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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."
it will take care of itself eventually, demand for bandwidth will increase and money will be poured into infrastructure
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.
... 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".
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
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 most glaring one I can remember was on the morning of September 11, 2001, but its not the only one that has occurred, and undoubtedly won't be the last. Also, the same thing happens with any other limited communications service (POTS systems can be -- and have been -- overloaded during major events!), and with (and where we get the name) electrical grids.
So, yeah, by 2010, internet brownouts "might" happen. They already do happen. And we all survive.
Aside from pushing a meaningles scary buzzword ("exaflood"), this is an unsurprising study by a largely telecom-industry-funded lobbying group favoring tiered internet services and other telecom-friendly policy that, surprise of surprises, finds that with the current, mostly-neutral internet, the whole system is about to collapse, and it will be used to sell the idea that we have to abandon that model, let telecoms charge additional fees to get data delivered even though they already charge each end for every byte transferred, etc.
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.
The actual report isThe Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web, free registration for a PDF download.
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.
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.
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.
US $137 billion. how much is that in hard currency, like 500 Euros?
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
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.
First the internet was a series of tubes.
Then the tubes were full of bees.
Now the bees are stuck in poo?