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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?"
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.
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.
Any such effect would have been caused by traffic overwhelming server capabilities at the news sites, or soaking up all the individual sites' available bandwidth. The internet as a whole performed just fine on 9/11.
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.
Except, bandwidth doesn't cost anything. Seriously. My home network costs me the same whether I keep it saturated, or almost idle. The same goes for every later of telecomm all the way to the top.
Sure, you have to pay to get access outside the network you control (which applies whether you talk about your LAN, your local ISP, TW, or a tier-2). But that amounts to pissing in your own well - Your side of the network means nothing if you can't get to the other side.
The sooner everyone realizes this, the sooner we can all have FTTP for a pittance similar to the cost of an analog phone line 20 years ago.
Until then, "all you can eat" at the local level sure as hell beats the sort of "the rich get the bandwidth, the poor get dialup" scheme we once had (and you suggest bringing back).
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.
Big, fat, huge undersea network cables that transmit lots and lots of data and can really only be maintained by submarines.
Submarine cables are actually surprisingly small. At most they are a few inches thick, which I don't think really counts as "huge". They might seem larger if you ever see them where they come ashore, but that's because in the shallows near the coast they are encased in armoring. Also surprising is that only fairly shallow cables are maintained by submersibles. Deeper cables are actually pulled to the surface by dragging a hook along the seabed until it snags.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
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.
Your plan isn't paying for bandwidth, your plan is paying for the amount of data transferred. It's the difference between paying for a pipe that delivers 10 gallons of water a minute, versus paying for 500 gallons of water.
Once upon a time that might not have been such a bad plan, but these days, a computer that was turned off would probably consume a good chunk of that allocation based on just the port scans and random worms flying around the internet, depending on how you were connected to the internet. If you didn't use enough data to push you out of the lowest tier, then the ISP could certainly add a few more pings into the mix just to make sure, or just accidentally drop a few TCP packets so you pay more to retransmit them. Or heck, just mark it up 30%, it's not like you can prove you didn't receive those packets. (On a related note, I wonder how many people ever actually test their electric meter or water meter for accuracy. Or how one would go about doing such a thing, since I hadn't even thought of that until just now.)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Ahh, and I thought I wouldn't get to talk about usenet again until the retirement home...
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.
Is this sudden abundance of oil because suddenly Exxon found a huge oil reserve under the caribou-mating grounds of the arctic? Not a chance. The reason we've got a lot of oil all of a sudden is because they can charge 3 bucks a gallon for it. See? Eighty cents a gallon and there's a shortage. Three bucks a gallon and there's abundance.
Actually, gas was MORE EXPENSIVE at $0.80 per gallon in the 1970s than it is at $3.25 per gallon today. There's this thing called "inflation", which along with its close cousin "deflation" cause the value of money to rise and fall.
Adjusted for inflation, the only time gasoline has been more expensive than now is during the oil embargo in the early 1970s.
Now how did that work? These "crises" are the corporate strategies for turning the usual laws of supply and demand on their head. The guys in the record business are knocking their heads against the wall trying to figure out a way to create a music crisis, right?
The reason why you see those Lincoln Navigators (shudder) along the Kennedy Expressway is that the average American is far wealthier than in the 1970s. Gasoline thus represents a much smaller percentage of total income, so the higher gas prices have less effect.
Think about it: how many $4 lattes were there in 1970? Oh wait, you probably weren't there, were you?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Sounds like what Akamai already does.