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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."

8 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.

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    ~ |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:Won't stop the RIAA/MPAA by eebra82 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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      Full Tilt
    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.
  2. 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.

  3. 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 ?

  4. Yes but... by crohan · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 ;-)

  5. Re:It's good for the economy. by CowTipperGore · · Score: 4, Funny

    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