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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.
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.
What are you talking about? Bandwidth is limited by hardware constraints, line constraints, political restraints, cost restraints, peering restraints, and other reasons. Bandwidth is meaningfully traded by big ISPs, Telcos and governments *every* day.
You're thinking about it wrong here. When you are talking about Internet transit, you are talking about shipping your packets all over the world. Services like that are productized in all corners of the marketplace, and services cost money just like physical products. In the case of Internet transit, you're paying for a certain number of packets per second (often expressed as "bandwidth" allotment in a contract) to pass through a gateway, and usually in a residential service relationship, you are paying for a maximum performance with no set guarantees or dedicated services.
How do people get these concepts so wrong is beyond me.
...Steve
When we all used 300 baud modems, was there a "bandwidth shortage"?
Uhhh actually I don't know about you, but sometimes it would take me hours to be able to log in due to busy signals at the modem banks, so yeah, I guess there was a bandwidth shortage.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's easy! Just kill all spammers and we instantly all have 50%-60% more bandwidth. Problem solved! Anyone want this shovel?
Either way its the perfect market. If bandwidth started truly running in short supply a little thing called supply and demand would kick in QUICKLY. ISPs getting complaints from users would implement higher caps or simply start charging more per speed rating. People would then either cut back or they would pay more. That extra payment then could be used to expand the network or the telcos could pocket it. The telcos that just pocket it would then start to lose customers. And the whole thing just goes in circles.. So whats the question again?????
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 $X in overhead whether they push 5Kb or 5Pb per day. The actual use costs nothing (except perhaps electricity, but even then, virtually all modern signalling protocols preferentially use electrically-off states).
Now factor in the requirement for spares, peering agreements, FIX fees, necessary support contracts from the hardware vendors
With the exception of peerage, which I mentioned (and for end users, basically means paying your ISP bill), the rest just amounts to overhead. Same no matter how much traffic you have, up to your peak capacity. You can try to inflate the numbers however you want, but they still stay flat with respect to throughput when you factor in everything above you.
This is such horseshit.
Really, now? So, which tier-1 do you work for, that you wish to justify your profits?
The internet amounts to one big LAN, divided into a bunch of fiefdoms with petty little corporate barons charging fees at every drawbridge and intersection. Take away all the troll bridges, and you end up with fees based on the overhead (hardware and human maintenance) for a given capacity, totally uncorrelated with actual throughput.
When they all jumped into the same market at the same time, they created an oversupply, or what has been euphemistically called as laying a lot of dark fibre, a huge amount of it in fact, this B$ about having filled all the dark fibre is just marketing hype and trying to force up the price.
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 ;-). 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).
There you go, a brand new patentable business opportunity, automatic local caching/mirroring of offshore/long range streams, to reduce bandwidth/traffic costs.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen