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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?"
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.
Quandary in the Making
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*.]
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.