"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

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

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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 ;-)

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

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: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.

Peak Bandwidth?

[Arngautr]

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