Study Warns of Internet Brownouts By 2010

Bergkamp10 writes "Consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown-outs in two years unless backbone providers invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure, according to a new study. A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Net by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to US $137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study by Nemertes Research Group. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand, Nemertes said. Quoting from the study: 'Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years.' Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year."

Comments

yay free market

[hlomas]

it will take care of itself eventually, demand for bandwidth will increase and money will be poured into infrastructure

Re:yay free market

[Urusai]

I've already warned about this. Nobody will invest in new infrastructure in the US because the investors know the US is facing an epic economic decline, or even collapse, in the near future. We've reached peak bandwidth in the US.

Re:yay free market

[SpaceLifeForm]

Actually the capacity for the bandwidth is there, if they light the fibre up.

The article is just FUD.

Re:yay free market

[Anonymous Coward]

demand for bandwidth will increase and money will be poured into infrastructure

Why? Why spend $137 billion to upgrade infrastructure just to keep up, when they could just spend $0, and use the weak infrastructure to justify collecting extra money from google, amazon, itunes, etc.

Re:yay free market

[timmarhy]

"We've reached peak bandwidth in the US."

let me guess your applying the same kind of phony logic as "peak oil" advocates use.

repeat after me everyone - there is no bandwidth crisis. The only thing lacking is the speed of the last mile, there's tons of fibre out there waitng to be lit up.

Re:yay free market

[mikael]

The fibre is there, but what do you connect it to, if the incumbents are just standing there and keeping the door to the cable rooms locked, and not installing any new equipment?

Re:yay free market

[h3llfish]

Yes, just like the free market has done such a great job of caring for the environment! And getting safe toys to our children! And improving the standard of living of the average citizen! And... the list goes on.

You can't have a free market without free people. All of the competitors in the market must play by the same rules - that's Economics 1, day 1.

With US and EU workers trying to compete with slave labor, we are doomed to fail. The massive trade deficit, among other factors, has begun to erode our way of life.

We aren't going to have the money to pay for massive internet infrastructure improvements, thanks to all these "free" markets.

I'm no commie - I just think that we should only trade with trade partners who play by the same rules that we do. Don't trash the environment and destroy species. Allow dissent and trade unions. Don't allow child labor or 80 hour work weeks. If you can't play by those rules, you shouldn't be invited to the game.

Re:yay free market

[penix1]

And just what incentive do the providers have to install said hardware? In fact, there is every incentive NOT to invest shit into it and let "teh tubes clog!!!!111!!!" They will scream to Congress as they try to fight the tide of Net Neutrality. That's what I predict they will do. Lord forbid they actually have to invest in anything except marketing overselling what the technology can support.

Re:yay free market

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

At which point, if they stop buying dollars to support the trade deficit

See, this is what people don't get: China doesn't want a worthless US dollar. All of the dollars that they received (as part of funding our national debt and trade defect) aren't good just sitting around. At some point, China is going to want to spend them, and if we see massive inflation (because our currency becomes worthless), suddenly China is left with a lot of worthless dollars (as are we). It's not good for either side.

Compared to 30 years ago, there's very little manufacturing that actually still creates goods in the US.

This is actually a myth. Manufacturing in the US has grown since 30 years ago. However, demand for consumer goods has grown faster, which is why we are importing so much from

Of course, when the US can no longer afford to buy foreign goods, especially basic items like steel, and all their manufacturing capacity has been dismantled, why that might just be a good time for the Peep's Republic to invade Taiwan.

That would be a particularly poor idea, considering that the US has dramatic naval and air superiority compared with China. Whether or not that will be true in 30 years is very much up in the air, but the PRC has a lot of catching up to do - particularly on the naval side.

Re:yay free market

[nasch]

All it takes is once. I'm not saying I know when it's going to happen, but surely everyone here can see that eventually it will no longer be economically worthwhile to extract any more oil. We won't actually run out, but there will be so little left that it's too hard to get out. The only other possibility is that new oil is being created as fast as we're using it, and I've never heard anyone suggest that. So eventually, yes, oil production will stop.

Re:yay free market

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I shudder to think what Iraq must be costing the US. If you have to have a war, do it well, or lose it relatively quickly, develop an anti-war stance, and become an economic superpower like Germany & Japan.

The cost of the war is in the order of $470,085,420,533... I'm sure you could provide a 100MB connection to every home in the USA for that... (about $4,500 per household)

What gets me, is people don't seem to have a problem with their tax dollars paying for a war that is killing thousands of people overseas, yet you mention trying to pay for universal health care for the entire nation and you've got a messy argument on your hands. Start to talk about spending it on Internet Infrastructure and you've got allot of people complaining in comments on Blogs!!! (that is as bad as it gets these days as nobody riots anymore. Homeland security you see.)

Instead of spending money on killing people, spend it on healing your citizens at home. NYTimes did a nice piece. Basically it's enough to double the research for cancer funding, provide care for ALL Americans suffering from heart disease and diabetes, rebuild New Orleans, Improve National Security, more schools and more teachers. This esitmate puts the cost of universal health care at $69b which is only 15% of the cost of the war.

And don't get all *thats communism* on me... In a true democracy people with power use it for the benefit of the most people.... not the elite few.

Re:yay free market

[tie_guy_matt]

Carter is blamed for it because he actually tried to do something about it instead of just ignoring it. Suggest I wear a sweater and switch to renewable energy? What are you crazy? Why in 20 years I am sure we will think of something else. If we ignore it then the problem goes away for a while and we can pretend it is someone else's problem (it will be someone else's problem -- our kids!)

Re:yay free market

[Anonymous Coward]

The free market will doom us. If our oil supply declines to 1970, or even 1980s levels in the course of a year, it will be too late to build the infrastructure other energy sources require without severely damaging the economy. Not only that, but building the infrastructure will be costlier then, since construction requires a lot of energy.

Re:yay free market

[hedwards]

Yes and no, there is the last mile problem, but there is also the problem of 3/4 of the existing bandwidth being used by spammers and crackers.

I don't personally support adding capacity to the net, until the other problems that are limiting the usability are dealt with.

Re:yay free market

[bitrex]

The reason some of the technologies you mention are not being used extensively is not only a question of cost, it's also a question of running up against technological difficulties and the laws of physics. Solar panel efficiency is still stuck at around 15% on average. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy carrier - one needs to use some other energy source to produce it. Battery technology restricts the use of electric powered vehicles. Even if all of the U.S. corn crop were converted to ethanol, it could only power 20% of vehicles on the road, and thats assuming farms still use the hundreds of thousands of tons of petroleum based fertilizers currently applied to make crop yields what they are. Crunching the numbers on all these things is difficult, but from the research I have seen it is easily apparent that even if we used all available alternative energy sources that we know of to maximum efficiency using current technology, the world would still fall short of fulfilling its CURRENT energy demands by a wide margin.

Perhaps there will be continued innovation in more efficient alternative energy technologies; perhaps others will be discovered. It's also possible that neither will happen, or neither is possible. By believing that the free market will automatically rectify the inevitable decline in world oil production with alternative fuels one is essentially betting that both possibilities will come about in time to avert an energy crisis, while the status quo is maintained for the foreseeable future. This seems to me like a dangerous gamble.

Re:yay free market

[mcrbids]

The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone.

You mean, like newsgroups?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but come on, man! This is NOT A DIFFICULT PROBLEM. It was thoroughly solved well over a decade ago. The only reason we aren't using it more is because of legal considerations. Newsgroups solved the problem of distributing large amounts of content over slow connections and caching the data on an as-needed basis. Your "NetFS" struggles (and fails) to be anywhere near as efficient.

But if your ISP took the top 50 movies and cached them in a cheap-ass 1U newsgroup server at your neighborhood head-end equipment, the top 500 movies in 4U at your city colo, and the top 50,000 in a nice rack at their datacenter, with one superglobalworldwide archive with everything ever made, they'd have a system that would be incredibly efficient. Build each tier to failover to the one above, and you'd have incredible reliability. Even if the superglobalworldwide data center went down for an afternoon, only maybe 5% of everybody would even notice. And the superglobalworldwide datacenter might only cost a few million. Peanuts!

See, half of everybody wants the top 10 movies. Half of what's left wants something released within the last year or so. The next 20% or so gets pretty tough to cache, and the last 5% is just impossible - some artsy film from 1948 filmed in southern France.

With very little expense, your ISP could serve basically every movie ever made.

Re:yay free market

[blahplusplus]

"... allowtrade unions. Don't allow child labor or 80 hour work weeks. If you can't play by those rules, you shouldn't be invited to the game."

Ahh yes but freedom means freedom to break the rules, and to do just anything... and that also means be crook. There is almost no distinction between a theif and a business man these days. Business practices can't be enforced because it would take probably upwards or close to half of the population monitoring the other half, or an orwellian society. We allow people to make their own choices, but... not all people are created equal, therefore not all minds, thoughts, and ideas, and their subsequent choices will be created equal either... and thus is the state of the world.

The fact is the culture of greed is nourished by the concept of money, it is in fact us who is doing it to ourselves, if resources are finite and limited, and they efficiencies only increase in bursts or jumps (i.e. taking a finite resource, and then being able to use less of it doing the same thing), then it follows that: We have done it to ourselves.. i.e. every time you invest in a company that is destroying the environment, you are in fact just as much responsible as the company for that effect. Companies don't exist without money, don't give them money and eventually they will go out of business.

The problem is of couse we no longer produce our own necessities, therefore we are indentured servants to one another. That may sound "luddite'ish" but it is the truth. If you don't own your own productive property and are dependent on someone else for basic necessities, then you are in a struggle for power with the person that provides you those necessities.

Re:yay free market

[encoderer]

I'm sorry, but your post shows a complete ignorance of how macro economics and monetary theory actually work.

1. The Chinese (or anyone for that matter) does not "buy dollars" to "support the trade deficit." !!!!! They produce GOODS which we BUY from them in DOLLARS. You probably heard how they have a few hundred billion dollars or whatever in their Central Bank and you just ran with it. Perhaps some of their USD reserves were investments/speculations but the VAST MAJORITY were sent to China in exchange for the shoes and DVD players and shit that we Americans just LOOOOOVE.

2. The Chinese (or anyone for that matter) aren't buying T-Bills out of the kindness of their hearts in order to support our deficits. They're buying T-Bills because they MAKE DECENT INTEREST and they're the most rock-solid investment vehicle ON THE PLANET. The chance of default is SO LOW that it's non-existent. This would be like saying that eventually Investors will get tired of funding Google's R&D and stop buying their stock. They won't. Because they don't give a fuck about googles R&D. They own the stock because it's a good investment vehicle.

3. As somebody else said, China (or anyone else for that matter) has NO INTEREST in seeing the US Dollar decline in value.

---First, China pegs the Yuan to fluctuate with the dollar!! So if the dollar falls, their currency falls as well. This artificial-pegging is one of the big economic beefs that the US has with China. It eliminates the normal controls of the free market. If they didn't do this, in theory, the Yuan would have gained on the dollar over the past 7 years, making Chinese goods more expensive, making US manufacturers more competitive. But that hasn't happened because of the way the Chinese Gov't manipulates their currency.

---Second, China's number one trading partner is the US! They are a wealthy country right now primarily because of the US! Why oh why would the slaughter the goose that's laying their golden egg?

---Third, If china began selling off their stockpile of dollars quickly, it would they would lose out! If they have $1TN in USD's (they don't have that much, just an example), and they sold off the first $500bn, the second $500bn would be worth much less. Why would they do that?

---Fourth, Even if china sold off every one of their USD's, the USD would rebound. Simple supply and demand! It will flood the market, push down the value, and then it would reach a point low enough that it becomes a huge buying opportunity, so other Central Banks would move-in and speculate on the dollar and make a shitload. As they buy dollars on the free market, the dollar would rebound, end of story.

4. The only premise under which China could consider this would be a US-Sino war. WHY? WHY? WHY? Why would either side of that fight ever decide it was worthy? Bill Clinton was wrong about free trade in many ways, but he was right about a few things. Among them: Free trade stops wars. Our relationship with China is symbiotic. They need us. We need them. For all the talk of China rising-up they have a LONG LONG way to go before they reach parity with the US. Sure, their (costal) cities look modern, but the vast majority of the country is not yet modernized. No highways and bridges and dams and homes and sewer and water and gas. No subways and bus stations and airports and seaports and spaceports. Outside of the major cities, it's a very backwards country and it's going to take TRILLIONS of dollars to modernize it. They NEED us. We NEED them.

5. AND HERE'S THE BIG ONE: Adam Smith solved this problem almost THREE HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO when he wrote the book that's become the bedrock for modern economic theory. In "The Wealth of Nations" he proposed for the first time the idea that trade is universally good. His theory is simple: What can China ever do with that money except buy things from us? (Or from other people, who eventually buy things from us)?? Money is just a way to keep score. It has no intrinsic value. It's value is limited to the fact that it can be exchanged for something you need.

This study brought to you by...

[Starteck81]

... your local monopoly telco. I wouldn't be surprised if Verizon, AA&T and their ilk paid for this study so they could go cry to congress about needing more subsidies so the internet doesn't "brownout".

Re:This study brought to you by...

[jtgd]

...or brought to you by Comcast, to justify their throttling.

More alarmist bullshit

[Sycraft-fu]

Bet you 10 slashbucks if you do some research behind where this study came from, it is companies who claim to have the fix for this.

I highly doubt the Internet is headed for a meltdown because, funny thing, as usage grows so does available bandwidth. Turns out that we can activate more fibre connections, we can upgrade to new, faster technologies, etc. I'm quite sure the Internet of 1997 would have ground to a near total halt were it subjected to today's traffic. However turns out we aren't dealing with that Internet, ours is faster, better.

I also hate when people throw out bullshit numbers of how much something will cost to fix. Ok well that might be impressive assuming we weren't spending anything now. But we are. Companies are investing in new infrastructure all the time (I know we are where I work). If it is insufficient, ok, but let's not pretend that there is no development going on and all of a sudden we have to find a big wodge of cash.

If it comes down to it, and there's more demand than supply and supply is too expensive to grow based on current pricing know what happens? No not a melt down, but that magic shit you learned back in Econ 200: Prices will rise such that demand will match supply. Of course those rising prices will give more money to upgrade supply and so on.

In reality I imagine things will go just fine. As far as I can tell bandwidth is getting cheaper at the high end, and supply is mostly limited by demand. As there's more demand for it, the infrastructure necessary for it will be purchased.

Why does spending level off ?

[mbone]

I must admit, my BS detector went off when I heard of this study. In my experience. the Internet backbones tend to be in the best shape, even in the US, and the most straightforward to extend. Our troubles tend to be on the edge.

While, I cannot find any real problems in a quick read, people should look at FIGURE 7: GLOBAL INCREMENTAL OPTICAL INVESTMENT, where the investment peaks in 2008 after exponential growth in both spending, capacity and use. It is not too surprising that a couple of years of exponential growth in usage later, and with flat spending, they predict problems. The real question to me is, how realistic is that that investment will peak next year ? I must admit that this sounds dubious to me.

Sounds like anti-neutrality FUD to me

[niola]

Some of the points made in this report seem to eerily echo the talking points of the big comm companies against neutrality, and for allowing them to tier pricing.

If you recall they said in the past that video is using up a substantial percentage of the bandwidth and that unless they can charge the big users more (ie Google, Youtube, etc) that they won't be able to upgrade the infrastructure to keep up.

Re:Just throttle the biggest content--Oh, wait.

[homer_ca]

Correct. An example of QOS would be prioritizing all VoIP packets. Non-net-neutrality would be prioritizing the packets of the ISP's own VoIP service and degrading a competitor's VoIP traffic (say to Vonage). This article sounds like more fear mongering to promote a tiered Internet, i.e. non-neutral Internet.