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Why the Coming Data Flood Won't Drown the Internet
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'."
Grab two of every packet and burn them to a HDVD!
5 And the ISPs saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, swapping copyrighted music, filching pre-release movies, placing phone calls all about the earth as if information were a mere fluid, like the sea.
6 And it repented the ISP that Oscar winner, Nobel laureate, and all around handsome fellow Al Gore, Junior, had made man to surf on the Internet, and it grieved them at their heart.
7 And the ISPs said, we will destroy the neutral face of the Internet, (which we have implemented from the primordial swellness of Gore) from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth us that we have made them to access information in an inexpensive and convenient way.
8 But NOAA found grace in the eyes of the ISPs.
9 These are the generations of NOAA: NOAA was a tidy little bureaucracy, and perfect in its generations, and NOAA walked with the ISPs.
10 And NOAA begat three acronyms: SHEM, HAM, and JAPHETH, which are not relevant to this jape at the moment, but will be cleverly decoded later for humorous effect if need be.
11 The Internet also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with sex and violence, because it was just another show, like the news.
12 And the ISPs looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto NOAA, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth with a bolt from my wand of bogus legislation. 14 Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. If ye know not the length of the cubit, check http://www.wikipedia.org/ but make haste, because Moby Dick shall be sent to devour Jimmy Wales shortly after this post self-destructs.
16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And though shalt part one mother of a datacenter therein; such that yea, even Marc Andreesen shall be made to blush at the smoking bandwidth thereof.
17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring an exaflood of data upon the earth, to destroy all data, wherein is the breath of binary life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall crash like Internet Explorer.
18 But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy acronyms, and thy support contractor, and thy acronyms' support contractors with thee.
19 And of every living thing of all data, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be stored at RAID99.
20 Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive, but they only need, say, RAID5.
21 And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them: plenty of frozen pizza and jolt.
22 Thus did NOAA; according to all that God commanded him, so did they, once they got the budget plus-up.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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
There is more info at Ars, and they also mention Brett Swanson's name - he's from the 'discovery' institute.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
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.
I've built an ark out of Ethernet cables and welcome all of slashdot onboard!
...are the people who want to control the internet.
Media companies wanting to shut down distribution of content not authorized by them (not just illegally copied content but content created and shared under licenses that specifically ALLOW sharing)
News organizations and governments wanting to continue to maintain control over what news we read, view and listen to so they can make sure that the "sheeple" stay "sheeple" and dont actually try to CHANGE their lot in life
Telecommunications providers (including providers of cellular telecommunications) who want to maintain profits for services THEY control and not allow the growth of alternatives to the telco-provided services
Churches and other groups opposed to pornography, gambling and other "vices" who want to be able to ban such content (or if thats not possible, at least control it to the point where its effectively banned)
Manufacturers, distributors and retailers who want to control your abillity to buy stuff to keep bricks & mortar stores alive or to keep people from buying stuff from a country where its cheaper than their own (for example, here in australia, a number of online stores were selling Panasonic DVD recorders really cheap due to the low overheads of those stores. Bricks & Mortar electrical stores complained since they couldn't sell at the price the online guys were selling at and actually make any money. So Panasonic stopped selling the DVD recorders to the online stores)
Governments and spy agencies who want to control the internet so that its easier to spy on the people and look for people who might "rock the boat" or that want to use internet control as a way to hang on to power (look at what happened recently in Burma for example where the government restricted internet access to try to stop the world from finding out how many innocent civilians were being hurt and killed in the name of keeping the dictatorship in power)
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.
Inviting slashdot onto an ark? Aren't you kind of missing the whole repopulate the earth thing? Or were you hoping they'd get laid in close quarters, where the opposite sex has no where to hide?
In December of 1995, he wrote: "I predict the Internet...will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
The only news here is the invention of a new scare word, "exaflood."
The only thing that could really make the Internet collapse would be to abandon the principles of neutrality and end-to-end connectivity, and I'm sure the dire alarmist predictions are intended to soften us up for some proposal... like one to hand over control of the Internet to the telcos so they can allocate bandwidth and prevent "exafloods."
By the way, what happened to all the "dark fiber" that was so spectacularly overbuilt during the dot-bomb era? Is all of it lit up now?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
checkout the massive growth for last year at the worlds biggest Internet exchange
These are the guys that thought that ATM would rule the world-- a very deterministic bunch at best. Not being able to understand Internet infrastructure- even though they 'run' big portions of it- is normal.
Let's say you needed your own acquired infrastructure to run your own cable system or your own cell/mobiles system. Let's say you didn't want your competitors services and content to be clogging your wires at your 'expense'. Let's say that it galls the living hell out of you that you can't control or throttle the full breadth of packets going over your own network!
And worse, some damn US Senator from Conn. decided to derail your immunity from prosecution over handing over data to the Bush Administration. Can't win that one? Then inject the fear of an 'exa' or peta or oogle event to scare the living shit out of people.
Propaganda. Every last fear-mongering fib.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Dire predictions are usually followed by a project/business plan on how to fix things. In other words someone wants money to fix something that won't need fixing.
How many times did people predict that Usenet would collapse due to the massive amount of data being passed around on the old modem network? It never did happen.
I have to say, an exaflood really *does* sound about a thousand times worse than a petaflood.
I1: I have no problem with two (or more) Internets.
.. and I have NO problems with my ISP filtering all the crap from I2 that tries to cross over to my I1 link. Or with my ISP providing me with "white list" or "black list" filter facilities (which would take care of the spam, thank you verra much).
I2: One for the original intention (legitimate email, web browsing, perhaps online gaming, minor file transfers).
One for the massive data transfers (to include streaming): video, file sharing, online or internet backups, etc.
Take your steenking music and video downloads to the overloaded one, and leave the _real_ internet clear for my WoW, if you please.
Oh
I'd pay for that. Yes, I would.
I'm glad that the exaflood is coming, it gives more warning that goatse is about to appear on my screen when I dont read links carefully enough (about 5% of the picture loaded before I was like wtfx0rz I'm at work and my boss is sitting behind me talking to someone and goatse is appearing on my screen!)
which is totally what she said
The exaspam!
I thought this paragraph from TFA was especially interesting:
But the growth in file sizes is made worse by a concurrent increase in the use of P2P as a delivery mechanism. Distribution gets pushed from the center of the network to the edges as users increasingly become both the consumers and providers of content, so the tubes could be clogged in both directions.... The [US Internet Industry Association] describes this transition as a traffic shift "from the Internet backbone to a peered system in which content is streamed directly to consumers," and the group notes that it will require ISPs to upgrade the most expensive part of their networks to keep pace: the last mile.
Wasn't the Internet designed from the ground up to be "peer-to-peer?" Yes, I know we started with client/server technologies and "the Internet backbone," but fundamentally every machine with a public IP address is, and has always been, the peer of all the other millions of machines with public addresses. That's what makes the Internet so profoundly democratic and so profoundly threatening to established interests.
I suppose cable operators weren't used to seeing the world in those terms, but telcos certainly were. Voice/data services were always interactive, not unidirectional broadcasting. Why should anyone be surprised that the Internet is being used for the purposes its designers envisioned?
Oh, and why is a system where "content is streamed directly to consumers" described as "peered?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
Actually, there are things to worry about.
Too many new applications have hard real time constraints. Copying movie-sized files around, no problem - TCP will throttle. Streaming HDTV without stuttering is much tougher. We're entering an era where the highest-traffic application needs a high quality of service. If resources are tight, there's good no place to throttle. VoIP works because it's a small fraction of traffic. Streaming HDTV looks to be a much larger fraction of traffic.
We still don't have a good answer to managing backbone congestion in pure datagram networks. The Internet today works because the congestion is out near the edges. If we get enough "last mile" bandwidth deployed that the backbone congests before the edges, packet loss rates will go way up. If we have about 2x excess capacity in the backbone, no problem. That's the solution we know.
Microsoft has proposed systems where "broadcast" video is multicast in real time with a high quality of service, while "video on demand" is heavily buffered and sent with a lower quality of service. That's an obvious solution; it's what multicast is for.
(Amusing thought: one solution to video buffering problems is commercials. When transport can't keep up and the player is getting close to running out of buffered content, play an extra locally-stored commercial or two. This lets the buffering refill. Download commercials in advance based on personalization info, then insert them as needed during playback. Don't put them in the main video streams at all.)
Excuse me, but you are NOT really a rural customer and 10,000 is NOT a small town. I live in town of about 8000 and yes we have cable and DSL as well as natural gas, paved streets, sidewalks, street lights, and way too damned many traffic signals. I think we may get fiber in the next decade (but only, I suspect, because the largest surviving industrial plant in New England is about a ten minute walk from the town hall.)
But I worked for a number of years in a genuine small town about ten miles further out from Burlington. Not one inch of cable. No DSL. The FCC's statistics say the town has broadband because the school and a mail order business have managed to conjure up T1 lines, but the folks out there do not have broadband in their homes and aren't likely to get it any time soon.
Regretably, from what I can find out, their experience seems to be more typical of rural America than yours or mine. So I think that the parent post is correct. Rural users won't see much change. They don't have broadband now. They won't have it then.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey