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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."
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.
... 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
The article is just FUD.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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.
We can always invade someone and take their bandwidth.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
US $137 billion. how much is that in hard currency, like 500 Euros?
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
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.
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.
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!)
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.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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.