service and electricity before it, quality, reliable, high speed, low latency connection to the internet needs to be deployed across the nation by government mandate if need be.
The businesses all cry foul the second a city or township tries to deploy their own public owned network for their citizens and suddenly finds the money to go running *cough* buying *cough* Congress or State legislation, money that never seems to be there to actually build their own networks, but sure enough it is available whenever/wherever some town tries this.
I truly believe that internet access should be simply just another utility, like water, and electricity already.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
BUY MORE ROUTERS!
duh! this is the simple solution.
bandwidth lives in the memory of routers!
fucking idiots!
They're using their grammar skills there.
Compare this to Usenet, which doesn't stress the backbone at all: it's a connection between my local ISP and my computer, so it's fast and doesn't require taking a piss in the global bandwidth pool. BitTorrent will only prefer downloading data that's geographically closer when connection to the stuff that's far away is so saturated that it starts coming in really slowly. But even then it will try to get as much data as it can from that saturated connection. And that's exactly the problem. We don't want the world's long-distance connections to be permanently saturated. That squeezes everything else that's competing to use them, like VoIP.
I wish that the article did not use a national health-care crisis to point at the current need for the internet back bone and front end to grow in certain parts of the globe. The dooms day scenario always prompts suspesion and declines trust in the speakers true motive. It is very ugly to think of a manager or a director that calls his nderlinks at home, requesting them to get to work home, eventhough they are affected by a fatal pandemic.
It fits for tabloids headlines though.
I think that this article is refering to an event that will prevent people from moving geographically from their home location to their work location, yet they are still able to perform administrative and managerial activities. It seems that the flu pandemic is used as a poor example. I think a better example would be similar to todays events on the east coast, where a major snow storm has slowed down the presence of workers at their work place.
This article did not consider the rest of the case, where every member of the society is affected by the crippling event, including, but not limited to, government workers and officials, technical support staff of the internet and its networks, healthcare individuals, and agriculture and Industrial sectors.
I think that the purpose behind the article is to point to the importance of the Internet today in our daily life in the "first world", and to point to the need to expand it on the access level in the "3rd-world", by expanding the capacity of the back-bone. It needs to increase also by contrast on the front end to give access to a more bandwidth.
I believe that the hidden message is a reference to a near future when everyone, who has access to the internet, will start using video conference instead of telephone systems. It is a reference also to "Global", which is a clear message to the third world countries in middle Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, whom do not have the advanced infrastructure that exists in USA, Japan, S.E.Asia, and EU.
This means more investments, more jobs, more infrastructure, and more job and economic security.
Speaking hypothatically of course.
I'll bet your Tb disc array/raid is using those pesky rotating magnetic storage devices. Without a backup? I sense a big "doh!" moment sometime in the next 2-4 years. And yes, you will be able to return the drive to the manufacturer and say "it failed before the 5 years was up!", and get a replacement -- a blank replacement.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
And invite all my friends.
I'd do that for you folks, cause I'm a 'giver'.
STOP. You're being farmed.
filtermasks and corpse burning parties ,kinda like what they did with sars in Asia
"When they all jumped into the same market at the same time, they created an oversupply, or what has been euphemistically called as laying a lot of dark fibre, a huge amount of it in fact, this B$ about having filled all the dark fibre is just marketing hype and trying to force up the price."
;-)."
You seem to be the only one making that particular claim. Anyway even if the broadband providers had unlit fibre. It's still useless without all the rest of the equipment. Second since the stories title is "global crisis". I'd say you'd have to involve more than just the US in this discussion. Do "they" have unlit fibre? Do "they" own that fibre? There's too many assumptions floating around in this forum, to say firmly that there's no crisis, or will not be an upcoming one, especially considering that overseas is using more and faster than we are.
"Especially as technology has marched ahead and has allowed a lot more traffic to pass down the exact same fibres, except of course those dark ones
Do you buy a new car every time technology upgrades? Then why do you think everyone else does?
"As for live TV streams, they can be cut back to near nothing, with effective caching at the ISP level (don't send hundreds of thousands of streams over seas, send one and cache/mirror locally for re-distribution)."
Odd all the contortions needed to emulate what has worked for over seventy-five years.
It's happened before.
1992-ish - before WWW took off. The load from connection-holding protocols like telnet, ftp and gopher was swamping network connections (ignoring the already then overwhelming usenet load)
http provided access to data without sustaining connections.....
and all of a sudden the bandwidth was free again.
Also - the 'net can scale like just about no other technology can. Go IPv6 and kill the spammers and the folks who want all content in tightly controlled spots (MAFIAA for instance). Distribution is strength.
Unity is weakness.
Google 'look how much we spent for "You tube", we did this to increase the global bandwith'.
Uh? The money spent by Google on "You tube" was given to the previous owners, not to increase the backbone bandwith..
1. Encourage ISPs to maintain large caches and users to have reasonably high cache settings
2. Employ a sane p2p-esque standard for most media content as a web browser standard, so that youtube doesn't upload the same video to everyone in my office when a "check this out" email is circulated around the building. Let me pull it from nearby peers at faster speeds.
3. Encourage ISP's to promote "in network" file sharing. For example, my upload/download to those on my cable node should be at line speed. So when I share/download something large on bittorrent, those on my node will download it from me FAST, saving the ISP's outbound bandwidth... using QOS, that bandwidth can be reduced before being sent over heavily shared backbones.
Essentially, a system where as much data as possible is distributed and pulled from fast local sources would result in great reductions in backbone utilization, while serving to improve the perceived speeds of large downloads.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
It bugs me that when I buy bandwidth, I don't really get bandwidth. It's like the airlines used to be: oversold, on the assumption there will be no shows. But when there aren't, the people who've paid for a service don't get it.
So I guess you could have a mode where it told you there was a shortage and asked for volunteers to get bumped for a few days, perhaps in exchange for free bandwidth later (or free porn or whatever it is that people want to trade for in order to get them to voluntarily stand down). But that sounds like it still relies on someone to be willing to give up. If they're expecting to die of bird flu tomorrow, you might find a lot of people who want to watch YouTube or some porn site today before it's too late and don't really care to trade it away.
But I think a better solution would be to have selling someone bandwidth really mean selling them bandwidth. Stop all these stupid clauses in access providers saying you can't resell bandwidth (because those are just there to keep you from exposing the overselling of bandwidth they've supposedly promised you anyway and it should be your right to resell what you've legally purchased). Create large monetary penalties for any provider who sells you bandwidth and doesn't really reserve it for you.
No, I'm not anti-capitalism. I don't mind someone selling the notion of gambling on getting bandwidth and getting a cheaper price. I just don't think that should be sold by saying you're getting x bandwidth. It should be like on credit cards where you have to disclose the info in a manner plain for anyone to know, not hidden in terms of service that the gigantically fonted numbers about how fast the connection will be is not necessarily reliably there... and certainly if you're going to be in trouble for trying to use the capacity of what you're given, that should be in big letters, too. Just like the credit cards have the Schumer Box, broadband agreements should expose things like: what's the worst case? how much is it oversold? will it go down if everyone uses it at once? will it go down if more people in your neighborhood buy? under what circumstancse do they commit to increase bandwidth? With proper labeling, I have a lot fewer objections.
But also, if after proper labeling I find there's no one in my area who will sell reliable bandwidth and everyone will only sell me probabilistic bandwidth, that's significant, too. Right now, a lot of places probably figure they have broadband reliably available when really they have it only probabilistically available (that is, oversold).
It seems to me the reason bandwidth might fall short in an event like a bird flu emergency (if it might--and that's hard to know) is that there's no serious recourse to the consumer if it does. And so what's the motivation for vendors to even care?
RCN itemizes the resale of what you've paid for in bandwidth as Theft of Service.
Comcast restricts you from offering the service to others, as well as telling you that even if you use it for yourself, you (not they) are responsible for making sure your use is within the scope of what you were sold (as if the typical Joe Sixpack is going to know how to assure his use of YouTube is within such bounds) and warns you that if you exceed your quota, they can shut you down at their discretion
Time-Warner Cable has similar restrictions.
Verizon is alleged to be quite overly strict in similar ways. They make a point of noting that Verizon advertises itself as offering a service
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
You mean, I'll actually have to live my _first_ life? No way!
A lack of growth is not the same as crisis. I download videos as fast as I can play them now; if bandwidth doesn't go up I still will; hell, if bandwith halves I still will! Most of the online games I play will run on 56k modems, the only reason against them is that they are metered connections. There is no bandwidth crisis.
...because by and large they already "live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access".
Hell, half the time my house gets a decent thunderstorm we're likely to lose mains power for an hour or so.
Not complaining, so much as pointing out that there are people out there who already do without BitTorrent, Google Video, YouTube, et cetera et cetera, but still find the Internet to be useful.
-Snorbert, somewhere in the antipodes
For physical reasons, the last-mile is *always* going to be by far the most expensive part of the Internet.
Take my current town Stavanger for a start. What do you figure costs more:
- Wiring up each and every one of the ~40.000 homes in the town ?
- Setting up ~3 high-speed links to relevant internet-hubs in the area to provide connectivity out-of-town ?
That's rigth -- the first task costs a lot more than the second.Now, imagine you decided you needed 10 times the bandwith (internally and externally). Which part would cost most to upgrade ? The 40.000 individual lines (each with some sorta modem on each end) or the high-speed links which will already be running over single-mode fibre where all you need to do is upgrade the equipment in each end and the repeaters every 50km.
The latter is *literally* a case of buying ~6 high-speed fibre-capable routers and ~20 repeaters capable of dealing with the same speed.
It's the same on a large scale: Connecting (say) Norway to Sweden is *much* cheaper than hooking up all of Norway internally. Connecting Europe to USA is *MUCH* cheaper than connecting all of USA internally.
If I'm a cable TV company with 10,000 Internet customer who are mostly idle, I can afford to spend a lot less on overhead than if I have 10,000 customers who are maxing out their bandwidth.
Agreed - And I will also agree that the current broadband model has one major flaw, in that the average user comes in far below the peak users, but the infrastructure needs to support the peak users.
I wouldn't even object to increased stratification of broadband sevice based on peak bandwidth. Hell, I think I currently pay for a peak somewhere around 15Mbps, and really don't need anywhere near that (and I consider myself a fairly high-volume user).
I only objected to the pay-per-byte suggested by the GG(G?)P, where regardless of the capacity of the network, each individual byte costs nothing at all.
But isn't that the whole point? You can't build a 'distributed Youtube' with only one copy of each video.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
http://www.ist-bread.org/pdf/only-just-works.pdf (BTTJ 24.3 July 2006)
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
My cousin has high speed access, 'cause he's closer to the freeway.
We have low speed access, 'cause there's a dirt road and railroad tracks in the way.
I can't imaging pay'n for it. My wife talked about that, but I think it were somethin differnt she meant.
if you could somehow get all commercial internet providers to honor ip multicast.
There was a glut of dark fiber the last time this came up! Is this another imaginary crisis meant to scare people?
Stop all the downloadin'!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
What says everyone should have to connect to the original source of a live webcast? Why can't the ISPs act as proxies for the webcasters, and those who want a 'cast after it's been sent live get it via p2p? If the authors want money for the bits, let 'em have it. OTOH, they should remember that IWTBF, and only charge reasonably for the content. If they can't they've got some serious problems with their business organization and methods, which they should rationalize if they desire to survive.
When they see me pedaling down Elston Ave on two wheels, singing my head off and my only fuel the fried egg sandwich and coffee I had for breakfast, I become their sworn enemy. True.
TRU DAT! TRUE, Homes! Werd.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Not quite. The net isn't regulated right now. "Net neutrality" will regulate it, you do realize that don't you? If you think it is regulated, post the corresponding law. You won't be able to because it doesn't exist. "Net neutrality" is manufactured to dupe people into thinking they need the governments help to stop the evil business from taking advantage of them. Sometimes they even cite cases where say a competing voip was slowed down, for a few days until it hit blogs (used to be it would hit the newspapers and then TV) and then they lift it. I'd rather have that than to get the government involved, thank you. If we really need it then ok, pass the law and be careful how it is worded. That law can make it so instead of an inconvenience, you are really screwed. For example how they "helped" us with voting irregularities in the 2000 election, passed new laws in most places that required new computer voting machines? Yea, we didn't need that kind of help as so many artices on /. will show.
This reminds me how Vint Cerf said the internet was going to fail due to the load... a decade ago. He ended up eating his hat over that one. He should have waited for 9/11/2001, it did fail that day for a while. 9/12/2001 it was back to normal. Anyhow be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
I know, lets create a false panic about bandwidth. And then we can sell the same service people already pay for back to them so they can finish downloading their favorite videos. Wow! what a great idea...... I should work for a telco and be paid 6 figures a year........ Yeah, definately.
uh... I live in South Africa. We permanently live with low bandwidth and some of the highest telecoms prices in the world, for horrible service. Aint monopoly a beaut!?!?!
Is your humor an attempt to minimalize a fair, and IMO accurate, opinion of the state of US society and politics? And what type of vehicle do you choose to "afford" sir?
Go ahead, mod me down, I'm done with you.
they simply call you once then disconnect your HSI the next month even if you have reduced your usage. I've written a blog to keep track of what I've experienced and what other's have passed along.
::grinz::). "Reign of the Fallen" is by far my favorite.
The sad thing is it may be perfectly legal. Too bad companies such as Comcast aren't upgrading their old infrastructure so it can handle the increased usage. After all, today's files are getting larger and larger. Zudeo for instance has a number of DVD movies you can legally download via bit torrent (yes, you can legally use bit torrent
Anyway, My blog is here.
I wish to get the word out and yes, it's accurate despite Comcast's allegation that it's not. I'm the author and maintainer for the blog. Everything can be proven. I've documented my whole experience so other's won't have to go through the garbage I have. I'm also pushing for real competition as I believe it will make even a mega corp reconsider unfair business practices and improve.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
> I'll bet your Tb disc array/raid is using those pesky rotating magnetic storage devices. Without a backup? I sense a big
> "doh!" moment sometime in the next 2-4 years. And yes, you will be able to return the drive to the manufacturer and say
> "it failed before the 5 years was up!", and get a replacement -- a blank replacement.
I mirror all my data, and can pick up replacement disks at the local Fry's any time.
I also donate coppies of my library to anyone who will pay for the disks. I've got 2 coworkers, 1 friend, and 2 family members that keep their own coppies. Plus, when it was smaller (80 GB or so) I would burn it to DVDs every Christmas and give it to everyone I knew. Even with DL DVDs, just 320 GB would take around 40 discs.
Andy Out!
Who needs copper or fiber.
My ISP is a microwave backhaul at 1.54 mbit
His connection to the www is a microwave backhaul to the telco
I don't have land lines I again use microwave (cell phone)
My tv is a dish
My electricity is the only thing that is in copper (aluminum actually)
and as soon as I can afford it it will become wind and solar.
Yes, I am planning on the day when the US becomes what we call a third world country
I don't see it in my lifetime but I do see it coming
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
A lot of this is rendering time; links still has to download the page with javascript even if it's not going to execute it. And if the css is included in the main file it downloads that too. The main saving is on images and you can have a graphical browser that optionally loads images.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
No company will ever want to distribute high speed access to everywhere in the nation.
No company wants to distribute high speed access to everywhere in the nation for free. They'll do it for the right price, of course. Rural folks should pay more than urban folks, because it costs more to build the infrastructure out to the rual parts of the country. If a rural person doesn't like that fact, let him move into a city. But what about the goods that can only be produced in rural areas? Well, supply and demand...if rural folks move into the city, production for those goods will go down and thus supply goes down, increasing the price, and thus increasing the profits of the remaining rural producers. In short, the market will balance everything out; we don't need the government to do it.
What you want to do is prevent these balancing forces. You want to force an urban guy like me to pay for other people to live in a rural area, thus creating an artifical incentive for people to live in the country. The only monetary incentive to live in rural areas should be the possible income from goods that can be produced in rural areas; once you start adding incentives, you've distorted the market place.
My ISP does at some peak times during holidays tend to lag. Not a serious problem for me though. My solution is often just to open a remote desktop on my server, located in one of the biggest datacenters in Montreal, or a clients server. Often for large downloads, I'll download onto my server first, then rar the archive across multiple files to have several smaller downloads. Of course,if it was truely a global problem, the almighty dollar would still have impact. I have a DSL provider, and a second cable ISP available in my area, and could easily set up a router to handle multiple connections... If the actual backbone connections started to suffer congestion, then I still wouldn't care that much because my internet access is mostly buisness stuff anyway, so my clients that I work for remotly would simply have to pay more for my connections, pay more for wait time, and in the end, pay more... Also, if there was a major bandwidth shortage, and the heavy flash/shockwave sites were no longer getting traffic because people couldn't download the content, the sites would probably have a ligher structure appear VERY QUICKLY. No successful traffice means no income, so changes will be made quickly to insure successful traffice, and income.
i think Netsukuku can solve this.
the problem would be still in backbones between america/europe, but at least in the same continent it would help a lot with his load-balancing features...
Worse case scenario (we run out of tubes and can't build more for some reason) - Put it over satellite. You can run quite a lot of data in a single 36Mhz transponder (About 40Mbps in QPSK, 3/4 Viterbi which is very fault-tolerant. A lot more if you use 7/8 8PSK). Latency is somewhat high (500ms for a round trip), but for video streaming, that's not really an issue (jitter is much more critical). It's also quite a bonus to have ALL your infrastructure on the top floor of your building - No more dependency on 3rd parties.
"can't run, can't hide...oh well, return 0"
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I started this thread by introducing the idea that per-month usage should be charged on a usage-of-service basis, with a generous allowance for the typical home customer. This means someone downloading twice his allowance would pay up to twice as much as someone using less than the allowance.
I did not address peak usage, the "size of the pipe," that is another factor that will go into pricing. Two customers who transfer the same amount of data in a month will pay differently if they have a different bandwidth cap. The one who pays for the higher bandwidth cap will enjoy faster Linux Kernel downloads, assuming the Internet and the back-end server can keep up.
As far as the infrastructure supporting peak users, it has never supported EVERY user using peak usage concurrently. That is the equivalent of everyone in town flushing their toilets all at once or trying to make a phone call at the same time. If the ISPs were forced to guarantee that level of service we would all be paying T1 prices or higher. What the ISPs need to guarentee is that a certain percentage of the time, say, 99% or 99.9%, any given customer will not suffer a slowdown due to lack of resources at the ISP level. This is something that an ISP capacity engineer can plan for without breaking the bank. Part of the way they don't break the bank is to identify heavy users and charge them more or threaten them with nasty letters.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Also have other web browsers open with Yahoo, CNN, Shacknews and all the other sites I always check. The faster I keep hitting reload on those pages the quicker I'll be informed just what's up with this bandwidth problem!
There already is something like this; I noticed the other day, when I had to download a 173 MB Brother print driver (that doesn't work), that it came from a machine three hops from me, on an Akamai server.
It's not like mirrors are a new concept.
What I WOULD like to see, though, is a series of giant squid boxes. They could even keep the FSM company.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
The Internet itself is fully redundant. The Internet backbone can survive several major failures. E.g. take 9/11 for example, much of the regional fiber for NYC and the surrounding areas, ran in near vicinity to the WTC, of course this is going to cause small regional outages, however down in DC or over in Chicago, the backbone was fine and handling it's daily activities. The problem with redundancy and availability is diversity. Most content providers do not have regional data centers that advertise a single BGP route over multiple providers to their content, in most cases a provider of content will have a single data center and a single or possibly two distinct feeds to the Internet. This is obviously going to cause some problems. The Internet is only as redundant as the content providers make it. As far as the Bandwidth Crisis? it doesn't exist. This is hype. Sure, some of the dark fiber may not be getting used, but for the most part there is still plenty of fiber to go around, and the conduit is laid for the expansion of more fiber, glass just has to be pulled through the conduit and lit. It's expensive though to pull new fiber, terminate it, light it and connect it to a backbone router. The backbone routers such as say the Juniper T640 are not cheap! The problem is who pays for the routers and cross connects? What do we do do when every home has gigE fiber to the front door? Right now the Internet backbone runs at roughly 10gbps, although providers will generally trunk multiple OC-192s together to create large virtual pipes. It is currently cheaper to run trunked OC-192s instead of increasing the pipe "size". There is no money in the innovation (physics/electronics/etc) of networking in order to drive speeds faster. The only shortage we have is money and who is going to fund massive fiber rollouts, router upgrades, and innovation. As money flows into the universities, we will get faster pipes as folks devise ways to pack more light and encode more bits into a single strand of fiber. Want to eliminate the shortage? Fund the universities and innovation, or stop greed (but that just seems impossible)
Worry about the global BEER shortage.
The HORROR!!!!
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
IPv6 was *supposed* to help with routing table complexity, because it was going to let us rebuild the address assignment and routing hierarchies and implement Step 3. In practice, nobody quite figured out Step 3, and the market needs for provider-independent addressing (so customers can change carriers) and customers homing to multiple ISPs (for reliability) have meant that nobody quite believes it any more. There have been some optimistic suggestions that never seem to quite cover the bases, and an ugly approach called shim6 that might help the multi-homing at the cost of real ugliness in many other places.
Replacing BGP wouldn't really help - any replacement would have to solve most of the same problems, though perhaps you could change the size of the calculations by a factor of log N if you got lucky. One of the real problems had been that a certain large router vendor used to charge way too much for RAM, about 10x the market price for painting their logo on the chips (ok, and for giving you a warrantee, but commodity memory really works fine.) But it's no longer a problem to get more than 128MB of RAM, which had been the common maximum a few years ago when the table sizes were approaching 100K entries. Of course, IPv6 makes all the tables at least 4x as large, because the addresses are bigger, but two years of Moore's Law has helped with that.
Also, your mention of transit and survivability is confused. In the US, the roughly two dozen big Tier 1 backbone ISPs are all heavily interconnected with each other, mostly in about 6-7 geographically obvious big cities, and the Tier 2, local, and niche-player ISPs almpst all get service from two or more bigger ISPs. Free peering vs. paid transit is mostly a commercial question these days - the price of transit has been in free-fall for a decade, to the extent that a number of ISPs no longer mind having to pay instead of doing free peering. The old MAEs have largely been supplanted by carrier hotels such as Equinix. In Europe, almost everybody seems to interconnect at LINX or AMSIX or both, so the commercial models are a bit different, but they've got adequately distributed hardware and buildings as well. Asia still has issues because some countries have telecomm quasi-monopolies that interfere with good architecture, but the other countries do just fine (especially Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong.) The Taiwan earthquake's effect was a geographical problem - just about all the north-south connectivity really does need to go by there, unless it's going to go as far east as Hawaii or else go to North America. Schools don't really affect the peering market, except for special cases like the Internet2 research networks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, if people stop seeing porn pages then... But I think is more easy to people stops using MSN IM that people stop getting porn sites, so...
ghostbar page.
I'm relatively moderate on bandwidth already, so I think I'd manage to get by with less. I used to get by fine on 33k6 anyway. I'd probably order in my Ubuntu ISOs rather than downloading them. Turning off pictures in my browser would help. So would caching proxies at the provider level.
But I don't think it will happen anytime soon. More and more bandwidth is used up by malware and spammers. I imagine that in a case of a real bandwidth crisis, those people would face serious charges, and available bandwidth would triple easily.
Of course what I would *really* do in the case of a global bandwidth crisis is to go sit in a corner in fetal position and cry.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
IPv6 was *supposed* to help with routing table complexity, because it was going to let us rebuild the address assignment and routing hierarchies and implement Step 3. In practice, nobody quite figured out Step 3, and the market needs for provider-independent addressing (so customers can change carriers) and customers homing to multiple ISPs (for reliability) have meant that nobody quite believes it any more. There have been some optimistic suggestions that never seem to quite cover the bases, and an ugly approach called shim6 that might help the multi-homing at the cost of real ugliness in many other places.
The internet is very much *not* hierarchical - current BGP tables are much closer to 183000 routes than 183 (it's a moving target, but somewhere in the range of 200,000 routes, which is possible to support now that you can get more than 128MB of RAM on a typical Cisco router.) In the US, there are about two dozen "Tier 1" ISPs that are mostly interconnected with each other, plus a bunch of medium, small, and specialized niche-market ISPs, plus all the hosting-center types of businesses, and the interconnections are pretty complex.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
To get the figures I mentioned earlier, for the "text" figure, I chose Save As through Firefox and had it save to a TXT file. This (I think) gets you a little more than a straight copy/paste, but not that much more. For the HTML but without the CSS, I saved it to HTML; if you view that you'll see that it gets some very basic formatting, like the indents and links, but not the more sophisticated stuff. Then for the whole shebang, I used the "Web Page, Complete" option, which grabs the HTML to a file, and all of its referenced files and put them in a folder. The quoted figure was the HTML file plus the total size of the directory with all the referenced stuff (which includes CSS, graphics, etc.). I surf with AdBlock, so it didn't include those.
This was browsing basically at level 1, although I can't remember all of the modifiers I have set up for what is shown and what's not.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Hi ABG,
I have some questions regarding numerical programming in C++. Can you please email me at throwawaydude (a) yahoo dot com. Your insight is much needed.
If it comes to a real crunch where our government and mega-corporations aren't providing the service we need out of some need to gain extra power and money from the process, essentially destroying the Internet as we know it, then I think it won't be long before private citizens begin to form new businesses, non-profit groups, co-ops, etc to address the problem. It's a basic economic concept that where there is demand there will be suppliers. The technology involved isn't secret and there is nothing that can actually become a real shortage other than those created artificially by government and the current suppliers. If they don't want to be our suppliers then someone else will. There might be a hiccup as things transition but in the end the system would probably be stronger and healthier.
What if every city offered a choice of gigabit fiber connections to every home and business through a co-op or a high-speed wireless network woven together through citizen contributions (like FON maybe)? How long would it be before these groups started finding ways to connect their MANs together to form new Internet backbones? And after such a shakedown people would no doubt be more paranoid so they'd want to be connected by more than just a single means. This would create a lot of opportunity and competition for businesses to provide access to these MANs and would help keep these long hual providers from having so much control. If the long hualers didn't provide adequate choices it'd b very possible to see co-ops created that would create new choices. You might have nation-wide or even international co-ops created and managed by the people who actually used the service.
Maybe for once us Americans could get broadband that isn't lame. Blah 6Mb connections could be a thing of the past and we could actually get gigabit speeds. Corporations are playing russian roulette by denying us these speeds and trying to squeeze more cash out of us. P2P has shaken the foundations of media distribution. What do they think will happen if the Internet begins to take on a shape more like that? The layout of the network could be much more chaotic with fewer points where any corporation or government could enforce control or collect tolls. Such a happening would make tracking down individuals much more difficult (or impossible) so P2P would explode, people would be a lot less likely to report taxes, chasing child predators would be very hard, etc. I think that eventually this is a change that will happen. It's just a matter of when. An imaginary crisis could be the spark of life needed to push this evolution into hyperdrive. People are hooked on the Net. As long as they can get their fix they aren't motivated to make it better - many don't even realize it could be better - but if you pull the plug they'll be jumping at other options.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
We already had a bandwidth shortage and no one noticed. A couple of the 13 root DNS servers that power most Internet operations nearly went down a couple weeks ago due to a DOS attack initiated by botnet. The attack stopped and a few feathers were ruffled but nothing serious happened. The infrastructure's fine as-is - just keep throwing more bandwidth at it until the average person's connection is OC-48 at $4.95 per month.
Hi ABG,
I need some insight regarding numerical computing. Please email me at throwawaydude (a) yahoo and you know the rest.
Thanks.
Slashdot should implement an email through profile option, if it's feasible.
Where exactly in the constitution does the Congress derive that authority?