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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.
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.
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?
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.
This would make more sense if step 3 was actually a mystery. I thought step 3 was obvious: "Convince influential idiots with money that your product is the greatest and most urgently needed thing since free porn."
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
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
Uh, yeah, but Dvorak doesn't have any credentials backing him up. Who is John C. Dvorak? Some stupid know-nothing tech journalist. Who is Bob Metcalfe? He's the co-inventor of Ethernet, he founded 3COM, and invented Metcalfe's Law.
Some people at least thought he knew what he was talking about and, well, they had good reason to. I will say that I thought his comment was wrong-headed and stupid, but, then again, what do I know? I'm just some random guy on Slashdot.
My blog
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"
From the looks of Anagran's description of their 'flow' based routing, routers analyze individual TCP flows very closely and rate them according to behavior in order to predict future needs of each flow, and then make adjustments on the fly by various means (closely timed discard of TCP segments to force endpoint TCP adjustments, QOS-like throttling of flows that look like they may be coming from slow endpoints, etc.)
All of this looks to be enhancements and accelerations to QOS. It could be really cool, or highly evil as well, since these boxes would be perfect for retarding P2P traffic without actually blocking it on backbone links. It looks to be the same "steal from peter to feed paul" way of dealing with bandwidth congestion without investing in network infrastructure.
Getting telecoms away from corporate welfare and into genuine market competition will go much farther to address bandwidth problems.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
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.