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"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."
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.
Full Tilt
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.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
... 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.
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.