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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.
"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.
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.
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.
I think the answer is obvious: You just build more tubes.
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'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.
.. You created it, you fix it !!!
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.
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.
There can only meaningfully be a bandwidth issue between the endpoints of a transaction.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I guess IP over carrier pigeon would be out.
Their they're doing there hair.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I would start a company that drives truckloads of hard drives across the country. They didn't say anything about a latency problem...
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...
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.
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.
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"
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.
You mean, I'll actually have to live my _first_ life? No way!
...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
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.