"Exaflood" Disaster Appears Unlikely

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "By now, we've all heard of the 'coming exaflood' that will drown the ISPs in data and smite the wicked P2P users. Fortunately, the 'exaflood' is unlikely to be a disaster. Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year, and there's plenty of core bandwidth — now handling about an exabyte a month in fact — but the last mile is still slow. So there's a reason that Comcast & co. are worried about losing to P2P, but the Internet itself isn't likely to suffer a meltdown any time soon. And there's plenty of data to counter anyone who says otherwise."

Comments

Exafloods?

[smittyoneeach]

Exafloods? Listen, buds
We got the cure:
Lots o' suds
Burma Shave

Re:Exafloods?

[martin_henry]

For surfing comfort Without goatse That big intertube Has lots to see Burma-Shave

Re:Exafloods?

[smittyoneeach]

Works more gooder with a

Re:Exafloods?

[martin_henry]

I know...forgot to preview :(

Re:Exafloods?

[DiEx-15]

I think our problem with exafloods has been solved!

Re:Exafloods?

[smittyoneeach]

Nice, I expected a RickRoll, but that was kinda cute.

Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[TripMaster Monkey]

You can bet that, despite this hard data, the RIAA and MPAA will continue to spread this FUD as much as possible...anything to salvage their fatally broken business models.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[risinganger]

Of course it won't. They flat out lied about everything else in their claims so why stop now. Hell even they have admitted certain numbers were fictional but that doesn't seem to stop them continuing to use them.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[eebra82]

There is very little they can prove, which is why they throw spaghetti on the wall. Of course they want to portray the accused as evil as possible. Most lawyers do this to dehumanize and humiliate the suspect, because when you have people judging people, this type of psychology actually helps.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[unlametheweak]

The opposite of FUD, whatever you may call it, from the headline article on Slashdot:

Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year Note quite, but as stated in the referenced article, the rate of growth is falling. Yes there are concerns with increased growth, especially since much of the usage and growth in usage is not the typical text based Internet of the 1990's, but of the multimedia and P2P type growth of the 20th Century. It makes sense that network capacity should keep up with this growth. This seems to be the concern with most people I believe. From the article; "But from 2002-2007, the growth rate has dropped, and it now hovers at 50 to 60 percent a year." This isn't shabby growth by any means, think of compounding effects of this over the long term, and P2P growth is at only 100% a year; again, if you think of it as money compounding one could get rich very quickly.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[timeOday]

The RIAA/MPAA aren't the ones complaining about being drowned in data, it's the ISPs, like Comcast.

Still, I'm not sure I see the point of this study. Everybody knows the last mile is the main problem. Most of the Internet is in the last mile! Just as your body contains something like 100,000 kilometers of capillaries, but only a few meters of arteries. So saying the problem is "just" the last mile isn't saying much.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Anonymous Coward]

The "growth" is the "growth rate" is the "rate of growth". They all mean the same thing, specifically, the change in size over time. To say that growth is falling is exactly the same as saying the rate of growth is falling: the rate of change-in-size-over-time has changed over time.

Yes, you're correct in pointing out that it's the growth which is getting smaller, not the size, but you're incorrect in your assertion that the summary is misleading.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[unlametheweak]

Yes, you're correct in pointing out that it's the growth which is getting smaller, not the size, but you're incorrect in your assertion that the summary is misleading. Perhaps not misleading; or maybe I'm just tired. I at first got the impression that this phrase was downplaying the "rate of growth" aspect.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Daengbo]

I get 100Mb/s to my door in a rural area with no complaints about my 100GB/month bandwidth. No last mile problem here. Yay! At least South Korea is good for something.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[mwlewis]

No, I'd says he's right on. I'd interpret "growth" to mean an absolute number of bytes by which it's growing (i.e., "** PB"). I guess you could interpret that either way, but I think "growth rate" would be more appropriate. If you measured a tree, and it was 10ft tall, then next month it was 11ft, and the following month, 12ft 1in tall, it grew more in the second month, but the rate of growth was slower.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Curunir_wolf]

Isn't that just as misleading? I think you actually mean "the positive deltas in the growth rate". Let's try to be a little more precise next time, hmmm?

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Shakrai]

Just as your body contains something like 100,000 kilometers of capillaries, but only a few meters of arteries

This is totally offtopic, but I was going to call bullshit on your 100,000km figure as it seemed pretty excessive. Imagine my surprise when I found this, which actually claims that an adult may have upwards of 100,000 miles (160,934km) of blood vessels in their body.

Learn something new every day I suppose.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[yuna49]

Most processes like Internet growth have long-term curves that look like the logistic function. Growth starts slowly, then ramps up quickly, but eventually the rate of growth slows. Sometimes this phenomenon represents a mathematical reality; rates of "penetration" of technologies into a population are the most common example. (In the US, it looks like HDTV's are in the rapid growth phase, but that will slow as the demand for the TVs is sated.)

Internet traffic growth obviously isn't constrained the same way penetration rates are, but the fact that the rate of growth is slowing is probably some indication of satiation.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea we should just do away with the copyright laws altogether. Nobody should be paid for their work and people should have the inalienable right to distribute other people's creative work to anyone that wants it.

People should make music and movies and give them away for free.

All creative work is the result of someone's hobby you know? It's free to produce and free to distribute, why not?

-AC

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[besalope]

To put this is business terms, the Internet has its own Product Life Cycle (PLC) curve. And if the rate of growth is starting to decline, then we're nearing the end of the growth stage and crossing over into the maturity stage. Sadly, this move to maturity won't affect the 13 y.o.s that constantly plague the online community.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[eebra82]

Give me a break. For starters, your reply is absolutely irrelevant to my previous post. Second of all, people don't hate RIAA because they protect copyright, but because of the way they are doing it. Last but not least, the music industry is widely responsible for not being able to cope with technological breakthroughs. They'd much rather sell CD:s for 1,000 years instead of dealing with the marvel we call the internet.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Chosen Reject]

It's free to ... distribute, why not?

Very true. OK, there is a minor cost to distribute, bandwidth isn't free, but it's pretty cheap especially when bit torrent is used.

I was in Home Depot the other day. I wanted to buy some gardening tools as I am going to start work on a vegetable garden. As I walk in I see lots of books, many about how to make a really good garden. Unfortunately for the authors and publishers of those books, I had already learned all I needed to from neighbors, online, and people at the local nursery. So what you are saying is that I shouldn't have learned that from other people for free? Should I be forced to pay for that knowledge from somebody who decided to put it into a book?

Last night I was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I read about Bill and Fleur's wedding. Let me ask you, who owns that idea? Rowling came up with it, but who owns it? Does Rowling? Yes, she is in possession of it legally. Do I own it? Yes, I am also in possession of that knowledge. Can I give it back to Rowling? Nope. I could forget it eventually, but that won't give anything back to Rowling.

Why do I bring this up? Because copyrights are just that, the right to copy. Or in other words, the right to distribute. There is nothing about copyrights that ensures the author of a work to recoup the costs incurred to create the work. Only that the government would enforce their rights of distribution. Unfortunately for those authors, the cost of distribution is practically nil. Their works are infinite. Simple economics tells us that infinite goods end up as free. It's really hard to make a profit on something that is free. So I guess now that distribution is not a money maker, copyright holders will have to find some other way to make money, or they can continue hoping that governments will enforce their distribution rights.

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Anonymous Coward]

OK. A more exact definition then.

The growth rate of some quantity, over some period, is the quantity at the end of the period, minus the quantity at the start of the period, all divided by the quantity at the start of the period.

In the case of your trees, that's a growth rate of 10% in both months - it doesn't get slower in the second month.

You're essentially correct in that "growth" (but not "growth rate") can rarely refer to the absolute difference in a quantity over a given period. But the problem is that "growth rate" is almost always elided to just "growth" in talking about these sorts of things (think of the term "economic growth", which almost always means a percentage change against the previous value; if we were to be naive about it, we'd want the term to be "economic growth rate" wherever it's used).

Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this modded 'Informative'? There's no information here.

On a side note, it's the ISP's who are spreading bandwidth FUD, the RIAA and MPAA haven't really spread FUD in that regard-- yet.

It's the last mile which is holding it back

[Silver Sloth]

Ok, so my experience is rural UK based but for me the last mile is what stops me using t'internet for realtime video downloads. Sure I do plenty of bittorrent downloads where I can go away and leave them to cook but realtime still sucks and it's all about the slow response over the last mile.

Now, when they fix that... but maybe by then they'll have increased the backbone as well.

Re:It's the last mile which is holding it back

[Chrisq]

That sounds pretty likely. If I could get real time video over the internet I would watch all sorts of things instead of terrestrial tv. Having to start a download and wait for a couple of hours for a half-hour program limits my use and therefore the bandwidth I use. In this way the last mile bottleneck reduces my usage of the core.

Re:It's the last mile which is holding it back

[Idbar]

In my opinion, that's what's holding the growth of traffic.

The last mile in many places is still limited. However, I think that as the time passes, people is more aware of the different services that they can find and use online. I remember not too long ago, we stressed the networks, sending 40MB emails with videos with my friends, as we start finding sites like youtube, we stopped abusing the email system, replicating mails. There's still people sending huge powerpoint presentations through mail, but chances are that now, people rather send a link to a centralized system than wasting 30 mins trying to figure out why the email didn't go through.

With limited access to the network (i.e. dial-up), you wont download the 30MB video your friend sent, and as people realizes that it doesn't make any sense using inappropriate methods to reach a goal, but use the right one, the network usage will converge, and again people will be claiming for more last-mile bandwidth, which is, at the end, what makes your services flow in a better way.

Note that people now, is more aware of what they want to see, and more selective. They look for particular videos, or particular news, and if they need some information, they go to their trusted sources.

Re:It's the last mile which is holding it back

[IdleTime]

You sound like a good fundie, I was just surprised it was not religion but tech fundie.

And here I am, watching news on my TV about a breakdown on the Blue line in Chicago and you are telling me to die while they are talking about injuries...

Wait for H5N1

[R2.0]

Almost every single company out there has plans for a flu epidemic that consist of 1 line - "work at home on the internet". So they modeled it and - shocker - the system collapsed PDQ. It wasn't switches exploding, but everything slowing to a crawl so that it would be damned near impossible to actually get work done.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[garett_spencley]

How exactly do you model something like that ? Did they model just a specific class of worker (sysadmin / programmer etc.) or did they assume that everyone in their model required x amount of data transfer ?

Because most of the jobs that I can think of that could be performed at home on a computer don't require a lot of Internet access. Maybe transferring one or two files from the office network but not any kind of constant data transfer back / forth.

Then you factor in that with so many people at home they'll probably be spending more time slacking off / surfing the net. But people do that at work anyway (I'm a webmaster and I see traffic spikes Monday morning after a weekend slowdown which suggests that people spend most of their time surfing the net from work) so I'm just wondering how you even begin to go about modeling something like that ?

Re:Wait for H5N1

[Chrisq]

Also pretty pointless. Unless you spend years in isolation the chances are you will be exposed to the virus.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[R2.0]

I actually got the reference here on /. - a coworker is big into "preparedness planning" (just don't ask how many guns he has), and I forwarded him the link, which is why I remember it.

"Because most of the jobs that I can think of that could be performed at home on a computer don't require a lot of Internet access. Maybe transferring one or two files from the office network but not any kind of constant data transfer back / forth."

While technically true, consider how a VPN works - you set up the connection, and now your remote computer ACTS like it is at the office. So, if you open a Word document, first it pulls the entire document over the VPN, and then writes back that stupid temp file. And since every good office worker has Autosave set up, every 5 minutes there is another disk write over the network. MS has made it so that there is a tremendous amount of LAN traffic possible while working in one of their apps, and now millions of computers are going to try to replicate that over the internet? And these same unsophisticated users, who may not have worked at home before or never experienced a low bandwidth home connection, are going to do what they always do when a command doesn't work immediately - try again.

Yeah, I really wouldn't plan on being able to get any work done at home in a pandemic flu situation unless one is network aware and does mostly everything offline, and then synchronizes at 0300.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[bestinshow]

Yeah, it'll be the delivery person for my first home food delivery that'll pass on the disease. I'll have to leave a note on the door - "knock, deliver, and go away".

Prepare for H5N1 now! Grow your own veg. Just think of the money you'd have saved in 2007 ... 2006 ... 2005 ... whenever this end-of-humanity bird flu was meant to strike.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[Nullav]

A million ~1MB Word documents versus countless 10MB-10GB songs/movies/games/compilations of songs/movies/games? I never thought of that. The Internet will be crushed under the weight of office work, ruining everyone's multi-gigabyte torrents.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[sexybomber]

... with so many people at home they'll probably be spending more time slacking off / surfing the net.

Wait, refresh my memory. Is H5N1 the flu strain with the ~70% kill rate, or is that something else? The severity of the illness will definitely affect the amount of network traffic produced from people working from home. 'Cause if 100Ks/millions of people contract a really serious flu strain, I doubt they'll be doing much of anything beyond, you know, screaming, moaning, and dying.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[jamesh]

'Cause if 100Ks/millions of people contract a really serious flu strain, I doubt they'll be doing much of anything beyond, you know, screaming, moaning, and dying.

I think the point is that everyone will be stuck at home because they are afraid they _might_ catch something.

Anyway, what will kill the internet is everyone blogging about the tiniest sniffle they get if there is ever a flu scare, and then recording video's of themselves coughing and submitting it to video sites and asking "does this sound like the flu?". And of course all the 'internet doctor' sites will break under the load. And finally, nobody will want to go out of their house to fix things when they break.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[Kjella]

A million ~1MB Word documents versus countless 10MB-10GB songs/movies/games/compilations of songs/movies/games? I never thought of that. The Internet will be crushed under the weight of office work, ruining everyone's multi-gigabyte torrents. Exactly. Plus that in the case of a real EMERGENCY, you can kindly ask people to turn off their P2P leeching. I wouldn't do it for corporate chumps too lazy to provide decent redundancy, but in case of an epedemic where people are urged to stay at home I would. ISPs could yank everyone down to a lower tier to curb hogs so they keep the network from choking. As long as the network is operational, I don't think this will be any major part of the problem.

Re:Wait for H5N1

[I.M.O.G.]

Because most of the jobs that I can think of that could be performed at home on a computer don't require a lot of Internet access. Maybe transferring one or two files from the office network but not any kind of constant data transfer back / forth. Then you factor in that with so many people at home they'll probably be spending more time slacking off / surfing the net. But people do that at work anyway (I'm a webmaster and I see traffic spikes Monday morning after a weekend slowdown which suggests that people spend most of their time surfing the net from work) so I'm just wondering how you even begin to go about modeling something like that ?

Working from home - for many this is going to require a VPN connection, especially for people not accustomed to working remotely. Thats going to require some talk back and forth to keep the tunnel open. Workers accustomed to being on the LAN probably have their mail clients configured in a chatty manner - I know I have different Notes settings for office and remote use, and my office setting is very chatty and noticeably impacts my network responsiveness when out of office. Security software, Active Directory, System Inventory Management... I could think of a lot of corporate environment background services that are negligible on the LAN. Send an entire city of employees home to work over a VPN connection, and I wouldn't be surprised if you encountered some load issues. Their proposition may be far fetched, but if we stick to the situation they introduced, I think there are some realistic network challenges.

As for modeling, I have a guess. They aren't going to do modeling for small scale businesses - corporations are what they'd pay attention to. In that situation, I could see how some reasonable models could emerge - modeling an office of 20 employees in an accurate/useful way could be challenging because a given individual whose usage is an outlier can throw off your model. Model an office of 500 employees, and the individual becomes far less important while the average of all users carries a lot more weight - you could do the math and come out with a reasonable range of error. The more people you put into the mix, like model an entire city, and you are probably even more likely to come out with something accurate - the curves become more consistent with a larger sample population. If you look at the historical usage for a group of ten houses, there could be some months where usage spikes make your predictions wrong. Model the usage for the continental US looking at historical patterns, and its not hard to get the numbers close.

It's good for the economy.

[Anonymous Coward]

The sooner everybody realises that more traffic crossing the tubes is good for the economy, the sooner we can all move on with our lives.

Re:It's good for the economy.

[morgan_greywolf]

The sooner everybody realises that more traffic crossing the tubes is good for the economy, the sooner we can all move on with our lives.

So, what you're sayin' is that when I'm on the internets, pushing the latest movies and mp3s through the tubes, I'm helping the economy?

w00t! Where do I sign up for my Medal of Honor?

Re:It's good for the economy.

[CowTipperGore]

So, what you're sayin' is that when I'm on the internets, pushing the latest movies and mp3s through the tubes, I'm helping the economy?

w00t! Where do I sign up for my Medal of Honor?

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3413872/Medal_of_Honor

Yes but...

[crohan]

And there's plenty of data to counter anyone who says otherwise.

So long as everyone does not access these copious amounts of data simultaneously ;-)

Ah but the ferrets will bring you fiber

[Anonymous Coward]

The same author also wrote on a brand new OECD report that tells how we are going to need a minimum of 50Mbit/s in order in the near future. And best of all he sais, it's going to be brought to us by ferrets.

No flood?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean I can stop stockpiling animals?

Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[ControlAltDelete]

I'm actually interested to hear if anyone has coherent suggestions as to how musicians might make money without royalties from albums - or if anyone feels like the free download of music doesn't impact the royalties from these albums significantly, or somesuch.

You always read/hear people saying that the RIAA has a "fatally flawed business model", and I think that's true. It does seem like there's going to be very little in the means of defense of intellectual property in the future. However, instead of laughing and pointing at the RIAA, does anyone have good ideas for business models that take this into account and are still able to succeed? This will impact more than just the RIAA. What happens when scholars can't sell books because as soon as it's published, it's on the interwebs for free?

In short: How do people out there on Slashdot feel about the decline of intellectual property rights and does anyone have any good solutions to the problems that this would hypothetically (I'm open to these problems being non-issues, too, if someone can demonstrate it) plague those who depend on intellectual property for their survival?

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[ericrost]

Here's a hint. You're starting from the flawed assumption that MUSICIANS make much money at all from album royalties.

Albums should be given away as promotional material for performances (if ever pressed at all instead of just delivered electronically to begin with). Artists themselves already make most of their money from selling merchandise at performances.

Labels make money peddling plastic discs. Artists pretty much get the shaft.

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that 1 example does not a business model make, but check out Jonathan Coulton. He's never touched a major label, but he does fantastic stuff (of both the geeky and less-geeky varieties), and I hear he makes a pretty good living for himself.

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[pipatron]

What happens when scholars can't sell books because as soon as it's published, it's on the interwebs for free?

Then the universities will have to publish the books, and help the students save thousands of dollars every year at the same time. Without a monopoly-supported, profit-driven market for schoolbooks, effort can be spent on more useful things than writing 10 books with the same content and release new editions every other year to prevent students from buying books second hand.

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[David Gerard]

They could do what they do now, which is get a day job like the rest of us.

You appear to be under the mistaken impression that record companies ever, ever pay royalties.

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[lupis42]

How do people out there on Slashdot feel about the decline of intellectual property rights and does anyone have any good solutions to the problems that this would hypothetically ... plague those who depend on intellectual property for their survival? I would have to suggest some combination of: Patronage, which currently provides us with museums, and libraries, (granted that the 'patrons' in this case are the taxpayers); Collectors, who tend to pay for physical objects anyway, even if the book is already available at the library for 0$, but owning it has considerable attraction anyway to many, and the same can go for recordings, just to a lesser extent; Performance, which doesn't apply to everybody, but the cinema experience will I hope always be worth a little something, especially if it's anything like the 'premium' cinema I often go to for dates (real food, real booze, comfy seats, 21+ showings, and plush leather recliners), obviously musicians were making money on performances long before there were recordings, and professors have, classically, been required to teach for a living, the book deals are more to get people into the university; Finally, Service, which is sort of the performance model for software and like products, by which I mean anything from making software available, as with Google apps, to providing support for software, as with RedHat, to maintaining and fact checking information, which is what Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, and a host of other organizations do. Intellectual pursuits may become slightly less profitable in the future, somewhat more inline with skilled manual work, but most of the people who are in these fields are in them because they love them, and it would be no bad thing if average incomes for skilled labor were a little less widely scattered. Ultimately, it seems to me, there are only three reliable ways to make money: Selling something, whether it be physical goods or services/performances, Working for someone else, basically just selling labor or knowledge, and Leasing something, whether it be renting a house, investing in a company, providing credit cards, or leasing bandwidth. Most companies are leasing, but many companies, and even some industries are far from clear on whether they're Selling service or Leasing stuff, and they need to get they're acts together, figure out which it is, and who is paying them. If you can't figure out which one you're doing, you might be exploiting someone, and if that's the case, they're likely to be unhappy about it, and sooner or later, they're going to do an end run around you.

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[__aaxwdb6741]

Or how about:
- Downloads are free
- Sharing is free
- Physical media (CD's, LP's, DVD's) are sold at a reasonable price that is low BUT also gives profit
- Concerts
- Eliminate record companies, or cut them down HEAVILY

I do realize this is utopia, as record companies are not ready to cease existence, but if we all share our music, we might just kill them.

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Albums should be given away as promotional material for performances

This answer has never sat well with me.

There are some very talented musicians who don't perform live.

There are also many types of music that don't lend themselves well to live performance. I like some electronic music, but I don't think I'd pay to go see it replayed in a concert hall or buy a t-shirt. In such a case the plastic disc and the effort that went into making it is the only thing I value.

The usual advice is for them to put up a tip jar on their website and hope for the best. But honestly, how many people are going to leave a tip? I probably wouldn't. Maybe the answer is that music is just overvalued these days...

It's interesting to think of something like photography. Their intellectual property is the original image. The artist and gallery make money peddling paper prints. I don't expect them to make high-quality digital versions available next to a tip jar for cheap. I ask this honestly: why is it so so easy to understand the photographer protecting their IP and not the musician?

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[Todd Knarr]

Simple: sell your music. Why take a small royalty from the label when you can sell your music directly to your customers and keep all the money. You have to pay the bills, but I'm betting you can arrange hosting and an e-commerce site for a low enough cost that you can sell cheap enough to have people buying while still making more actual profit than label royalties would be. The key is to shake loose of the idea that the only way to make money selling music is to collect royalties from a label. Once you do that, many more options are available.

And yes, people will buy. The Baen Free Library has proven that. You just need to sell them what they want at a price they think is reasonable (note: it does NOT have to be ridiculously cheap, just reasonable). That probably means giving up on the idea of selling albums and just selling individual tracks, and a price somewhere in the 50 cents to a dollar per track range. I'd think it'd also be smart to co-opt the P2P file-sharing networks too. Don't wait for copies of your music to appear, seed lower-quality copies yourself. Set the quality so the seeded tracks are reasonably listenable but the tracks from your site are audibly better, and embed information about your site and how to purchase the high-quality copy in the ID3 tags so players will show it while your music is playing. My bet is that, while the file-sharers will cheerfully upload copies if there's none available, if the songs are already on the network the people who'd seed the high-quality copies won't pay for the high-quality copies and won't have them to upload.

Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA..

[lupis42]

I would have to suggest some combination of:
Patronage, which currently provides us with museums, and libraries, (granted that the 'patrons' in this case are the taxpayers);
Collectors, who tend to pay for physical objects anyway, even if the book is already available at the library for 0$, but owning it has considerable attraction anyway to many, and the same can go for recordings, just to a lesser extent;
Performance, which doesn't apply to everybody, but the cinema experience will I hope always be worth a little something, especially if it's anything like the 'premium' cinema I often go to for dates (real food, real booze, comfy seats, 21+ showings, and plush leather recliners), obviously musicians were making money on performances long before there were recordings, and professors have, classically, been required to teach for a living, the book deals are more to get people into the university;
Finally, Service, which is sort of the performance model for software and like products, by which I mean anything from making software available, as with Google apps, to providing support for software, as with RedHat, to maintaining and fact checking information, which is what Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, and a host of other organizations do.
Intellectual pursuits may become slightly less profitable in the future, somewhat more inline with skilled manual work, but most of the people who are in these fields are in them because they love them, and it would be no bad thing if average incomes for skilled labor were a little less widely scattered.
Ultimately, it seems to me, there are only three reliable ways to make money: Selling something, whether it be physical goods or services/performances, Working for someone else, basically just selling labor or knowledge, and Leasing something, whether it be renting a house, investing in a company, providing credit cards, or leasing bandwidth.
Most companies are leasing, but many companies, and even some industries are far from clear on whether they're Selling service or Leasing stuff, and they need to get they're acts together, figure out which it is, and who is paying them.
If you can't figure out which one you're doing, you might be exploiting someone, and if that's the case, they're likely to be unhappy about it, and sooner or later, they're going to do an end run around you.

Last Mile

[jgoemat]

That's because Internet traffic is growing faster than capacity, but also because of the difficulty in upgrading the edges of the network, not just the center (where such upgrades are relatively simple).

The "internet" can handle it, the problem is with ISPs? Sounds like a good place for competition and innovation to work. If an ISP cannot handle the traffic they sell to their customers then they shouldn't be an ISP.

Repeat after me...

[slashname3]

How many times in the past have people reported that the imminent failure of the Internet (or USENET) would occur? Get it straight folks, the Internet as we know it may change but it will not collapse or crash or fail. It will adapt as it always has and continue on.

This is another non-story that should not have been posted.

Re:Repeat after me...

[Workaphobia]

I can understand not RTFAing, and in rare cases the summary, but seriously, the headline? This is an article refuting that claim, providing arguments (and quantitative evidence to support them) against the exaflood scaremongering.

But perhaps your right - slashdot should only post the outrageous corporate propaganda articles, and ignore the writings that challenge such FUD, leaving each individual to judge BS in isolation.

not the size of the pipe, its the number of users

[gbjbaanb]

Well, everything is fine when you look at historic trends, but like condo speculators imagining that prices will always go up, looking behind you won't prevent you from falling over the cliff.

The future of internet has nothing to do with the capacity of the big pipes behind the ISPs, but the cost of it to the ISP. I don't mean that as capacity increases cost reduces, but that as users demand more the ISP must offer more capacity at the same price - users wont accept less (especially if they're promised unlimited bandwidth), and considering that all ISPs have oversold their bandwidth expecting user's usage to remain at historical levels (ie web, email, a little streaming video, a little downloading) if they suddenly find that users think nothing of downloading a few hour's fullscreen video daily, their business model will be in tatters.

This is why the iPlayer is such a big thing for the UK (at least) - suddenly, we have users expecting to stream their TV over the internet, and the internet has not been designed to cope with it.

There may be plenty of capacity in the big pipes, but if ISPs have to buy 10 times their current cap to satisfy their current users, there will be trouble. And the trouble will be of download caps, traffic shaping and peak hours usage - which is pretty much what the article says will not happen.

Peak Bandwidth?

[Arngautr]

A bit analogous to peak oil? (except for the whole, not actually deletable thing...)

Re:Peak Bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

depleatable, depleetable, depletible, gah! :P oh well, you know what I mean. :( depletable isn't in the Firefox dictionary...

Re:Peak Bandwidth?

[Workaphobia]

Except in every way, yes, exactly. Oil is a fixed resource whereas bandwidth is by definition a rate; we need to consume oil at a constant rate simply to keep the system going, but sustained bandwidth is easy. Oil gets harder and harder to extract the more we consume, but we can always add more bandwidth without being penalized by how much we already have.

Re:Peak Bandwidth?

[Arngautr]

Pending doom and gloom about supply not being able to match demand. There are those who effectively argue that there is no need for concern. Sounds analogous to me...

Re:Peak Bandwidth?

[Workaphobia]

Except that the Evil Corporations (TM) are on opposite sides. Big Oil fights peak oil scares, while AT&T promotes the notion of a bandwidth crunch.

Re:elop88u9 0 0 u jkkl jj ;iue[= u[ U{ {U U rw8

[Anonymous Coward]

Greetings sir moderator, you are a gaye homosexual who does a sex with the men in the anal butt.

P2P Throttling

[scarboni888]

Now that traffic shaping & throttling is rolled out across most major ISP's I imagine there's really no impetus to lay down some decent pipes anymore.

Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year

[SurturZ]

Don't you love second derivatives?