Does the Internet Need a Major Capacity Upgrade?

wiggles writes "According to the Chicago Tribune, the recent surge of video sites such as Youtube and Google video are pushing the limits of the Internet's bandwidth, or soon will be. Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, says that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands. Further, a recent report from Deloitte Consulting raised the possibility that 2007 would see Internet demand exceed capacity. Admittedly, this seems a bit sensationalist, but are we headed for a massive slowdown of the whole internet?"

Comments

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[AvitarX]

As the article has a quote about it, here's specifically WHY I am against "Net Neutrality" -- the ISP has no control over throttling particular sites or protocols that can have major negative effects on their overall user experience. I've already noticed some network slowdowns, but in the past 60 days I dumped broadband and rely primarily on my EDGE connection from T-Mobile (200kbps). Latency isn't too shabby. When I use my T1 at the office though, I have noticed some slowdowns.

"net Nutrality" does not prevent throttleing ports. It would even allow bandwidth capping from video sites if the policy was #GB/site or something. It does not allow the site to get improved performance by paying money or partnering or being owned by the provider. the only way a site or protocal would get better performance would be by the user paying extra. (a lot like what you describe).

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[bky1701]

The solution isn't just more bandwidth. We're not talking about more users accessing the same sites, we're talking about more users accessing more sites -- significantly more. The "long tail" of the web is exploding in access; all the blogs, vlogs, MP3 downloads and videos are across a huge incongruent group of sites.

Say what? Up and down connections are technically the same load to process in most cases. I don't know how you think that somehow use != bandwidth, unless you want to talk about IPs.

The solution is to nix net-neutrality legislation and allow the consumer and the producer to come to terms on need versus price.

Whooh, it is? As I said above I don't think you understand the "problem", how can you know the magic fix to it?

At home, I'd be more than happy for a Port80/Port110 prioritized connection, with other ports reduced in speed or performance. Sure, videos come over Port80, but the vast majority of cable users in my neighborhood are downloading torrentz and other similar protocols.

That's the most idiotic thing I ever heard. Do you realize if such was done torrents would just start using port 80/110?

but that is why the FCC needs to back off on over-regulating the opportunity for competitors to enter the market.

That may be a great idea for cars, pop and beans, but not on something that is inherently a monopoly/near monopoly. Having such comes with responsibility. No matter what your pseudo-free market ideals say, it's not a monopoly because of those responsibilities.

The Internet doesn't really have "bandwidth" limitations, because all it takes is more ISPs and more backbones to come into being. If the pro-Net Neutrality parties have their way, though, we may see significant restrictions in investment on both those fronts.

Where did you get that one, other than a dark spot?

Sidenote: That damned GoogleBot sometimes hits my sites 5000 times a day -- maybe Google is doing a little more to aggravate the problem than they want to admit? Thankfully I use server-side compression and caching, so things aren't hammered too bad by the bot, but there have been times when things on my end were running slow and I had 100 "Guests" all registered at Google's IPs.

Google index bots only read text, not images or video. 5000 google views are probably the same as 1 normal view. I am not sure about image bots, but I noticed that they are normally far behind the main index.

If we need any major internet change, it's nationalizing it. I don't see what's wrong with it right now other than some people crying they will not make enough money (like all companies), people stating that somehow it is making it hard for new companies to be started or people saying that there is a big dark technical problem looming over it waiting to kill us all. None of these are news.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[ScrewMaster]

I don't think most of the ISPs even have common carrier status. The telcos do, when it comes to phone service, but as a data service operator they don't. I believe (and someone who knows more can correct me) that they reason they don't want to be considered common carriers is that they would be subject to additional (read: expensive) regulatory burdens.

Backbone? Pfftt!

[JoelG]

Having worked in the ISP market for the past 7 years I have seen the access portion of Internet access go through multiple fazes. From a single T1, to 4T1's, a 10Mbps feed, 100Mbps and now Gigabit and even multiple Gigabit connections to multiple peers.

For a standard ISP it's a given. Your bandwidth needs double, if not triple once every 2 years, 3 if you're lucky. New technologies come up at a regular pace, it's a part of the industry. Whether it's graphical websites, streaming audio, peer to peer networks, or streaming video, new technology creating more demands for bandwidth requires you to upgrade your network access over time.

Having said this, working for a company with over 10,000 highspeed and dialup internet subscribers, I have found some interesting trends. It's not the Youtube's, VoIP, Peer2Peer &etc eating up our resources... It's spyware infected machines, spam attacks and hacked servers that eats up the bandwidth. When I take a look at my network utilization and see a spike I don't say to myself "Oh no! There must be a hot new movie on YouTube that everyone is watching." Far from that! I say to myself "Stink! What spyware program is it this time." or "is my web server under attack again?"

In addition, as access rates increase I've noticed that performance issues is less affected by the speed of the provider network I'm connected to and more by the remote sites access speeds. You'd be surprised by the puny amount of bandwidth the majority of websites on the internet run on. High Bandwidth sites running on fractional T1's, it's just crazy! Entire computer networks run on the cheapest network equipment known to man.

Has anyone taken a good look at the WorldComm's, Level3 and Bell networks of the world? They are already at 10Gbps with MPLS are their core, and multi-gig connections to their customers. The internet backbone looks better than it ever has! There are far more problems with the endpoints of the internet than the backbone, and it's about time that people took more responsibility in making sure that their network elements are properly backed by the appropriate amount of bandwidth and secured from basic security threats than complaining about their backbone providers.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[rekoil]

Every ISP oversubscribes at some point. It's a fact of the business. It's built into the competitive environment, and if you know anything about longhaul capacity and network hardware costs (I'm looking at you, Cisco), you'd know that the cost of moving a megabit of traffic across the country costs *much* more than what it costs for an ISP to deliver a megabit of capacity from its edge routers to your home. They have to play the averages, counting on only having to move a tenth or so of the available sold capacity as actual traffic. As I said above, if you really want a non-oversubscribed link, be prepared to pay $500 and up a month for it. In fact, that's how much Verizon Business, AT&T, and the other "Business Class" providers charge for a T1 circuit, which is 1.5Mbits of non-oversubscribed bandwidth.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[chill]

Here's a summary of your argument "Networking is hard. We have to lie to sell it to people."

There is an easy way out of this. Stop lying to your customers.

Stop having big, flashing 8 MBPS INTERNET CONNECTION ads with teeny, tiny print on the bottom that says, basically "If you're the only one on, at like 3:05 a.m., if we're not working on something. Oh, and your upload bandwidth is only 384 Kbps."

Don't fucking whine to me how hard it is. You idiots made it hard by LYING YOUR ASSES OFF about what is being sold. You made your bed, lie in it.

[For the record, I'm a telecom engineer for a major equipment manufacturer so I'm intimately familiar with the costs, equipment and issues. I just don't like lying ISPs *cough* Comast *cough*.]