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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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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?
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
I'm inclined to agree and call bullshit to this. I survived MCI Worldcom, Global Crossing, and Metromedia Fiber among others. I've got boxes of papers from during and after the days when people like Bernie Ebbers and John Sidgmore were screaming that there wasn't enough bandwidth, while people like Gary Winnick were out conning businessmen into cabling deals. Maybe it's post-traumatic stress, but whenever I hear business people make vague blanket statements about there not being enough bandwidth I cringe and hide behind a tree on the off chance I'll get to club Jack Grubman.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1. Deliver a thoughtful and witty reply in a slashdot thread.
2. Illustrate the reply with Yet Another Car Analogy.
3. Bend the car analogy into an angry, frothing rant against SUVs... or rather, against the people who drive them... or rather, against the people who can afford them.
4. ???
5. Hard-on! I mean, profit!
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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