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.'"

Comments

ahahahaha

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:ahahahaha

[hurfy]

And here i thought it was the geeks getting home and downloading Ubuntu.

Re:ahahahaha

[TechForensics]

Streaming video will tend to be self-limiting. When the slowing produces a maddening result, folks will go back to watching cable.

Re:ahahahaha

[Tubal-Cain]

streaming video.

porn

You're just being redundant.

Re:ahahahaha

[noidentity]

Computers slow down when you turn them off, or lower their clock rate. They don't slow down when you use them; you just put those cycles to (local) use.

Re:ahahahaha

[Maxo-Texas]

You let it stream to the break point, then rewind and watch it without any stuttering.

I use this to avoid most the commercials (I start them and walk out of the room- just like i did with TV)-- then I come back and watch the show.

Or I flip over and read the news while it plays.

Or any number of variants.

Plus--- The collapse of the internet has been predicted many times. I think tales of the internet's demise are greatly exaggerated.

Re:ahahahaha

[davester666]

This report brought to you by your local cable or DSL ISP.

Re:ahahahaha

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's quite simple really, I'll explain:

A computer is a machine that has to fill with data in order to work, just like a lightbulb has to fill with electricity in order to work. Back in the old days, you purchased your data on little disks, and inserted them into the slot in order to fill your computer with data. Now, with the internet, you connect your computer to the data tube, which fills your computer with data from the cloud, just like taking your car to the gas station. The problem is, with pirates and pedophiles and enemies of the Comcast's Rightful Profit start consuming large amounts of data, the data pressure of cyberspace falls. When cyberspace's data pressure is lower than your computer's data pressure, data starts to flow out of your computer through the data tube, rather than flowing in. As your computer's data pressure falls, it starts to slow down and crash.

See?

Re:ahahahaha

[postbigbang]

Nemertes Research are lackeys of the telecom industry in my opinion. Scare tactics to support metering is what's behind this. There's far more possible problems from security concerns than streaming.

The cable cos and telcos are all watching their revenues drop, and want some kind of defense. Their research is a red herring, designed to distract from the real problem: ISP greed.

why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[DragonTHC]

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.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[cbiltcliffe]

$50 says there's a connection between this group and a major ISP in the USA.

Cynical? You bet I am. I'd say I've got good reason to be, though....

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[Anonymous Coward]

If it were truly capitalist, they would. We haven't lived in a capitalist society in ages. In a free market, aforementioned "subsidies" would never, ever appear. The bad service providers would evaporate and be replaced by better ones.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[digsbo]

You're partially correct. Telecom providers make money by investing in capital equipment (the fiber, copper, routers, switches, etc.), then extracting revenue from that equipment over the long term. This is fine, and purely capitalist. The anti-capitalist part is when they lobby for laws preventing others from entering the marketplace, or lobby for special privileges for domain rights, etc., and shoulder out of the way the smaller operator who can't lobby/legislate as well. The government involvement is the part that makes it anti-capitalist (including Intellectual Property law).

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[nine-times]

Yeah, this sentence really bothers me:

brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace

It sounds like some BS description they'd put into a movie when they forgot to hire a tech consultant. You know, like some dude with spiky hair who describes himself as a 'hacker' would be typing furiously on a keyboard, and then suddenly yell, "Oh no! We're in too many firewalls and cyberspace is almost full! All of our computers are going to crash if I don't do something quick!"

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[mellon]

Yup, and now we're experiencing monetary brownouts, and the financial system is freezing. Oh wait, no, that was because of the streaming peer-to-peer profits in the banking industry! If we don't do something fast, all our industries will crash!

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[Anonymous Coward]

What's really dumb about that, is that whenever I'm in too many firewalls and cyberspace is almost full, I just code up a gui in visual basic and trace an ip address. Everyone knows how to do that. Sheesh, some "hacker!"

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[srh2o]

Collect your $50 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/suckered-by-astroturf_b_73483.html

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[noidentity]

Yeah, that's crazy that a computer would freeze or crash just because the connection is slow. My internet slows down often and it never causes my computer to cra

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[LordKaT]

"their fair share" is socialist bullshit. Either give me what I paid for (unlimited/unmetered) or sell me something else. Don't try to spread peanut butter on dog shit and tell me it's cake.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[BlitzTech]

I laughed at this.

And then I died a little on the inside because it's so unfortunately true.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[nine-times]

And just to spell this out a little more: the theory supporting "capitalism" as a useful economic system supposes an actual free market, which is not the same as "a market where a large corporation is free to do as it pleases." Yes, there's a difference.

A free market is one where there is no significant barrier to entry into that market, as well as relatively level footing within that market, thereby allowing for free competition. Of course, this is nothing like the ISP industry that we have today.

And it's not at all clear to me that we can have that kind of competition in the part of the ISP business that includes developing physical infrastructure. You can't just let everyone and anyone dig up whatever land they want in order to lay cable.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[Eravnrekaree]

However, monopolies can happen without government intervention. Thats what your free market ayn randish argument seems to forget. In fact, the government is essential in making sure that there is competition by preventing monopolies. If we had a completely unregulated economy with no government like some Rush Limbaugh fantasy, we would end up with a situation where one company could easily seize control of a market and using its size and anti-competitive practices to destroy anyone else who would try to compete. Government is the only thing that can step into stop that.

Also, just a note, but conservatives at least by their behaviour show a contempt to democracy and the peoples ability to solve their problems, through their democratic system. To make the democratic institutions inept and powerless, basically allows corporations to do whatever they want, and these corporations are not accountable to the people. Its not unreasonable to ask for an economic system that serves the common good of the people and which is democratically controlled by us, rther than controlled by large corporations which exploit the people to hoard massive amounts of wealth for themselves. Your ideology is leading directly to a corporate totalitarian police state where a few massive corporations have consolidated control over everything, jobs, money, the economy, markets, and operate completely above the law and any democratic institution.

Rather than this corporate fascism, id rather see a mix of socialism, democratic corporations, and small mom and pop businesses.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[NeutronCowboy]

There's one more aspect to the free market that's often overlooked: it requires perfect information to be available about all competitors and products. While not knowing that product B beats the pants of product A is also an entry barrier for the company that produces product B, that's not the common understanding that people have of it - nor is it ever mentioned outside of academic circles.

BTW, your argument is the reason that Britain bought all British rails, and leased its usage out to private companies. Kinda like the road system in the US. And, just like the road system, success is mixed. But it'd be worse if the rail and road system would be private as well - like we're finding out with private ownership of the fiber and copper.

There's a reason there's enough dark fiber out there to fix any possible "internet brownout" that might come up. If there'd just be a reason to use it.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[_KiTA_]

For some reason, the line below kind of tells me where their loyalties lie:

Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity.

I kind of think its just a justified precursor to metering.

I used to work at a small ISP in Central Washington, so I have an interesting point of view of what's going on.

First off, you can't be a "net hog" when you're paying for unlimited data transfer and a set connection. The two concepts do not mesh. But, as we've seen, the market has utterly rejected the idea of non-unlimited data transfer connections.

(As an aside, I eagerly await the first cellphone company to come out with an "unlimited minutes anytime anywhere to anyone" plan that doesn't suck, as it will fundamentally change the US cellphone market.)

If you are paying for a 3mb connection and using 3mb/sec 24x7, you aren't doing anything wrong at all. You're getting what you paid for.

Unfortunately, the Internet Service industry has hedged their entire business model on the idea that people will pay for a 3mb/sec connection and use it to check their email -- really really fast -- every 3-4 hours. We called these our "Email Grannies" back in the day, and we *loved* them, because they were an incredible return on investment.

They weren't paying for bandwidth, they were paying for their emails to load really, really fast. There's a big difference there, and once a person understands that, they can really start to succeed in service industries.

What we didn't love was the college kids and the computer geeks, using Bittorrent and eMule to pirate things 24x7. For the most part on our heavily restricted lines (DSL et all) this wasn't a problem -- but then again, we weren't irresponsibly overselling our DSL network.

One problem area was our Wifi Network. We sold Wireless Broadband -- our unique solution to the last mile problem -- by using Motorola Canopies on essentially telephone poles on hills. 10 mile range, we usually had the end users use a 1' tall grid antenna connected to a Cisco 350 card or an Engenius Network Bridge. Point the antenna to the tower, run the cable -- something reminiscent of triple-thick TV coax cable -- to the bridge, badda boom, you're online.

The problem there was the same problem the Cable Companies have. QoS. We had no way to stop a single user from getting on say Bittorrent or eMule, both of which are engineered to get around the traditional "throttle the connection" speed caps by just opening up thousands of connections. I believe eMule, for example, is set to open up a max of 800 or 1000 simultaneous connections out of the box.

Even if you throttle a user like that to what they're paying for, the sheer overhead of 800-1000 connections going at 0.001k a second destroys a network. Your ISP might only be sending you the packets at 0.001k, but they're hitting the ISP's gateway at whatever full upload speed the other user is sending it at. So the ISP can deny you your speed, but they still feel it.

For example, 1000 connections each going at 10k a second (not unreasonable numbers) = about 10,000k of transfer trying to come into the ISP. It doesn't matter if they're filtering it down to 128k/sec or whatever you're paying for -- that's still 80 megabit worth of bandwidth resources wasted on the ISP's side. And there are hundreds of thousands of users on these networks (spread out across the US) trying to do this at more or less the same time.

There's a reason those ISPs were trying packet drops and other sneaky methods to kill off P2P on their networks -- they have to, or else.

No doubt the cable companies are looking at their networks and seeing the same problem. Their networks are based on the same type of topology our wireless network was set up on -- each node (a wireless tower in our case) got a certain amount of bandwidth, and the leaf systems (the end users, aka customers) can c

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, 1000 connections each going at 10k a second (not unreasonable numbers) = about 10,000k of transfer trying to come into the ISP. It doesn't matter if they're filtering it down to 128k/sec or whatever you're paying for -- that's still 80 megabit worth of bandwidth resources wasted on the ISP's side.

WTF? TCP doesn't work like that... The sending speed changes according to the acks the receiving end sends back. The ISP gets exactly what it sends to the user and everybodies happy.

You're right though that the overhead of a couple thousand connections can be quite large - but thats not the problem here. The problem is that the same slice of bandwidth is sold to 10 different people. This just will not work.

Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze"

[ElKry]

The programmers of these P2P apps, either brilliant jerks or unwitting fools (both equally dangerous), have made applications that are so irresponsible on networks that just opening them can bring networks to their knees -- intentionally so, as these apps were specifically designed to break college P2P filters.

Please choose one of those so I can be properly offended. I guess I prefer brilliant jerk, but I'll leave it up to you.

Now, no P2P application I know has been designed specifically to break college P2P filters. The fact P2P applications open tons of connections is because, well, they are P2P applications. Unless you plan on creating a network by connecting to one or two peers, the point of those applications is to connect to a lot of peers. This is akin to claiming that Facebook's social network could be achieved while keeping a user cap of 3 friends. That simply doesn't work.

On top of that, you seem to be extremely oblivious about the default values for connection limits on p2p applications like eMule, or most bittorrent clients. As someone mention bellow, p2p applications can't open by default tons of connections because home routers tend to have small routing tables, and in many cases those routers crash when exceeding that point. P2P programmers would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were to set such limits.

You are right in the fact that ISPs are to blame. Somehow you are able to see that selling unlimited bandwith means that people can't be to blame for using as much bandwith as they want, but you can't see how that applies to connections. Unless you can claim that ISPs sell *limited* connections, people are still totally in the right of opening as many connections as they want, and network congestion derived from it means it's the ISP's responsibility to maintain the health of the network, and to improve the infrastructure if needed.

Are you telling me that companies using the bittorrent protocol for distribution like Blizzard are also to blame?

Really, you have a very nice view about bandwidth caps, but it also seems that you are completely biased against P2P (and uninformed, too).

Slashdotted!

[Smivs]

Nuff said

Same group

[painandgreed]

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

Re:Same group

[vrmlguy]

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

In that article, they predicted brownouts in two years, i.e. November of 2009, so really they've just moved the timeframe back a few months. On the other hand, Bob Metcalfe thought the Intertubes would collapse in 1996. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_predictions

Re:Same group

[Dahamma]

Reminds me of the doomsday cults who predict the end of the world is coming every year, and then when it doesn't, they just adjust their prediction to next year. Sort of like a Cubs fan.

Re:Same group

[Blakey Rat]

If I were a Cubs fan, I'd look forward to the end of the world, too.

Too bad

[slapout]

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.

Re:Too bad

[HasselhoffThePaladin]

Uh-oh, someone's got the swine flu.

Metered Service

[Reason58]

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.

Re:Metered Service

[sofar]

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.

Re:Metered Service

[Twanfox]

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.

Re:Metered Service

[Feanturi]

How about common sense?

What else is new?

[kclittle]

"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?

Re:What else is new?

[noidentity]

"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?

Comcast is just bringing you the future, today! They're ahead of everyone else.

The network is not the device! Yet!

[Sockatume]

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.)

Complete FUD

[Thornburg]

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.

Nemertes and Net Neutrality

[1sockchuck]

Nemertes' research pops up often in discussions of net neutrality. See the Save The Internet blog for another perspective on their data.

Re:Respected

[Thumper_SVX]

Respect in this case comes from the Internet Innovation Alliance who fund it. Of course, AT&T funds the IIA

Make of that what you will. I know that the first thing I think is "shill", followed closely by "astroturf".

Watch for this study to be cited in some bills regarding tiered service agreements any day now.

Can't at least the "experts" get it right?

[pla]

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?

Re:Does slow internet really cause freezing?

[CAIMLAS]

No, of course it wouldn't - not unless your web browser is poorly written and stuck in an I/O blocking state, consuming all available CPU cycles. But that doesn't happen these days, and hasn't for a decade+. Never mind the bravado in which the article states these things is, and always has been, nonsense.

this wont affect me at all.

[nimbius]

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.

Same old same old

[Flimzy]

I remember similar doomsday stories when the 28.8kbps modem came out. "With such fast Internet access to homes, the backbones will now be overloaded!"

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.

Something is missing from the article

[Dotren]

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).

Re:Iam facing a brownout now

[JCSoRocks]

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.

Re:Lets crank up those clouds

[digitig]

Don't you love it when people who don't understand irony think you actually mean what you say.

Actually, no, I don't.

What OS would "freeze" with network brownout?

[david.emery]

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!

Re:What OS would "freeze" with network brownout?

[idontgno]

What version of Windows past Win98 or MacOS 8 would 'freeze' due to a "network brownout"?

Windows XP, filesystem browsing ("Computer Explorer") remote CIFS/SMB shares. Jitter, share, complete application freezeout*. Not hypothetical; I live it every day at a job where most of the documents I work on are hosted 1,000 miles away. (MS Word is a complete pig about temp files over the same remote link, too; that's another example of "jitter and freeze".)

*Yes. The kernel doesn't freeze. But it seems that large portions of the I/O complex does. Applications using the network mount definitely freeze. The desktop shell definitely does freeze. Since the "Start" button is tied to that same desktop shell, that means you can't start any other applications either. However, applications already running and not doing filesystem I/O are not frozen, I suppose. That means that I should keep Minesweeper running in the background to have something to do when most of the useful parts of the system are wedged solid.

freezing

[Cajun Hell]

Why the hell would my computer slow down or freeze because of network congestion?

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.