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Why the Coming Data Flood Won't Drown the Internet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the really-strong-tubes dept.

High Waters writes "Ars Technica examines predictions of an 'exaflood' of data that some alarmists believe will overwhelm the Internet. A closer look reveals that many of those raising the alarm about an exaflood are generally doing so to make the case against internet neutrality regulation. 'There's a reason that "exaflood" sounds scary. It's supposed to. Though Brett Swanson's Wall Street Journal piece tried to avoid alarmism, it did have an explicitly political point in mind: net neutrality is bad, and it could turn the coming exaflood into a real disaster'."

4 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Why? Simple! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Simple. It didn't happen before. The Internet has experienced 'exafloods' before. The amount of data and traffic have skyrocketted exponentially every year since this big major growth spurts started in the 1980s and 1990s. How can the Internet do that?

    Because it was designed that way, that's why. The Internet is the largest distributed network in the world. TCP/IP was purposefully designed to be scalable on a massively large scale. Sure, we've improved the technology along the way, but the bottom line is that the routers directing all those tubes aren't going to buckle under the pressure anytime soon, and routing technology is just getting better all the time.

    --
    My blog
    1. Re:Why? Simple! by apt142 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The idea that there will be too much information, too much bandwidth being used is laughable.

      There's money to be made in building new servers. There's money to be made in selling bandwidth. Infrastructure is relatively inexpensive compared to the income they can generate. And it gets cheaper everyday. The ISP's are sitting on a gold mine and complaining that gold is too difficult to mine.

      --
      Star Pirates
  2. That's how it goes since people invented language. by the_other_chewey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Predict bad things are going to happen unless people do what you say/buy what you sell/give what you want/etc.

    Nothing new here.

  3. Scaremongering as usual! by redelm · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Kudos to Ars Technica once again. Amazing they stay sharp after all these years. The case against "net bias" is remarkably simple. Even moreso in the face of increasing traffic:


    When traffic increases (overall, or peaky) to handle more video (for example), capacity has to be added or it quite simply will not get moved. Squeezing out/delaying other traffic will not go very far. Dark fiber has to be lit. When capacity is added because there is more traffic, there is also more "gaps" to fit in "low priority" traffic.


    The fundamental problem is people think of the internet as a water pipe, with very simple capacity constraints. It is not. You don't care about water latency while data packet latency or jitter are extremely important.


    It is beyond annoying that certain commercial entities are exploiting this misunderstanding to further their own interests at the expense of their customers. One cannot help but see them as grasping and acting out of malice.