Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

"Exaflood" Disaster Appears Unlikely

Posted by kdawson on from the just-because-you-can't-swim-doesn't-mean-we're-all-drowning dept.

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."

4 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA by risinganger · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:Wait for H5N1 by garett_spencley · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 ?

  3. Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA.. by __aaxwdb6741 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.