"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

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.