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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 can only meaningfully be a bandwidth issue between the endpoints of a transaction.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
That's easy! Just kill all spammers and we instantly all have 50%-60% more bandwidth. Problem solved! Anyone want this shovel?
Walk through any major network centre and try to count the dollars for the machinery, fibre, and operating labour.
All fixed costs. NOCs, and the lines between them, cost $X in overhead whether they push 5Kb or 5Pb per day. The actual use costs nothing (except perhaps electricity, but even then, virtually all modern signalling protocols preferentially use electrically-off states).
Now factor in the requirement for spares, peering agreements, FIX fees, necessary support contracts from the hardware vendors
With the exception of peerage, which I mentioned (and for end users, basically means paying your ISP bill), the rest just amounts to overhead. Same no matter how much traffic you have, up to your peak capacity. You can try to inflate the numbers however you want, but they still stay flat with respect to throughput when you factor in everything above you.
This is such horseshit.
Really, now? So, which tier-1 do you work for, that you wish to justify your profits?
The internet amounts to one big LAN, divided into a bunch of fiefdoms with petty little corporate barons charging fees at every drawbridge and intersection. Take away all the troll bridges, and you end up with fees based on the overhead (hardware and human maintenance) for a given capacity, totally uncorrelated with actual throughput.
There's more HTML and Javascript on this page than there is actual content. Don't kid yourself that slashdot is some simple text based site.
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.
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"
...it wasn't a good day for us.
As I remember that day, it was a bad day for pretty much everybody.
...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