ARPANet Co-Founder Predicts An Internet Crisis 152
The Insultant writes "Dr. Larry Roberts, co-founder of the ARPANET and inventor of packet switching, predicts the Internet is headed for a major crisis in an article published on the Internet Evolution web site today. Internet traffic is now growing much more quickly than the rate at which router cost is decreasing, Roberts says. At current growth levels, the cost of deploying Internet capacity to handle new services like social networking, gaming, video, VOIP, and digital entertainment will double every three years, he predicts, creating an economic crisis. Of course, Roberts has an agenda. He's now CEO of Anagran Inc., which makes a technology called flow-based routing that, Roberts claims, will solve all of the world's routing problems in one go."
Of course, he has an agenda (Score:5, Insightful)
Cure-All Seed? (Score:5, Funny)
Seed? (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Of course, he has an agenda (Score:5, Funny)
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News Just In (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, not buyin it. A similar thing happened with electricity, when everyone bought TVs everyone bought computers etc. suddenly of course power usage sky rocketed, and lots of people said, well this is going to be the rate of growth now. Of course, with that, as it is with this, everyone go their TVs and then the demand levelled out, with this, everyone will start downloading videos, and the bandwith usage will level out. Yes, soon we'll need some new routers, but the problem isn't permanent, and it isn't something that we should trust a salesman to deal with.
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Hey! (Score:5, Interesting)
People have been predicting that we'd run out of item X by time Y for hundreds of years. The reason we don't is because (as you said) when supply dwindles, there is incentive to find news supplies and substitutes.
During WWII, it was thought that we'd completely run out of rubber, and this would kill our war effort, due to lack of tires, hoses, gaskets, etc. Along comes synthetic rubber, and magically we don't run out. These days most rubber is synthetic.
This stuff happens all the time. When oil becomes expensive enough, alternative fuel use will become so desirable that an efficient solution will present itself. Hell, that's why we switched to cars in the first place, because our previous transportation (horses) produced untold...uhh..."pollution". A little Co2 seemed like heaven compared to mountains of horse crap, and it didn't take long before cars needed less maintenance than horses.
There was a time, however, when the car was a choice only the rich could afford, one less reliable and less efficient than a good horse. Economics rarely gets the solution ahead of the problem, which is why it's an uphill battle to force people to switch to alternatives when the alternatives aren't as efficient as what they're already using.
The biggest issue right now is that the government is mucking with the damn problem by subsidizing industries to artificially make petroleum/cars seem more efficient than they actually are. For a bunch of "free market economists" they sure love to give away money to un-free the market. They're also dropping the ball by shouldering the pollution costs created by the fossil fuel industry, instead of passing it back to the industry in the form of taxes and fees. Take away the subsidies and fairly apply the costs to the industry that created them, and you'd see a much broader adoption of alternatives as the prices rose to reflect the "real" costs.
China is a good example of this right now...They're polluting like mad, and passing the costs of that on to their citizens so that they can be super-competitive in the global market against people who have to actually pay some of those costs. It's going to catch up with them in a big way...It's like their propping up our currency. The more the dollar deflates, the more money China dumps down the drain trying to keep the dollar high, at the same time trying to keep their own money as depressed as possible.
As the dollar deflates past a certain point, American goods will become "cheaper" and Chinese goods more expensive, leading to a local manufacturing resurgence, yadda yadda, whereas when the Chinese lose hold of their own money, they're going to have this explosion of costs internally, as well as having to watch their goods become much less competitive globally.
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People have been predicting that we'd run out of item X by time Y for hundreds of years. The reason we don't is because (as you said) when supply dwindles, there is incentive to find news supplies and substitutes.
However, just because there have always been enough incentive, ingenuity and advancements to solve our problems, or replace item X, doesn't mean that this will always be the case. That's like saying: "I've always been able to swim across any body of water I've come across, so I'll always be abl
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A good example is removable media for computers. Starting with the 3.25 in disk, there were several formats used before the widespread adoption of the CD. Each one of those formats was developed by a company, each one of them enjoyed s
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As the dollar deflates past a certain point, American goods will become "cheaper" and Chinese goods more expensive
Maybe. We still buy our oil with dollars though, and oil prices are rising now mostly because the dollar is becoming devalued. As people have to spend more on gasoline, they have less money to spend on widgets. I don't know how much of the US economy is internal, and how much is export, but I'd bet a LOT is internal. The gains by a cheaper dollar might not be made up by the losses incurred by
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We could get some inflation. Hell, it could wipe the US out, beca
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If oil prices rise 10x, then for cars and energy production it will get replaced by other sources of energy, but industries like pharmaceuticals (for which petrochemicals is the source of much of components) will easily eat up the cost increase. If we use our (finite) supplies of oil for chemical purposes then we have a lot longer time to research and develop alternatives for them, compared to us currently simply burning this
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For now, the hope that we'll find something else is a leap of faith. Again, if you want to be pedantic, other energy sources are already available, but the point is they're much more expensive than oil, so switching to them would make us all poorer and perhaps cause fighting over whatever oil is left.
In other words, no, the world is not going to end. If we simply burn all the oil until it's gone, through the stages of wars, decre
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Ethanol production is already driving the price of corn higher than ever...
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I was actually implying what your posted stated far more clearly - just didn't feel like typing that much!
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Energy Independence? Does that mean the same thing as invading the Middle East? Cos, y'know, I'm having some problem with that picture.
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No. It means becoming more efficient and drilling in places like ANWR.
Now, stick with the topic.
As demand for bandwidth grows, so will the supply. It's that whole supply and demand argument we learned about in Eco101.
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By the way, have you all seen the "Cat wake-up call" [youtube.com] animation on youtube?
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That is not going to be enough to do it. ANWR does not provide nearly enough oil to make a dent in our oil consumption, and the oil that is there is rather expensive to tap (I don't work in the field, but I've heard that the cold temperatures affect oil viscosity)
Efficiency? We certainly should improve efficiency where possible, but lets not delusion ourselves into thinking it will give us energy independence. Europe has very high o
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You switch America to electric cars (or ethanol hybrids), powered by nuclear power plants and drill for oil where we have it, and we can make at least an enormous dent in our energy imports if we don't become completely independent.
I guess I should
I wonder (Score:2, Interesting)
The old packet vs circuit argument? (Score:1)
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All of this looks to be enhancements and accelerations to QOS. It could be really cool,
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flow based routing would be more like MPLS, in fact im pretty sure i've seen some big vendors router already doing flow routing
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Their routers calculate a hash from the IP headers, and then use that to parallelize out the actual routing, so that they can use cheaper DRAM instead of SRAM (performance of DRAM is a problem for high end routers), then they do a lookup in a hash table to see if they've come across this "flow" before. If so, a lot of information about QOS and about the route chosen initially is already stored, so that the
Similar. (Score:3, Informative)
Flow-based routing attempts to identify flows of packets - TCP connections, related streams of UDP packets, etc. - and cache information about them. Then when future packets of the flow arrive and are successfully identified they can be handled using the cached information, rather than performing a full lookup of routing, QoS labeling, permission checking, etc.
It may also attempt to identify more things about it - such as what kind of tr
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- If you use RSVP (or the like) to explicitly reserve bandwidth through the net for your flow, it's emulation of circuit-switching.
- If the routers identify the flow on the fly from seeing the packets and remember things about it from packet to packet for later decision-making, it's flow-based routing.
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We've heard this before... (Score:5, Informative)
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Some people at least thought he knew what he was talking about and, well, they had good reason to. I will say that I thought his comment was wrong-headed and stupid, but, then again, what do I know? I'm just some random guy on Slashdot.
Scarcity (Score:4, Insightful)
As the demand rises, people leap to fill it. When Metcalf decided we were going to run out of switching capacity, he was looking at current manufacturing capacity, and a projected increase in demand, and he was sure that capacity could never keep up with demand.
What he didn't see is a horde of people looking for ways to make money, who were looking at the same numbers and thinking, "Holy crap! If I make switches I'll be RICH!" Demand drives supply, not the other way around.
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Famines occur for lots of reasons. War, civil unrest, corrupt governments, and countries like us choosing to produce less food tha
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I mean, at some point, if the malware didn't succeed, it wouldn't be written.
OTOH, if we had some way to enforce cleaning up hosts that spewed malware, that would get rid of it also.
Comcast, you listening? How about filtering Storm and a few, just a few, of the well-known trojans and worms that infest the Internet? Starting with your own subscribers, residential AND commercial.
If spam and malware are bandwidth threats, maybe THAT
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How do you propose they do that, check for the evil bit?
Bittorrent/Notes/etc. send out traffic that correctly identifies itself, making it easy to block/throttle/whatever. When malware sends out traffic (I hate to be the one to tell you this) it lies.
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That's the way you do business. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, the first step is that these guys need to really convince everyone that the internet is about to implode and that the companies who need the enormous bandwidth and services simply can't or won't make the hardware investment that is necessary.
The real threat to the internet are the legislators and lobbyists who want to nerf the internet so that the only use for it is the commercial enterprises and everything should be nerfed down to a Disney-fied toddler's level. That's an actual legitimate threat.
However, maybe he should peddle the "piracy and torrents are killing the internet and I can save you!" angle. Might work.
Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nice Formula (Score:3, Funny)
2. Develop and market a product that fixes the sky
3. ?
4. Profit!
He must have read Chicken Little.
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Re:Nice Formula (Score:5, Insightful)
This would make more sense if step 3 was actually a mystery. I thought step 3 was obvious: "Convince influential idiots with money that your product is the greatest and most urgently needed thing since free porn."
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"Dark fiber"? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how much of the routing problems stem from backbone ISPs (Comcast, Verizon, etc.; see recent
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The fiber is still there. But to use it, you need routers, and TFA is about the cost/performance of routers.
TFA was about the fact that bandwidth is increasing some 1/3rd faster than (some variation of...) Moore's law... Whether or not you do filtering and QoS is completely independent of the point.
The real internet crisis (Score:5, Funny)
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Packet switching was invented by Paul Baran (Score:5, Informative)
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No crisis, just business as usual (Score:1, Insightful)
What is the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not quite. They will only invest in infrastructure if they think the return on that investment will at a bare minimum keep the same level of profit, and likely only if it will increase their profit.
Companies don't increase their capacity because cost goes up, they increase capacity because by doing so they can increase or maintain profits.
The notion that increased revenue increases capacity only works when the markets are free enou
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No, cost of bandwidth is still going to go down... Just (according to him) not as fast as it has in the past.
I Doubt It (Score:3, Insightful)
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Agreed. Yet it's important to keep in mind that part of "the Internet keeping up" is that the users modify their usage according to what technology allows. Now that it is possible to download video relatively quickly, people are doing it. But trying to stream high-def wouldn't work (either you'd have to wait a really long time to buffer or the video would stutter), so people basic
Comcast has a viable defense... (Score:1)
Just a question (Score:2)
Supply and Demand, Anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
The traffic will only increase dramatically if people continue to use the services that demand the traffic, and pay for the bandwidth they need to do it.
Warning! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Didn't we see this article a few weeks ago? (Score:2)
I think this is a dup. This is the virtual circuit guy again, isn't it?
OH NOEZ! (Score:2)
uh. Of Warcraft. [wikipedia.org]
This is about "managing" unwanted traffic... (Score:2)
This is not at all about circuit switching, or routing more efficiently. This about tracking connections through the router so that they can apply policy based on a simple lookup, rather than examining each packet. If they didn't intend to muck with the packets, a "dumb" router is perfectly fine.
Dear Dr. Roberts (Score:3, Funny)
We will do quite OK without you meddling with our open standards.
We only need linux, an open TCP stack, and anything that happens I am sure we can handle it with JUST those tools.
Well, that and an army of a million penguin volunteers.
We will do fine, really.
Please peddle your proprietary CRAP OLA somewhere else.
Thank you.
-Hack
Wassup Doc? (Score:2)
(rolls eyes)
What did Anagran pay Slashdot for this posting?
An anagram (barely) of Anagran is "A nag ran"
Oh No! (Score:2)
The imminent death of the internet has been predicted too many times now, but it hasn't happened yet.
The real killer will be the one we don't see.
And anyway - the bandwidth limit will always limit the services available at any time. If a service uses too much noone will use it.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Different website, same message, same bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
You have officially crossed into the JonKatz zone. Not only do you post duplicates, but you post slanted slashvertisment duplicates! Your articles are worthless.
It's too bad all I can do is ignore you, but it's about time I finally did. I recommend everyone else do the same, so we can finally hit home that bullshit editors will not be tolerated.
baahhhh ... It will never work (Score:2)
Historical video on GV (featuring Mr. Roberts) (Score:2)
I watched this video a while ago. I think this is an appropriate time and place to bring it up.
This implies network neutrality will go (Score:2)
It is true that by offering a solution to a problem a conflict of interest is introduced, but there is more to this piece than just that. In describing problems of network growth the author Lawrence G. Roberts makes references to different types of network traffic having different impacts on networking equipment. Responding to these specific challenges implies that the desirability of networking equipment which can respond to, such as by throttling, network usage based on packet information such as the da
Moore's Law (Score:2)
This sounds like Moore's Law working against us.
Truth is that such growth rates must eventually slow as we run out of new users and new must-have apps to run in the Internet. That will not likely happen tomorrow, however. So where's all this Dark Fiber waiting for light?
So what does... (Score:2)
Are the internets dieing or what?
Confirmed? (Score:2)
Roberts Has Spouted Off Before (Score:2)
Crisis? (Score:2)