Slashdot Mirror
Think-Tank Warns of Internet "Brownouts" Starting Next Year
JacobSteelsmith writes "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research, reports the Web has reached a critical point. For many reasons, Internet usage continues to rise (imagine that), and bandwidth usage is increasing due to traffic heavy sites such as YouTube. The article goes on to describe the perils Internet users will face including 'brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace,' and constant network 'traffic jams,' similar to 'how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games.' ... 'Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India. ... While the net itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts — a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.'"
Home computers slow down when kids come home from school and start playing video games? Poppycock. Home computers slow down when adults get home from work, come home, and start watching streaming video.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
that's not realistic at all. It's true we're going to see massive slowdowns in bandwidth, but those are caused by too many users drawing too much data through the 'tubes'.
Not to mention, this could all be solved if the greedy ISPs and network owners spent some of their damned earnings on upgrading the networks.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I didn't see this.
I didn't see this.
There just is no good reason not to start moving everything over to cloud computing and SaS.
If only someone (cough **telcoms** cough) had been given time and money to expand bandwidth we wouldn't have this problem. Too bad they only had 15 years to try to solve the problem. Guess the internet just grow too fast for 'em.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
...waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts â" a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
Will all computers do this? I think not. They are either referring to servers or the network as a whole.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I mean, if the internet were to slow down to almost a standstill... then my computer would completely freeze, just like it does when I unplug my ethernet connection.
Aaargh, it's infuriating that a thinktank that has the false authority to make proclaimations like this conflates network performance and computer performance. It's like Intel's "MMX makes the internet faster" crap, but in reverse. A slow network does not suddenly make your favourite offline photo editing app slow down.
(I will of course withdraw these objections if it transpires that the think-tank have come back from the near future where everything's done on The Cloud.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This will never fly because of simple mathmatics: 95% of the internet users pay too much for their connection anyway and use maybe 5% of their fair share or allotment.
If your plan would come into place those people would see their monthly bills drop like a rock.
Guess who won't be allowing any of that? Not to mention that anyone who's in the top 5% range of usage will drastically flee to cheaper operators or even adjust their download behavior.
All that metered access would accomplish is a gigantic drop in revenue for ISPs.
Meh... this just smacks of astroturfing for "tiered service agreements" that the ISP's have been trying to push for a decade!
Besides, aren't random freezes and jittering just part of Windows "charm"? :)
> "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research.."
What does that mean, respected? By whom? Some IETF plenary council? Paris Hilton?
Is "respected" meant to imply the report is accurate? Why don't we judge reports on their own merits - soundness of methodology, reproducibility - rather than alleged reputations of the report's issuer?
When they make such technically brain dead statements as, "Internet brownouts will make computers freeze!" do they really expect anyone to take them seriously?
Subject says it all but since it is so funny, insightful and shows how amazing a human being I am in 5 little words (and because the lameness filter forces me to showing that slashdot coders are silly and not worthy of kissing my furry butt, I will repeat here).
Think-tank, where thinking tanks.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This would be followed by brownouts -- a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
I consider it bad enough that I have to explain, every time I helps someone clean up their machine, that MSN loading slowly does not mean they have a slow computer.
And now we have so-called experts warning us that network lag will cause slow computers?
What next, a warning about how Windows 7 requires 16 GB of storage, causing a wave of panic among those who don't understand the difference between RAM and HDD space?
News flash... ISPs and Telcos know how to increase their bandwidth, too... it's not just the last mile that's getting faster and allowing people to do more and more frivolous things with their Internet connections.
Sheesh.
>>> This will never fly because of simple mathmatics: 95% of the internet users pay too much for their connection
Citation Please
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
What sort of limited resource (other than bandwidth) are you consuming when you use the Internet vs Electricity? With Electricity, you are consuming power generation at the power plants, a non-unlimited source. With the Internet, the only thing limited are the resources to get you what you want, not the actual data you are concerned about. Does Google run out of bits to send you? Does your trading software say 'Oops, no more bits today'? No, it doesn't. Instead of comparing Internet Bandwidth to power generation, perhaps you would liken it better to roads (yay car analogies!). Even metered (tolls), it still exceeds it's maximum capacity (traffic jams). The only resolution is to build out the infrastructure (bigger road) to handle more traffic at once.
What makes you think ISPs would lower the fee on the lowest-bandwidth tier?
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
They forgot to add "My name is Time-Warner Cable, and I approve this message" at the end.
I'm getting serious deja vu here folks... seems to me we already got through a wave of this "the internet is going to burst" stuff years ago. Guess what? The internet is still going, much to the misery of some of the telecom companies that would have loved to have an internet state-of-emergency declared so they could come "rescue us" with filtering, heavy traffic shaping, and metered usage. Instead, they're trying to introduce these things behind closed doors or, when they can't like in the case of metered usage, through public tests which are being met with a lot of negative backlash.
This isn't really a technology limitation. This has nothing to do with dead websites clogging the net (LOL) and it isn't going to freeze anyone's computer.. at least not until every bit of our apps are in the cloud. This is the telecomms refusing to use money they were given for what it was for and balking at using their own profits do to it now. With little competition in most cases, these companies would like nothing better than to convince the general populace that the internet is as good as it can ever get now and that prices will need to be hiked and metered usage added to ration what we have.
And no, I don't think metered service is a good solution. I don't have any faith in these companies not to sorely abuse it. We've seen already how the ones that also manage cell service act... I don't trust them not to put a insanely inflated number on the cost of bandwidth per mb or gig (see cell text message for an example of an insanely overpriced service).
How about common sense?
What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?
That kind of comment generated a "WTF?" reaction from me. As did "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research"... I never heard of Nemertes Research, and if this is the quality of their work, they ain't getting no respect from me!
that's not allowed here
There is a logical, non-evil argument for transfer capping.
Bandwidth is oversold, and there's not an inherent problem with that: for the couple of hours per day (at most) that a connection is actually saturated, there are many more when it is idle or nearly so. Obviously we want to be able to use a lot of bandwidth in short bursts (waiting for an iPlayer video to download, for example) but for most usage patterns it would be wasteful to have that amount of backbone bandwidth sitting 'reserved' with my name on it all day. By overselling, the costs for high-bandwidth connections are kept sensible and bandwidth capacity 'waste' is minimised.
Marketing an oversold connection as unlimited, however, is rather dishonest and becomes more so as the extent of the overselling increases. If a connection is marked as unlimited then it should not be oversold, it should be bandwidth limited such that there will be enough backbone capacity to support 100% usage 24/7.
As mentioned above, however, that true unlimited connection is overkill for many people. Provision of that level of service would have us all being lied to and sold 'unlimited' connections that are anything but unlimited (sound familiar?) or paying through the nose for a few Mbps.
The imposition of a cap on data transfer allows the oversold bandwidth to be allocated more sensibly: take a hypothetical 100Mbps connection, oversold by a ratio of 50:1. If my calculations are accurate, 100Mbps is equivalent to approximately 30.9TB (note the capital B) per month. This means that for the same infrastructure cost as giving one person a truly unlimited 100Mbps connection, you can give 50 people a connection that can deliver burst speeds of up to 100Mbps and allow each one of them about 600GB/month of data transfer. Assuming you want the cheaper, oversold connection rather than the truly unlimited one, I don't see why being upfront about that overselling and giving everyone a 'portion' of the total capacity is problematic. It's the same as having an unlimited 2Mbps connection, except it can deliver burst rates of 50 times that when you need them.
As I said in another post, the problems come because caps are made for reasons of profiteering not network management, and that leads to all kinds of consumer-unfriendly behaviour.
Common sense would indicate that SOME number of Internet users is paying significantly more for bit delivery than others due to their lower use. However it doesn't say what their value proposition is relative to another user.
Further, common sense doesn't indicate that anything would "drop like a rock" and it also doesn't substantiate the remarkably high percentage of users that it is claimed would be affected.
So, Citation Please.
remove all the damn ads and Im sure we'll be just fine
The key sentence in this whole thing: "Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity."
Of course you have to wade down to the very last sentence before you find the motivation of this little bit of astroturf, which is "we need to punish the big users of the 'net because if we don't, your computer will crash."
Translation: "give us tiered pricing or die."
It's just FUD designed to push an agenda.