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"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."

6 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. It's the last mile which is holding it back by Silver+Sloth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    init 11 - for when you need that edge.
    1. Re:It's the last mile which is holding it back by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Wait for H5N1 by R2.0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  3. Re:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA by unlametheweak · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.
  4. Re:Instead of Laughing at the RIAA.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  5. Peak Bandwidth? by Arngautr · · Score: 2, Interesting

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