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ARPANet Co-Founder Predicts An Internet Crisis
The Insultant writes "Dr. Larry Roberts, co-founder of the ARPANET and inventor of packet switching, predicts the Internet is headed for a major crisis in an article published on the Internet Evolution web site today. Internet traffic is now growing much more quickly than the rate at which router cost is decreasing, Roberts says. At current growth levels, the cost of deploying Internet capacity to handle new services like social networking, gaming, video, VOIP, and digital entertainment will double every three years, he predicts, creating an economic crisis. Of course, Roberts has an agenda. He's now CEO of Anagran Inc., which makes a technology called flow-based routing that, Roberts claims, will solve all of the world's routing problems in one go."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Man with Solution says the is a Problem.
Yeah, not buyin it. A similar thing happened with electricity, when everyone bought TVs everyone bought computers etc. suddenly of course power usage sky rocketed, and lots of people said, well this is going to be the rate of growth now. Of course, with that, as it is with this, everyone go their TVs and then the demand levelled out, with this, everyone will start downloading videos, and the bandwith usage will level out. Yes, soon we'll need some new routers, but the problem isn't permanent, and it isn't something that we should trust a salesman to deal with.
What's the difference between this flow routing and circuit switching?
Robert Metcalfe predicted this in 1995. He literally ate his words (a printed InfoWorld article mixed with liquid in a blender) in front of an audience in 1997.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Create a problem. Solve that problem. Uniquely own that solution in the market. Make everyone need what you have to offer.
Of course, the first step is that these guys need to really convince everyone that the internet is about to implode and that the companies who need the enormous bandwidth and services simply can't or won't make the hardware investment that is necessary.
The real threat to the internet are the legislators and lobbyists who want to nerf the internet so that the only use for it is the commercial enterprises and everything should be nerfed down to a Disney-fied toddler's level. That's an actual legitimate threat.
However, maybe he should peddle the "piracy and torrents are killing the internet and I can save you!" angle. Might work.
Someone submits a slashvertisement, acknowledges it in the summary, and it still gets put on the front page. Brilliant! Also, routing will be just fine. F-U-D.
1. Run around screaming that the sky is falling
2. Develop and market a product that fixes the sky
3. ?
4. Profit!
He must have read Chicken Little.
What happened to all that talk of "dark fiber"? /.) wanting to fiddle with packets instead of simply routing them?
And how much of the routing problems stem from backbone ISPs (Comcast, Verizon, etc.; see recent
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
When the ice caps melt, the tubes will get clogged with dead polar bears.
I thought American scientists came to UK and we gave them the idea of packet switching.
See "On Distributed Communications", published in 1964.
This would be a crisis if traffic levels were completely insensitive to price, but they're not. It would be a crisis if ISPs were forced to carry an unlimited amount of traffic on pain of death, but they're not. If it becomes expensive to add new routers, ISPs will pass the costs onto their customers, some of whom will buy less bandwidth than they otherwise would have done. No crisis, just an opportunity for some profitable scaremongering.
If the cost increases, they will invest the money and upgrade the network. What is the problem? When MSFT thinks Facebook is worth 15 billion dollars, routers are chump change for them. What is the crisis here? Cost of something is going to go up? Big deal. Oil prices are shooting up. College tuition costs are shooting up. Y ! routing costs?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
People have been claiming "new technology $foo is going to overwhelm the Internet!" for ages. Yet somehow the Internet keeps up. I'm not worried - especially since this guy just so happens to be offering to sell us a solution.
So, how does one get inoculated with your special seed?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...against the upcoming class-action P2P lawsuits. Comcast will claim they were trying to save the Internet by messing with BitTorrent, Gnutella, and Lotus Notes traffic.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
But can we unpublish this article? I mean it doesn't really belong here. The Internet is not going to be overwhelmed by video, VOIP or anything else. It also will not cause a problem with the economy that more data needs to move around. In fact it will HELP the economy.
The internet will not work efficiently without traffic shaping.
If it's too expensive to deploy the services, then perhaps people will do without the services?
The traffic will only increase dramatically if people continue to use the services that demand the traffic, and pay for the bandwidth they need to do it.
--- JurassicPizza
You have reached the end of the internet p0rn. Please turn back now.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's not a watermelon seed is it? I hear if you swallow those, they grow into a watermelon in your stomach. Then maybe you'd forget about that pesky disease and worry more about your serious melon-based intestinal backup problem.
I think this is a dup. This is the virtual circuit guy again, isn't it?
Wow nice Dupe slashdot. Christ, just because it was published somewhere else DOES not mean its not the same frigen article as this: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/1631217 Nicely done guys.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
If we don't get this problem under control, it could mean the END OF THE WORLD!!!!!!
uh. Of Warcraft.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
And how much of the routing problems stem from backbone ISPs (Comcast, Verizon, etc.; see recent /.) wanting to fiddle with packets instead of simply routing them?
The picture on this page says it all.
This is not at all about circuit switching, or routing more efficiently. This about tracking connections through the router so that they can apply policy based on a simple lookup, rather than examining each packet. If they didn't intend to muck with the packets, a "dumb" router is perfectly fine.
Leave my internet protocols ALONE thank you very much.
We will do quite OK without you meddling with our open standards.
We only need linux, an open TCP stack, and anything that happens I am sure we can handle it with JUST those tools.
Well, that and an army of a million penguin volunteers.
We will do fine, really.
Please peddle your proprietary CRAP OLA somewhere else.
Thank you.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
He's now CEO of Anagran Inc., which makes a technology called flow-based routing that, Roberts claims, will solve all of the world's routing problems in one go.
(rolls eyes)
What did Anagran pay Slashdot for this posting?
An anagram (barely) of Anagran is "A nag ran"
15 years ago that was a hoary old USEnet joke...
The imminent death of the internet has been predicted too many times now, but it hasn't happened yet.
The real killer will be the one we don't see.
And anyway - the bandwidth limit will always limit the services available at any time. If a service uses too much noone will use it.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I wonder if everyone on Krypton walked around saying, "That Jor-El! Trying to sell us a rocket to escape an 'impending planetary disaster' to some backwater planet where we'll all have 'superpowers'. Yeah right. What a loser."
He invented packet switching in much the same way that Al Gore invented the Internet ;)
I can assure you that where there is demand, there will be businesses rushing to provide the supply. Its appalling to see people complaining about excessive demand.
Read radical news here
These internet experts should probably talk to each other. But then this story is probably bogus "the sky is falling" hype anyway.
Still waiting for October 1.
Zonk you fucking moron. You already posted this earlier this month right here. Different website, but same guy and same company, of course. Same message, same bullshit!
You have officially crossed into the JonKatz zone. Not only do you post duplicates, but you post slanted slashvertisment duplicates! Your articles are worthless.
It's too bad all I can do is ignore you, but it's about time I finally did. I recommend everyone else do the same, so we can finally hit home that bullshit editors will not be tolerated.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
blank post
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How could any new 'thingy' for the intarweb tubes work if it aint IpVeeSix compliant? He never mentioned that once in the FA. Obviously they don't have a very good marketing team, so how good could the product actually be? huh? Tell me! It'll probably be okay for public schools and libraries, but not for the REAL intarweb!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Really, he should have done it this way the first time, no? I think he should be forced to give away his new solution, because his first one is apparently failing.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
What's the difference between this flow routing and circuit switching?
Flow-based routing attempts to identify flows of packets - TCP connections, related streams of UDP packets, etc. - and cache information about them. Then when future packets of the flow arrive and are successfully identified they can be handled using the cached information, rather than performing a full lookup of routing, QoS labeling, permission checking, etc.
It may also attempt to identify more things about it - such as what kind of traffic it is. Then it can do other things: Identify what quality of service it requires. For instance:
Streams such as VoIP and broadcast audio and video need low latencey and jitter (variability of transit time), but packets that are already delayed too much should be discarded, and the bandwidth SHOULD be limited. Meanwhile file transfers prefer delaying the packets to losing them but they're happy to take all the bandwidth left over from more critical stuff. So streams may go to the front of the line if they're timely but the trashcan if they're already delayed or there are too many of them than there should be.
Once a flow has been identified the knowledge can also be used to do other things with it: Find a better route that it has rights to use, give it preference if the customer's contract guarantees delivery (i.e. "you get 4 VoIP lines worth of bandwidth with high quality of service before your VoIP packets start getting best-effort handling".), perform "deep content inspection" (such as running email through a spam filter as a service), etc.
Circuit switching explicitly reserves resources through the network switches at the start of a session ("setup") and releases them at the end ("teardown"). Flow-based routing attempts to identify the flows of sessions on-the-fly, to speed routing decisions and be "smarter" about the flow - sometimes to the point of being able to emulate circuit-switched quality of service. But it doesn't REQUIRE setup/teardown and end-to-end cooperation to get things to happen. Instead, anything it can't identify goes through in the old way, with the router thinking about each packet of a flow from scratch, just as if the flow-related features didn't exist.
And Anagram is far from the only company working on it. B-) It's a major industry buzzword, on its way to becoming a (set of) required check-boxes for getting networking companies to buy your boxes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
..it's executive compensation, extraneous layers of middle management, lobbying/bribing costs, giant "my architectural penis is bigger than yours" office buildings and corporate jets that are expensive.
Quick, everyone! Run for the hills before the internet crashes!!
Are you safe in your rural shelter?
Problem solved...
DING! You've hit the nail on the head - routers (even big ones) are fairly cheap unless you want to do fancy look-inside processing on them, which methinks is exactly what is going on here. Now if only I had mod points for you...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You and your knowledge of "economics" can go! We're predicting disaster here!
People have been predicting that we'd run out of item X by time Y for hundreds of years. The reason we don't is because (as you said) when supply dwindles, there is incentive to find news supplies and substitutes.
During WWII, it was thought that we'd completely run out of rubber, and this would kill our war effort, due to lack of tires, hoses, gaskets, etc. Along comes synthetic rubber, and magically we don't run out. These days most rubber is synthetic.
This stuff happens all the time. When oil becomes expensive enough, alternative fuel use will become so desirable that an efficient solution will present itself. Hell, that's why we switched to cars in the first place, because our previous transportation (horses) produced untold...uhh..."pollution". A little Co2 seemed like heaven compared to mountains of horse crap, and it didn't take long before cars needed less maintenance than horses.
There was a time, however, when the car was a choice only the rich could afford, one less reliable and less efficient than a good horse. Economics rarely gets the solution ahead of the problem, which is why it's an uphill battle to force people to switch to alternatives when the alternatives aren't as efficient as what they're already using.
The biggest issue right now is that the government is mucking with the damn problem by subsidizing industries to artificially make petroleum/cars seem more efficient than they actually are. For a bunch of "free market economists" they sure love to give away money to un-free the market. They're also dropping the ball by shouldering the pollution costs created by the fossil fuel industry, instead of passing it back to the industry in the form of taxes and fees. Take away the subsidies and fairly apply the costs to the industry that created them, and you'd see a much broader adoption of alternatives as the prices rose to reflect the "real" costs.
China is a good example of this right now...They're polluting like mad, and passing the costs of that on to their citizens so that they can be super-competitive in the global market against people who have to actually pay some of those costs. It's going to catch up with them in a big way...It's like their propping up our currency. The more the dollar deflates, the more money China dumps down the drain trying to keep the dollar high, at the same time trying to keep their own money as depressed as possible.
As the dollar deflates past a certain point, American goods will become "cheaper" and Chinese goods more expensive, leading to a local manufacturing resurgence, yadda yadda, whereas when the Chinese lose hold of their own money, they're going to have this explosion of costs internally, as well as having to watch their goods become much less competitive globally.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The movie, produced 1972 while the Internet was still a toddler, is titled Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing. There is also a Wikipedia article about the film.
I watched this video a while ago. I think this is an appropriate time and place to bring it up.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Your ass is on fire....Aaaaand, Look right here, I happen to have a fire extinguisher made specifically for ass fires! Only $1500.00 and a bargain at twice the price.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
People who freak out about scarcity don't understand economics. Economic pressures drive alternatives and expanded production; we've been seeing this with food since Malthus confidently predicted that food generation could never keep up with current population growth...in 1798.
As the demand rises, people leap to fill it. When Metcalf decided we were going to run out of switching capacity, he was looking at current manufacturing capacity, and a projected increase in demand, and he was sure that capacity could never keep up with demand.
What he didn't see is a horde of people looking for ways to make money, who were looking at the same numbers and thinking, "Holy crap! If I make switches I'll be RICH!" Demand drives supply, not the other way around.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It is true that by offering a solution to a problem a conflict of interest is introduced, but there is more to this piece than just that. In describing problems of network growth the author Lawrence G. Roberts makes references to different types of network traffic having different impacts on networking equipment. Responding to these specific challenges implies that the desirability of networking equipment which can respond to, such as by throttling, network usage based on packet information such as the data, the type, the application, and the source. The only real difference is that in this specific context he is putting forward a solution for dealing with the short to medium term needs that happens to be compatible with network neutrality. If one accepts what he says about problems with networking traffic then the questions about network neutrality seem to be a matter of when it will be lost and not if.
He also implies that latency is a serious problem for particular applications that involve real time control, but that is a complex issue that depends very much on how much data is needed to drive the application and how much sophistication is integrated into the remote client instead of being present only at the server.
This sounds like Moore's Law working against us.
Truth is that such growth rates must eventually slow as we run out of new users and new must-have apps to run in the Internet. That will not likely happen tomorrow, however. So where's all this Dark Fiber waiting for light?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
... Netcraft have to say on the subject?
Are the internets dieing or what?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Yeah, that was the day the Internet died. Can Don McLean write a song for us?
I'll believe the Internet is dead only when Netcraft confirms it.
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.
Back in 2001 Roberts insisted, in the midst of the technology industry's nuclear winter, that the Internet was growing faster then ever. He had a company selling gear at that time (presumably a different company than the one being promoted today), so that was a convenient prediction. Funny how this guy's visionary thinking always aligns with a business model for a company he's backing.
Am I the only one tired of hearing every problem ... even easily surmountable ones ... referred to as a "crisis"??
Crisis: "a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger"
Not enough routers is an *intense* difficulty? Uhhhh ... how about shifting Youtube use to after-business-hours only? How about routing phone calls through wired telephone networks?
"Crisis" solved?
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
From the article: "Flow routing has introduced an important innovation that can help alleviate the capacity crunch: Routers do not need to route every packet, only the first packet in a flow."
...
He has just described Multi Layer Switching.... something which has been around for years. From Cisco:
"The packet forwarding function is moved onto Layer 3 switches whenever a partial or complete switched path exists between two hosts. Packets that do not have a partial or complete switched path to reach their destinations are still forwarded in software by routers.
IP MLS allows you to debug and trace flows in your network. You can identify which switch is handling a particular flow by using MLS explorer packets."
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst5000/hybrid/mls.html#wp10207