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

A big strike against Net Neutrality

[dada21]

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.

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

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. I don't see a reason why everyone should pay the same price for different service. Sure, the telecom industry is scared of Net Neutrality because they WANT to ban Skype and VoIP, but that is why the FCC needs to back off on over-regulating the opportunity for competitors to enter the market. There is a huge opportunity for more wireless providers and more people bringing FTTH or other options.

I know, I know, you were promised 160 Mbps and you want every last speck of it. Those ads will change, I think, as more people do get connected. I'd be happy with lower latency than higher data-rates, and I think this article forgets that it is latency that is just as important (if not more so) than just pure bandwidth speed.

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. The companies who invested in offering new limbs on the internet took great risks -- and some made great rewards. We want to keep that risk/reward ratio uncluttered by excess regulation legislation so others can offer us more options for who we can connect to.

I'm sure if YouTube/Google had it their way, they'd get special consideration for providing more bandwidth -- State-paid consideration maybe? I sure hope not.

When things slow down, it will give new competitors reason for entering the market. 20% more backbone speed interconnecting some Level 2 ISPs and things will be fine, until the next slowdown brings another run of entrants into the game, or gives the old companies reason to expand their network. Envision 2010: "Is your latency too low? Comcast Ultra offers you 50ms or less ping times across the board, guaranteed!" It may sound fishy, but who would have thought 10 years ago that we'd hear about Mbps on basic cable ads?

The last paragraph is the most insightful part of the article:
Any service degradation will be spotty and transient, predicted (John) Ryan (of Level 3), who said that underinvestment by some operators may "drive quality traffic to quality networks."

EXACTLY.

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.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[ADRA]

What a well prepared talk piece. I however take the other approach.

If I'm offered 5Mits/s from my cable provider, that is an obligation for them to fill my order. If they can't fulfill my expectations, then they shouldn't have offered the service to begin with. If telco XYZ is getting bitten for overselling their lines that sure as hell isn't my problem as a consumer. What I do with my 5Mbits/s is my own business. I could use the internet to check my email (10kb), or surf the web a while (2MB), or download a YouTube video (200M?).

Why should my internet operator, the guys protected up the ass by common carrier protections dictate my internet surfing activities?

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

[Doc Ruby]

Studies of actual traffic congestion mitigation techniques have consistently demonstrated that increasing capacity is a much cheaper and more reliable remedy than QoS on backbones. With extra benefits in the raw capacity. The "quality traffic to quality networks" would require a whole extra architectural layer to route through several different Internet links on realtime route quality decisions, rather than leverage the full capacity of the Net to route anywhere at any time on local congestion conditions or other overall strategies.

These whines are in fact "special consideration" pressure for the telcos to get "Net Doublecharge". They don't need service tiers, but they can use them to demand distant endpoints pay protection money. If they can get the protection money from the government, their favorite source of subsidy and protection for over a century, they certainly will. Especially if they've already used up the capacity for private accounts (people) to pay them directly, which makes them look less competitive.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[CommunistHamster]

Privatising, like the UK Rail industry, whose CEOs spent so little on track maintenance that trains crashed and people died?

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.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[rekoil]

Let me try to explain the problem from the ISP side (pardon me while I don Les Asbestos Underpantz)...

What we're seeing is the hazards of changing oversubscription ratios. I'm sure this term is familiar to many of you, but for those who don't, it's the concept that ISPs know that on average, each customer will only use a certain portion of the bandwidth that's made available to them. As such, an ISP doesn't have to provision one megabit of backbone capacity for each megabit it sells to a consumer; it might only have to upgrade on a 1:10 or 1:50 upstream-to-downstream ratio. There's no way that an ISP could sell bandwidth at a reasonable price without oversubscribing at some point. Without oversubscription your 1.5Mbit DSL line would be $500 a month, not $50. Those in the business know I'm not exaggerating here, given the cost of service provider network equipment and fiber capacity (which continues to fall, but not nearly fast enough).

What's causing the problem is that those ratios are changing, such that (for example) the 1:10 ratio an ISP built its business model around is now 1:5, thanks to YouTube, iTunes, Bittorrent, WoW, etc, not to mention 0wned machines spewing spam and DoS traffic, which is overtaxing its infrastructure and increasing costs. The ISP can't get away with raising prices, and obviously has to remain profitable, so congestion is the inevitable result.

Some ISPs, most notably Comcast, have gotten quite aggressive at disconnecting what they perceive as "abusive" customers whose usage is higher than the norm. This is absolutely the wrong way to go about this problem, but feeling of being between the proverbial rock and a hard place is understandable. ISPs simply can't stay in business if customers actually use all the bandwidth they're given, and if we all built our networks such that everyone could, no consumer would pay for it.

I think it was 1994 when AOL introduced its unlimited dialup service (prior to 1994 AOL billed dialup connection time by the hour). Because the user that before was spending an average of, say, 30 minutes a day online was now spending 3 hours a day connected, and because AOL woefully misforecast those ratios, it became next to impossible to connect to AOL for quite a while until they caught up with modem provisioning (That's when I got rid of my AOL account and got my first real ISP acccount, yay!). Looks like everything old is new again.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[timeOday]

Nationalizing it like the UK's health care, where they recently discovered that doctors were letting old people die rather than get treated because the doctors did better financially treating younger, healthier patients? No thanks.

Check your facts. Longevity is longer in the UK than here and they pay far, far less. The free market is better for most things, but health care - judging by the statistics - doesn't seem to be one of them.

Anyways, it sounds horrible to "ration" health care, but the fact is, nothing is infinite. Even if all of us did nothing but work in the health care industry, or pay 100% of our salaries to it, there would still be a limit. Where do you draw that line? Do you really want to give a $60K quadruple bypass to an 80 year old with a 50% chance of dying on the table and a 90% chance of living less than 2 years? The US insistence on rationing health care according to ability to pay instead of the expected benefit (measured in expected lifespan and quality of life) is exactly our problem.

Oh and by the way, I would not support nationalizing the Internet. These little "oh no! We're going to run out of bandwidth!" articles come out two or three times per year ever since I can remember. I would support either regulation or deregulation (I'd have to look into it!) to make the residential market more competitive.

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[troll -1]

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

You're not by any chance a lobbyist for the non net neut advocates are you? i

Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP) should occur at the end-points of the network.

See "End-to-end arguments in system design" by Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoe nd/endtoend.pdf

This principle was used by DARPA when it worked on Internet design and it's the reason TCP/IP communications have experienced massive growth.

It's a principle supported by almost everyone except the backbone owners. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him and if you're going to make a profit off them then he wants a cut too (referring to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al who oppose Net Neut).

Compare with mobile carriers who don't follow the principle of network neutraility where you pay more for cell phones that use a zero cost medium (the airways) than you do for the Internet which uses an expensive wired system. And where every service is separately billable. Is that the network of the future you're suggesting is better for us?

I wouldn't be so opposed to your argument if I could be convinced the telcos weren't running a gnarly scheme to make my ISP bill look like my cell phone bill.

The net has been so successful perhaps because it was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists an d engineers in an academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal. You want to give it over to the business folks because you think they can do a better job if they're involved in how the Internet continues to evolve?

Be careful what you wish for. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. But what worries me the most about non net neut is that we're going to be giving companies a large hand in determining, not how the Internet will look in a few years, but ultimately we're going to be giving them a lot of power in influencing how it's developed later on down the road. I say we tread carefully.

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*.]

Re:A big strike against Net Neutrality

[mysticalreaper]

Thank you for the excellent explanation of how things work from the ISP side. However, i think you have betrayed the ISP by citing what you did when AOL started to suck:
because AOL woefully misforecast those ratios, it became next to impossible to connect to AOL for quite a while until they caught up with modem provisioning (That's when I got rid of my AOL account and got my first real ISP acccount, yay!). Looks like everything old is new again.
(emphasis mine)

This is exactly the point. If qwest is starting to offer shitty service, it's proposterous to blame the customer, and then talk as if the internet itself is breaking cause of these damnable users.

If company A is not capable of delivering a good product, i'm sure company B will have something you'd be more interested in.

Following this logic, you come back to the situation that many of us in Canada and the US are faced with: Lack of competive choices for an ISP, resulting, in this case, with shitty service being blamed on the customer. I hope enourmously that no one in goverment is buying this tortured logic, and making policy decisions based on it.

Consider the source

[KingSkippus]

Qwest is one of the companies speaking out against net neutrality. The CEO even went as far as to call it "really silly." Could it be that the CTO's comments are politically motivated?

I, for one, think so.

Re:Consider the source

[killbill!]

It's pretty obvious the whole purpose of the article is to drum up support for ending the net neutrality rule.

From the article:
Backed by several consumer groups as well as large Internet enterprises such as Google, network neutrality legislation forbids phone companies from managing the network to favor one Internet user's content over another's.

Notice how the article ends on the tired "it'll be good to the consumer" strawman:
underinvestment by some operators may "drive quality traffic to quality networks."

Distribution models, throttle and better last mile

[Twillerror]

The internet will continue to grow in capacity and as it has new products will come out to fill the void.

My biggest issues with youtube are at work in our main office. We have a large application hosted in data center. It is a major hub for internet connectivity for the region. Given that we are so close to some big vendors we can get lots of bandwith for relatively low prices. If my employees where sitting in that facility they could surf youtube.com all day.

Now at home I can also do it. I pay Comcast a big more for the extra bandwidth and I can download over a meg a second from some sites. Verizon is going to be laying fiber directly to houses and businesses soon.

Get into our offices and it is a different story. We have dual t1s coming in and only 60+ employees, but we are constantly saturated. Combine that with the fact that Cisco Pixes have horrible throttling support and you end up with times when I can't even access basic websites very quickly. The issue here is that T1s and DS3s are freakin expensive compared to a simple cable modem. We have been tempted to get Comcast bussines ( which makes me shiver a bit ) because I can get larger down pipes for general internet surfing. We only host a few services such as email here so it isn't like we need megs of up bandwith.

Throttling would go along way to solve this issue. Youtube could buffer people down quite a bit, you would just have to wait for the movie to buffer a bit. For shared internet connections and ISPs this could allow for better QOS.

Distribution models will help a lot. Youtube should have replicated servers in major market. As more players get in the video game I'm sure they will be setting up shop in several areas. Video doesn't change that much so when one person uploads it can be replicated throught out the network. You can still host the main links from a centralized place, but then stream the video from the closest location as it becomes available. This takes all the traffic from the west coast and keeps it there keeping people from the midwest from saturating the big pipes that connect the regions. Less hops also means less latency which is good for everyone.

People have been saying this same thing for ever. Telecom companies are just afraid of admitting that they can't charge up the ying yang for DS3s anymore. They are also going to have to invest in their networks which there shareholders hate. It is also the local telcoms that irritates me. Although dealing with Sprint is no treat, dealing with SBC/ATT/other momma bells is huge pain.

Networks are distributed by nature, so it just means you can't pipe all the data thru centralized routers. You are going to have to setup an infrastrute that can do very basic routing in a spider web. You can route packets very quickly if you just look at the first octect...and forward along to another router. All 1.xxx.xxx.xxx thru 5.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx can be piped to a router that knows about those routes, and even breaks it down further. If you think about it they don't even need to do that they can just take the packet and load balance to many other devices. I think it'll be a while before we can't route faster...it is not like faster switching rates is completely dead.

If anything video is just forcing the issue of increasing the capacity, which will always need to grow. Eventually we will be streaming high end video content, and this article will be a long forgotten joke.

Let the market work.

[zorkmid]

Raise prices until the underclass can't afford it. Then they'll drop off and stop clogging my intraweb tubes.

I have to agree with that.

[khasim]

"Net Neutrality" is the way to go.

Once you start instituting "tiers" you take away ANY incentives to increase the available bandwidth.

Instead, the "innovation" will go towards extracting the most revenue from the smallest pipes. And "innovation" is in quotes because it won't be real innovation. It will be accounting tricks and tier pricing.

Re:Distribution models, throttle and better last m

[adamruck]

I don't understand why people keep equating T1's to fast internet. Your office has the equivalent of about 50x dialup connections for about 60 people. It doesn't take a veteran sysadmin to understand why that is a problem.

Astroturfing : Nothing to see: Move along folks

[strangedays]

This appears to be yet another atroturfing attempt.
See Slashdot post: "How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?" Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 15, @06:19PM
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/15/18 25230/
(please remove the silly extra space slash adds to the url above, just before 25230, it breaks the link)
Clearly we are going to be treated to this bogus bandwidth crises bullshit approximately once a week, probably to collect some supportive comments for the need for more control/cost/etc.
Please don't feed the trolls, or help them lay more Astroturf for Net Neutrality.

Caching is the answer

[deckert_za]

I live in South Africa. Like Australia we're geographically far away from most of the "internet content", but unlike Australia our bandwidth costs are astronomical (mainly due to a telecoms monopoly) on the thin fibre links that we have.

But because of the bandwidth situation most SA ISPs have invested in massive cascaded caching infrastructure all over the country and at the so-called logical borders where the links exit to the US, Europe and far East. I continually monitor HTTP headers to check the cached status and easily 70% of the regular content I surf comes from one of the local caches.

Even websites within South Africa are reverse-cached, i.e. the ISPs put caches in at the foreign landing points to speed up access (and lower return bandwidth costs) to foreign surfers.

I sometimes think that the rest of the world has forgotten about caching due to the apparent abundance of bandwidth available in those countries. Maybe we'll see a return of caching polularity?

--deckert

Needed: QOS routing at the access point!

[IBitOBear]

If the net needs anything it needs Quality of Service routing at the customer access point.

NO, I am _NOT_ talking about a non-neutral net. I think net neutrality is mandatory.

What I am talking about is an end to TCP Retransmits in our lifetime. (Ok, that is overstating it a little 8-).

At my home I put together a QOS gateway that throttled my _outgoing_ packets to the speed of my cable modem _and_ made sure that if it had to drop something it would _not_ drop outgoing "mostly ACK" packets. (e.g. outgoing TCP packets with little or no data payload get best delivery.)

This action lowered my incomming packet count and got my effective download speed to closely approach the bandwidth tier I am paying for. This was a 3x to 4x improvement in throughput. This, when combined with the lower packet count, implies that previously I was wasting 2 out of every 3 packets due to unnecessary "recovery" (read useless retransmits).

That cost must, then, have been paid at every step along every trip etc.

Then I turned on HTTP Pipelining on all the (forefox) browsers in my house (etc).

I suspect that if we could do something about the waste ratio, and generally speed up each transaction by squelching the noise and getting better effective throughput, "the intertubes" would be a lot clearer and the capacity wouldn't fall apart so readily.

[aside]
If we could (pie in the sky) get the porn and ewe-tube traffic onto the mbone with smart caching near the client so that each person didn't have to get each part "the whole way" from the provider even though everybody else is watching the same top-ten clips of the day, we could make more progress. This falls apart because it messes up the charging model for porn and advertising, and ewe-tube gawkers couldn't possibly stand waiting 2 to 6 seconds to join a synchronized swarm...
[/aside]

This is very like the whole thing where a guy with half-flat tires is standing around complaining about his gas mileage.

Collision detect style arbitration falls apart when you saturate the link, and cable providers screwed themselves with the way most cable modems fail to buffer outgoing traffic. Penny wise and Pound foolish of them to make the default devices so cheap. Iterate as necessary for businesses and ISPs with their underpowered gateway machines terminating their PPOE (etc).

As for the part where that failure to schedule packets at the most basic level will be turned into "demonstrable evidence" for the "need" non-neutral networks... That will be the "WMDs" of the net neutrality war.

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.

Ok, so in layman's terms...

[Bananatree3]

The internet is essentially one giant stadium, and computers are the toilets in this stadium. When all the toilets go flush! at the same time, the sewage pipes inside the stadium walls cant handle it, and so they burst.

Re:Ok, so in layman's terms...

[multipartmixed]

No, not pipes. The internet is not like sewage pipes. It's more like... a bunch of TUBES.

Why, just last week, my staff flushed an internet, and I only got it, I got it yesterday. And I still haven't figured out who this "tub girl" is supposed to be.