Slashdot Mirror
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."
I don't know if I'm trolling or joking or what, but I'm in the unfortunate position of saying: If people start seeing brownouts because there's too much video on the 'net, I'll happily switch to a service that throttles the heck out of your content as long as I can still use my low-bandwidth telnet stuff. Does that mean I'm supporting or opposing network neutrality? I don't even know anymore.
The money doesn't even need to be poured into infrastructure anymore. Back in the late 90s they laid so much fiber/conduits that we will be perfectly fine for quite a long time.
Add on to that the lowering cost of long-range high-speed ethernet and I'm confident that there won't be a problem nearly as fast as people want to make it seem.
What is really needed here, however, is a wider adoption of multicast and local cache technology. That is going to be very costly to do.
-nick
http://mr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12356.html
From an article in discover magazine:
John Doyle is worried about the Internet. In the next few years, millions more people will gain access to it, and existing users will place ever higher demands on our digital infrastructure, driven by applications like online movie services and Internet telephony. Doyle predicts that this skyrocketing traffic could cause the Internet to slow to a disastrous crawl, an endless digital gridlock stifling our economies. But Doyle, a professor of control and dynamic systems, electrical engineering, and bioengineering at Caltech, also believes the Internet can be saved. He and his colleagues have created a theory that has revealed some simple yet powerful ways to accelerate the flow of information. Vastly accelerate the flow: Doyle and his colleagues can now blast the entire text of all the books in the library of Congress across the United States in 15 minutes.
I haven't actually read the whole article in a while but from what it seems, this guy has a pretty good solution to this whole problem that I don't see discussed a lot.
The collapse of the infrastructure is like the end of Moore's Law--always a couple years over the horizon.
As a general practice, I ignore any news story that relies upon "could", "may", "might" or "possibly" in its central premise. It always means that another lazy journalist is being willingly spoonfed a story by a PR flack.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Well telcos, I guess you have to upgrade the network now like you promised for the tax cuts clinton gave you between 1996 and 2000! What was it? 200 billion?
This is the telcos fault, screw them.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
I hate agreeing with a guy who can't understand the simple fact that oil production will peak someday (was I missing obvious sarcasm? If so... sorry), but...
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. All we need is a few simple strategies to help enable it. I'm doing my part. We geeks will overcome.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I worked for Cisco Systems in the late 90's and through the dot-com bust. Starting in 1995, there was a MASSIVE undertaking to lay out fiber across the nation and throughout the world. When they pulled fiber, they didn't just pull one strand. Fiber is cheap, it is the manual labor that is incredibly expensive to bury the cables and hook them up, certify them, etc. When they buried the cables, they ran 128 pair, 256 pair. TO THIS DAY, we have MORE DARK FIBER than we have lit fiber. There is enough fiber spanning this planet to support a quintupling of bandwidth and we'll STILL have dark fiber to spare.
Why are they 'warning' of impending bandwidth crisis? It's pretty simple.
I was just at a customer site last week (a city government). They had a DS3 and were going to get a second one. I asked him why on earth he was getting a DS3 which is OLD telco technology. I went up to his demarc point and showed him that Qwest had a fiber cable coming into their facility that provided 100mb to the net, that they then fed into a Fujitsu FL4100, then passed it off to a DS3 mux and passed off to the customer as a copper coax connection. They had a wall filled with equipment JUST TO SLOW DOWN THE CONNECTION to a DS3 speed. Oh, and the City was paying for the electricity for all the telco equipment.
I told him to call up Qwest and tell them to come get their crap out of his server room, take the fiber and plug it directly into his switch. And he was only going to pay $2000 a month for the 100mb connection to the internet or else good luck ever getting a permit to dig up another sidewalk in this town.
It worked. He didn't even have to resort to the threats. Qwest knows that they NEED TO CREATE A PROBLEM IN ORDER TO CHARGE FOR THE SOLUTION. In 100% of the cases I've dealt with telco's, I've told them what the speed and feed was that I wanted, and what I was going to pay for it. Never have I had an issue. Now, I do live in the Twin Cities Metro Area, where there is plenty of bandwidth to go around, and I'm not demanding that they give me priority QoS all the way to their tier 1 core backbone, but this game they're playing is ridiculous.
Another customer was paying $12,000 per month to get a 200mb connection to the net. I got on the horn with Qwest and told them to give us a gig connection for $10,000 per month or they can come get their gear because we weren't going to pay for the electricity for them any more. They gave us a gig connection.
It costs $100 to provision a 10mb connection port. Heck fiber optic modules are CHEAP. Want to know how much it costs to reconfigure that link for 100mb? Same Price. It is also the same price to bring it up to a gig connection.
They will bring in equipment for the sake of bringing in equipment, they will spend tens of thousands of dollars in gear just to slow your connection down, just so they can charge to speed it up.
Don't fall for it.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
"M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970."
...
Are you confusing the correct prediction of peak domestic oil production vs. peak world oil production? (Of course, the latter comes later).
In either case, we won't have long to see how well the prediction scales world-wide.
You can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
I am not aware of other (presumably false) predictions of when peak oil will occur other than the Hubert Peak Theory, which seems pretty well grounded.
The real debate seems to be whether we're at the peak now, or will be in another 10-20 years, and whether the effects will be catastrophic or underwhelming.
Of course, peak oil has zero to do with the topic at hand
It is truly sad to see my country fall apart like this. And I don't honestly see any far sighted thinkers left in my country, either in the private or government sectors. Instead we will get rationing until what is left of the Internet infrastructure until it finally breaks down and by then the cost to rebuild will most likely be beyond our means.
And finally if anyone has doubts to that happening, fell free to come to AR and see our horrible road system and then realize the guy responsible for cutting off funding for every improvement while we maintained record surpluses is now running for president (Mike Huckabee). Just the thought that Huckabee might even have a chance scares me even worse than President Hillary, and I never thought anyone would scare me that bad!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well, call me idealistic, but then we light up the fiber ourselves; start some sort of co-op, I dunno. Span the US with fiber and Wi-Max. Google has to be planning something with all the fiber they own.
If something like that were to happen, and a 'second internet' spring up independent of the current infrastructure and grow reasonably, then one incumbent will start playing along. After that, they'd start falling like dominoes.
Of course, I'm being ridiculously optimistic about the chances for success of such a project, not to mention the willingness of a group of people to let go of their own money to do it. There's a high initial cost and it would take a long-term commitment to see real results.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.