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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.
Nuff said
Smivs on the intertubes!
I remember this from an earlier slashdot of the same group saying the same thing. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/20/0024248&from=rss
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
We would see massive power brownouts if electricity was being billed as an unlimited service too. The fact the internet service is still this way is silly. Meter it and move on.
...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.
"This would be followed by brownouts a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed."
I have Comcast; how will I be able to tell when this starts to happen, compared to what I see today?
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
brownouts that will freeze their computers
In my experience, when the internet is slow or a server is having problems, the webpage takes longer to load. It doesn't affect anything outside the browser, and my other programs remain "unfrozen."
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?
Everyone's computer is going to jitter or freeze because the net will be over capacity? Are the rest of you still using Windows 95 or other OS's that don't multithread properly?
Otherwise, the idea that your whole computer will freeze due to a network issue is kind of laughable...
So far, carriers have added capacity often enough to stay ahead of the curve. I don't see why that would change now.
I'm sure if we just set up some sort of beowulf cluster among our desktops and set up a cloud on top of it it would solve all of our problems.
Windows 7 is already going there - the actual plan is to use the XP VM to host the internet locally - like freenet, but umm... controlled by Microsoft instead of the evil... umm... people. Yeah.
It seems most of these fluffy fear pieces are mere convenient flak for those that want some government excuse for broadband rollouts. These rollouts may or may not be warranted, but fear mongering is not convincing, especially when they tout increasing use of you tube or BBC iplayer as bringing down the global backbones. As you tube and BBC gain users, the response will be more and more local CDNs. There is no reason anyone's global backbones need be involved to stream you tube from India to USA.
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?
Nemertes' research pops up often in discussions of net neutrality. See the Save The Internet blog for another perspective on their data.
Thank God! I'm glad someone knows what's going on in this confusing world of ours!
As far as what the OP says, aside from the wild fear mongering and hilariously dumb power distribution "analogies", I do tend to experience connectivity problems during peak hours (Sunday nights specifically). That is, I lose connectivity: upstream and downstream simply cease for periods of time (5s+), and I'm unable to connect to anything (including DNS) on the outside. It's infuriating.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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?
ive been using an alternative-internet technology based on corn and soybean oil for years now...with the only side effect being that my slashdot posts sometimes smell like french-fries or donuts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Take a look at why Slashdot's pages load so slowly. There are several layers of "document.write(some javascript that loads something else)" just to load ads. The browser can't do the loads concurrently; they all take place sequentially. Each "document.write" has to finish before the code in it can be run. Also, some of the CSS is being read from "s.fsdn.com", which is a rather slow server at times.
It can get worse. Try Rushmore Drive, the slowest-loading search engine home page known. This is a spinoff of Ask. There's enough ad-related crap on that page that it takes 10-15 seconds to load. And this is without any personalization or content-related overhead. It's all inept ad serving.
Those are both sites maintained by supposedly competent professionals. Sites where some third-tier web programmer just cut and pasted code from other sites can be much worse.
We can probably deal with increases in Internet traffic just by improving ad-blocking.
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).
and stuff.
I see what you did there. But you're not fooling anyone. We know what you really mean. And no, we don't feel sorry for you.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
The summary was so bad that I actually read the article, expecting that I could then come here and post the usual flame about mangled, misleading, or otherwise just bad summaries.
That was a HUGE mistake. The article really is bad enough that no improvement in the summary would have been possible.
The author of that article confuses "computer" and "network streaming". The confusion seems to be quite deep, perhaps to the point that the author thinks of computers as mere display screens for this magical "internet" thing that does all the work.
Imagine that you read an article about a traffic jam, but rather than saying that the flow of traffic at the moment didn't seem to be very fast, it instead suggested that the cars would "jitter and freeze". That's how I felt when I read that article.
See that "Preview" button?
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!
From TFA:
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource.
Really? The internet was limitless in 1989 and now its slowing down? Which internet were they using?
That's pretty much a complete rewrite of history if I've ever seen one. The internet was really slow in those days. My whole university of 40,000 students had a 64kbit connection to the internet as late as 1993 or so. Anybody remember the www being called the world-wide-wait? I think the first couple of years I was more limited by the backbones the by the last mile. And that was on dialup!
Then at some point in the late 90s, probably during the dot com boom, they finally got the backbones to where they could keep up. And by and large, I think they do that pretty well even with the much increased traffic today. Did these guys just make up some facts to support their fearmongering theory? Like 'home computers' slowing down when kids start playing games?
I don't get it
There's 20,000+ miles of dark fiber in America owned by a couple of shells or consortiums. All this was laid out during the late 90's dot com boom and the bandwidth per fiber was tripled with DWDM. Most of the holding companies acquired the infrastructure for pennies on the dollar as deployed fiber costs fell with dwdm.
On top of that the telcos laid out an extra set of conduits with all fiber to snake future fiber through..all the backbone they need to double of triple their bandwidth is already available..
The ISP's are really reluctant to invest money in leasing more fiber and upgrading their switches, god forbid they accidentally invest money in something actually beneficial for their customers. they prefer to spend money lobbying and threatening out the competition.. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86081/big-us-isps-roll-out-push-polling-to-stop-cheap-internet/
Let's create some more FUD on 'brownouts' and roll out the bandwidth caps... On a related note TWC will be repackaging a recent Southpark episode as a documentary on excess internet usage and broadcasting it for free on all channels tonight..
Modern codecs are pretty CPU-intense. As long as you keep the data flowing, the CPU stays busy and generates a lot of heat. If the pipe stalls, what happens is that the CPU idles. Now, the article is probably written for an audience where most people overclock with some rather extreme cooling solutions. When these peoples' CPUs idle, the water-cooling can actually ice up.
When the coolant freezes, the tubes burst. (Senator Stevens warned us about this, but people didn't understand, and some even ridiculed him.) Then when more packets come in and the CPU resumes working and heats up, the coolant thaws and leaks out of the broken tubes. Coolant gets all over the motherboard, and the computer crashes.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This think tank's claims are pure garbage. You all need to read this article from arstechnica about how the peak and average load on the internet backbone has actually dropped over the last couple of years. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/exaflood-not-happening.ars
I have never heard of this "Internet" company before, but I am 100% certain they are infringing on a Microsoft patent.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
First off the Think Tank is well respected... by who exactly? I am pretty neck deep in the industry and I've never heard of them. If you are going to tell us "they are well respected" then a journalist would provide us with who holds them in high regard.
Second: A think tank, in this sense, is usually funded. In full disclousure when talking about "THINK TANKS" it is usually customary to indicate the sponsors of said think tank.
Third: More statistical mumbo jumbo. 60% growth each years is irrelivant without the baseline numbers to go with it. I can have a 60% growth rate no problem but 60% of what? 60% of the base population? 60% increase in the new traffic? (In short if it went up last year by 100 people and this year went up 160 or were there 100 people to begin with and we added 60 more...)
I could go on but I am tired, cranky, and due for a nap...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Check who is paying their bills. They are only trying to do what has been done for a long time convince people that there needs to be more government money thrown at ISPs. We have seen these same stories going back years and years. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2004/04/63264 The report assumes no new investment in increasing capacity. Whatever. Dumb Masses.
Sounds like that wolf crying again...
Seriously, I've been hearing that long distance bandwidth is plentiful, it's just the last mile that is the limiting factor.
why isn't anybody using it?
Because multicasting requires everyone to be watching the same thing at the same time!
It doesn't fit in with the concept of 'video on demand' which is what sites like youtube provide.
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.