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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?"
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.
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No, it didn't choke the internet, but it pretty much choked it for that corridor. Of course, that was mostly because a huge chunk of New York's comms infrastructure was routed through the WTC and/or the Verizon building across the street.... Amazing how the whole premise of ARPANet was decentralizing everything, and now we've slowly reverted back to a situation where a failure in certain key core backbone facilities can really wreck things, and a failure in only a handful of root DNS servers can similarly decimate usability.
We should be looking for ways to use P2P technology to solve these high bandwidth problems, decentralizing the data as much as possible, caching it regionally as much as possible, etc. Instead, all the players seem to be too focused on who controls the rights, thus ensuring that no progress is made....
SNAFU.
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No... They would upgrade their infrastructure if there was any major market demand for it.. and thus people were willing to pay for it.
There isn't... and thus they aren't...
Well, maybe YOU want more bandwidth, but I know that in my household we never use even a fraction of our quite nice cable modem bandwidth, even with 4 computers going.
I do some freelance work for a hosting company in Chicago. Their network has more than enough bandwidth to serve all of their bandwidth-chuging clients... yet if they have 2Gbps (number out of the air) of bandwidth that customers have purchased, they are NEVER going to hit over say 1.25Gbps... it just doesn't work like that... and if everybody had gigabit lines on your block, it would be the same...
-nick
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?
When we all used 300 baud modems, was there a "bandwidth shortage"?
This whole story sounds a lot like FUD created by the people who don't want Net Neutrality. By manufacturing a "crisis", the government will HAVE to deregulate and then you'll see so much bandwidth you won't believe it, but it will cost a lot of money. The main purpose of the PR campaign that is behind this story is to make sure nobody gets a free lunch. If there's one thing that corporations hate, is people getting something for nothing, or next to nothing. Politicians and corporations HATE the internet as it has existed for the last 15 years. It makes them shit-crazy to think of people doing stuff and it not putting money in their pockets. They have come to believe that the very act of communicating is something that everybody should have to pay them for.
Remember, some 30 years ago, there was an OIL SHORTAGE. I mean serious. Rationing. You could buy gas on even days but not odd days. Cars that got over 40 miles to the gallon.
Today, there are so many Lincoln Navigators driving down the Kennedy Expressway it looks like a locomotive convention. Each getting about 9 miles to the gallon. Each one with one person in it, usually a 30-something with a small dick. 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. 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?
And, as I said, it's because it pisses them off to no end when people can get something cheap or find a way to live without them getting paid. Every time an oil truck passes me on when I'm on my bike, I watch for a gun barrel to peek out the side window, you better believe. 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.
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