Study Warns of Internet Brownouts By 2010 318
Bergkamp10 writes "Consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown-outs in two years unless backbone providers invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure, according to a new study. A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Net by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to US $137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study by Nemertes Research Group. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand, Nemertes said. Quoting from the study: 'Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years.' Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year."
yay free market (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is just FUD.
Re:yay free market (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:yay free market (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, call me idealistic, but then we light up the fiber ourselves; start some sort of co-op, I dunno. Span the US with fiber and Wi-Max. Google has to be planning something with all the fiber they own.
If something like that were to happen, and a 'second internet' spring up independent of the current infrastructure and grow reasonably, then one incumbent will start playing along. After that, they'd start falling like dominoes.
Of course, I'm being ridiculously optimistic about the chances for success of such a project, not to mention the willingness of a group of people to let go of their own money to do it. There's a high initial cost and it would take a long-term commitment to see real results.
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
let me guess your applying the same kind of phony logic as "peak oil" advocates use.
repeat after me everyone - there is no bandwidth crisis. The only thing lacking is the speed of the last mile, there's tons of fibre out there waitng to be lit up.
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Interesting)
The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone. All we need is a few simple strategies to help enable it. I'm doing my part [sourceforge.net]. We geeks will overcome.
Re:yay free market (Score:4, Informative)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:yay free market (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason some of the technologies you mention are not being used extensively is not only a question of cost, it's also a question of running up against technological difficulties and the laws of physics. Solar panel efficiency is still stuck at around 15% on average. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy carrier - one needs to use some other energy source to produce it. Battery technology restricts the use of electric powered vehicles. Even if all of the U.S. corn crop were converted to ethanol, it could only power 20% of vehicles on the road, and thats assuming farms still use the hundreds of thousands of tons of petroleum based fertilizers currently applied to make crop yields what they are. Crunching the numbers on all these things is difficult, but from the research I have seen it is easily apparent that even if we used all available alternative energy sources that we know of to maximum efficiency using current technology, the world would still fall short of fulfilling its CURRENT energy demands by a wide margin.
Perhaps there will be continued innovation in more efficient alternative energy technologies; perhaps others will be discovered. It's also possible that neither will happen, or neither is possible. By believing that the free market will automatically rectify the inevitable decline in world oil production with alternative fuels one is essentially betting that both possibilities will come about in time to avert an energy crisis, while the status quo is maintained for the foreseeable future. This seems to me like a dangerous gamble.Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The real issue is we like our hydro carbons in easy to transport containers and oil is going up in price, but there is still a lot of oil out there in tar sands etc. Now we c
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Read up on breeder reactors and take a real look at this issue.
The other issue is the extreme levels nuke plants are regulated. For an idea just how silly this is: http [nytimes.com]
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Informative)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you confusing the correct prediction of peak domestic oil production vs. peak world oil production? (Of course, the latter comes later).
In either case, we won't have long to see how well the prediction scales world-wide.
You can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [wikipedia.org]
I am not aware of other (presumably false) predictions of when peak oil will occur other t
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Remember when oil production "peaked" in the 1970's? How many times will we have "peak oil"?
If you mean how many more time will people predict it - many many more. If you mean how many peaks will there actually be - just one.
A mathematician whose name escapes me at this point demonstrated decades ago that humans will use up a finite resource on a curve not unlike a bell curve. Of course, countless people want to be able to say they correctly predicted when the peak happenned, though reality is that we probably won't be sure the peak was in fact the peak till five or ten years after it happens.
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Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, like newsgroups?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but come on, man! This is NOT A DIFFICULT PROBLEM. It was thoroughly solved well over a decade ago. The only reason we aren't using it more is because of legal considerations. Newsgroups solved the problem of distributing large amounts of content over slow connections and caching the data on an as-needed basis. Your "NetFS" struggles (and fails) to be anywhere near as efficient.
But if your ISP took the top 50 movies and cached them in a cheap-ass 1U newsgroup server at your neighborhood head-end equipment, the top 500 movies in 4U at your city colo, and the top 50,000 in a nice rack at their datacenter, with one superglobalworldwide archive with everything ever made, they'd have a system that would be incredibly efficient. Build each tier to failover to the one above, and you'd have incredible reliability. Even if the superglobalworldwide data center went down for an afternoon, only maybe 5% of everybody would even notice. And the superglobalworldwide datacenter might only cost a few million. Peanuts!
See, half of everybody wants the top 10 movies. Half of what's left wants something released within the last year or so. The next 20% or so gets pretty tough to cache, and the last 5% is just impossible - some artsy film from 1948 filmed in southern France.
With very little expense, your ISP could serve basically every movie ever made.
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"Worl' be fallin' apart an' shi'. Buy our boxen an' dodge the toxin."
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I don't personally support adding capacity to the net, until the other problems that are limiting the usability are dealt with.
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Funny)
I've been warning people for years too. That's why I've been stockpiling porn for years. One of these days, we just won't have enough bandwidth then these fools will come crying that they can't get enough porn to get by on. Well, I warned them.
STOCKPILE PORN NOW!
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Re:yay free market (Score:4, Informative)
That will be good for your trade balance, of course, but bad for your economy since the high increase in the cost of goods will probably lead to a severe recession - people will be buying a lot less when everything suddenly costs many times more. It may take a decade or more for the US to recover. On the other hand, house prices won't seem that ridiculous anymore after 150% or more inflation, but anybody living on a fixed income, like retirees, are going to be seriously screwed.
And in case you think that isn't ever going to happen, apparently the Chinese have been making noise [nytimes.com] about shifting their ownership of foreign funds to away from currencies that have been showing recent weakness.
Of course, when the US can no longer afford to buy foreign goods, especially basic items like steel, and all their manufacturing capacity has been dismantled, why that might just be a good time for the Peep's Republic to invade Taiwan.
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Sure losing competitiveness in the US market would hurt, but if they still sell relatively well in Australia, Asia, the EU, as well as to the domesti
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See, this is what people don't get: China doesn't want a worthless US dollar. All of the dollars that they received (as part of funding our national debt and trade defect) aren't good just sitting around. At some point, China is going to want to spend them, and if we see massive inflation (because our currency becomes worthless), suddenly China is left with a lot of worthless dollars (as are we). It's not good for either side.
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What else do you have to trade America? You sure got a purdy mouth!
That is where that sub comes in (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember that story from a while back, with a chinese diesel-electric sub surfacing right besides a US carrier? A clear signal by the chinese that the US is a lot more vulnerable then previously thought. It was believed that with its carriers the US could project its military power pretty much anywhere, with little fear of counter-attack. (There is a flaw in this, but I will get to that)
IF China were to flex its military muscles it would want to pull a SUCCESFULL Pearl Harbour. That is, it wouldn't want to
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Spot on. I'm a geezer myself (51), and I remember in the 1970's working for a company that did tax returns for farmers (and former farmers) in Canada. I must have done returns for over 100 widows whose husbands had sold their farms, moved into town, and died shortly thereafter. These women were left to live on the capital g
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1. The Chinese (or anyone for that matter) does not "buy dollars" to "support the trade deficit." !!!!! They produce GOODS which we BUY from them in DOLLARS. You probably heard how they have a few hundred billion dollars or whatever in their Central Bank and you just ran with it. Perhaps some of their USD reserves were investments/speculations but the VAST MAJORITY were sent to China in exchange for
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Interesting)
Add on to that the lowering cost of long-range high-speed ethernet and I'm confident that there won't be a problem nearly as fast as people want to make it seem.
What is really needed here, however, is a wider adoption of multicast and local cache technology. That is going to be very costly to do.
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The routers to use the dark fiber, and the upgraded routers to use in-use fiber better, still count as infrastructure. And they aren't cheap. And we will need them.
Does that mean the internet is doomed? I doubt it. It's not impossible, but I'd want to see better evidence. Plenty of people have predicted the imminent death of the internet before.
No concept of traffic (Score:2)
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That is not tragedy of the commons. That is common sense. Farm land is not common. It is limited.
If you want tragedy of the commons, see:
* fishing (oceans and stock populations and current inaction over it - or action by Japanese to kill more whales to "fix the problem" (no fish, no problem))
* CO2 and other greenhouse gases
* Mercury (most mercury
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I couldn't agree more, except for the cost part. Good local caching will come [sourceforge.net], and it will be free. It's my project, and likely therefore total crud, but what the heck... somebody's got to change the world :-)
Typo (Score:2)
Here, fixed it for you.
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Why? Why spend $137 billion to upgrade infrastructure just to keep up, when they could just spend $0, and use the weak infrastructure to justify collecting extra money from google, amazon, itunes, etc.
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Always remember that competition improves service and reduces cost. Right? Right? So we have no competition, obviously. Comcast may disagree.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:yay free market (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't have a free market without free people. All of the competitors in the market must play by the same rules - that's Economics 1, day 1.
With US and EU workers trying to compete with slave labor, we are doomed to fail. The massive trade deficit, among other factors, has begun to erode our way of life.
We aren't going to have the money to pay for massive internet infrastructure improvements, thanks to all these "free" markets.
I'm no commie - I just think that we should only trade with trade partners who play by the same rules that we do. Don't trash the environment and destroy species. Allow dissent and trade unions. Don't allow child labor or 80 hour work weeks. If you can't play by those rules, you shouldn't be invited to the game.
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Ahh yes but freedom means freedom to break the rules, and to do just anything... and that also means be crook. There is almost no distinction between a theif and a business man these days. Business practices can't be enforced because it would take probably upwards or close to half of the population monitoring the other half, or an orwellian society. We allow peopl
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Brown-outs (Score:4, Funny)
Then the tubes were full of bees.
Now the bees are stuck in poo?
TCP/IP protocols? (Score:2, Interesting)
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virtually any conceivable user demand (Score:2)
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Just throttle the biggest content--Oh, wait. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Just throttle the biggest content--Oh, wait. (Score:5, Informative)
Neither. You support QOS. QOS is throttling based on protocol/bandwidth/latency needs. Neutrality is under attack when ISP's throttle or block based on content/source. Sometimes the line between QOS and Neutrality is blurry, but your example is clearly QOS.
Re:Just throttle the biggest content--Oh, wait. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just throttle the biggest content--Oh, wait. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course the gotcha there is the "should be". If the telco's are cheap and don't upgrade, then even QoS can't stop the brownouts. But then again if the telco's don't upgrade, there'll be brownouts anyway...
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neutral solution (Score:2)
There is a decent solution that doesn't violate network neutrality: an ISP could simply give each customer a data quota*, and if they exceed it, they get their bandwidth reduced.** That's a good way of reducing bittorrent and video traffic without explicitly targeting bittorrent or video.
* If this is implemented the right way, the customer should know what their [monthly|weekly|daily] quota is when they sign up for
Three things to consider (Score:2, Interesting)
2. For Net users beyond the Americas and Europe, going to IPv6 would solve this problem - and installing throttle content managers to bridge the gap.
3. Just because you can link all devices to the Net, doesn't mean you have to.
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Computer License! (Score:2)
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This study brought to you by... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Be careful what you wish for. The telco's ideas of a "modern bandwidth price" is probably not LESS than what they charge today
What about improving the way the internet works (Score:3, Interesting)
From an article in discover magazine: [discovermagazine.com]
John Doyle is worried about the Internet. In the next few years, millions more people will gain access to it, and existing users will place ever higher demands on our digital infrastructure, driven by applications like online movie services and Internet telephony. Doyle predicts that this skyrocketing traffic could cause the Internet to slow to a disastrous crawl, an endless digital gridlock stifling our economies. But Doyle, a professor of control and dynamic systems, electrical engineering, and bioengineering at Caltech, also believes the Internet can be saved. He and his colleagues have created a theory that has revealed some simple yet powerful ways to accelerate the flow of information. Vastly accelerate the flow: Doyle and his colleagues can now blast the entire text of all the books in the library of Congress across the United States in 15 minutes.
I haven't actually read the whole article in a while but from what it seems, this guy has a pretty good solution to this whole problem that I don't see discussed a lot.
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New technologies (Score:2)
Now it's granted that we'll probably come up with some new and creative ways to use up the bandwidth such as realtime 3D v
Bandwidth "brownouts" are nothing new (Score:5, Informative)
So, yeah, by 2010, internet brownouts "might" happen. They already do happen. And we all survive.
Aside from pushing a meaningles scary buzzword ("exaflood"), this is an unsurprising study by a largely telecom-industry-funded lobbying group favoring tiered internet services and other telecom-friendly policy that, surprise of surprises, finds that with the current, mostly-neutral internet, the whole system is about to collapse, and it will be used to sell the idea that we have to abandon that model, let telecoms charge additional fees to get data delivered even though they already charge each end for every byte transferred, etc.
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Heh, there was an internet brown out? Good thing I missed it. Or considering the fact that I watched the world trade center fall from a bed in intensive care, maybe not.
More alarmist bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
I highly doubt the Internet is headed for a meltdown because, funny thing, as usage grows so does available bandwidth. Turns out that we can activate more fibre connections, we can upgrade to new, faster technologies, etc. I'm quite sure the Internet of 1997 would have ground to a near total halt were it subjected to today's traffic. However turns out we aren't dealing with that Internet, ours is faster, better.
I also hate when people throw out bullshit numbers of how much something will cost to fix. Ok well that might be impressive assuming we weren't spending anything now. But we are. Companies are investing in new infrastructure all the time (I know we are where I work). If it is insufficient, ok, but let's not pretend that there is no development going on and all of a sudden we have to find a big wodge of cash.
If it comes down to it, and there's more demand than supply and supply is too expensive to grow based on current pricing know what happens? No not a melt down, but that magic shit you learned back in Econ 200: Prices will rise such that demand will match supply. Of course those rising prices will give more money to upgrade supply and so on.
In reality I imagine things will go just fine. As far as I can tell bandwidth is getting cheaper at the high end, and supply is mostly limited by demand. As there's more demand for it, the infrastructure necessary for it will be purchased.
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Its from an lobbying group whose pushing a tiered internet and other telecom-friendly government policy as the solution; so its not the "we have a product that is a solution" type of thing, but essentially the political equivalent.
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I agree. I think it was only a couple weeks ago that there was a story on here about some Australian figuring out how to get a 100 to 200 TIMES faster throughput on an ADSL line. I'm too lazy to dig it up. But "Necessity is the mother of Invention" applies to the intertubes, too.
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They said the same thing about the railroads too at one point. You don't know what the future will bring. Who would have imagined a world covered in asphalt and a car for ever person, 200 years ago - when it was your feet, a horse, or a train? How many trillions have been spent on motor vehicles and all the infrastructure to support t
Actual link to the report. (Score:5, Informative)
Why does spending level off ? (Score:5, Insightful)
While, I cannot find any real problems in a quick read, people should look at FIGURE 7: GLOBAL INCREMENTAL OPTICAL INVESTMENT, where the investment peaks in 2008 after exponential growth in both spending, capacity and use. It is not too surprising that a couple of years of exponential growth in usage later, and with flat spending, they predict problems. The real question to me is, how realistic is that that investment will peak next year ? I must admit that this sounds dubious to me.
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On the other hand, the telcos may have overbuilt capacity so much for a while that the excess capacity drove down prices to the point where they couldn't recoup their investment. What happened is that they countered that by severely oversubscribing backbone ban
Sounds like anti-neutrality FUD to me (Score:5, Insightful)
If you recall they said in the past that video is using up a substantial percentage of the bandwidth and that unless they can charge the big users more (ie Google, Youtube, etc) that they won't be able to upgrade the infrastructure to keep up.
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I've been raised to believe (Score:2)
Been hearing this since 1996 (Score:5, Interesting)
As a general practice, I ignore any news story that relies upon "could", "may", "might" or "possibly" in its central premise. It always means that another lazy journalist is being willingly spoonfed a story by a PR flack.
Re:Been hearing this since (long before) 1996 (Score:2)
Didn't we give the telcos money for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the telcos fault, screw them.
exchange rate (Score:5, Funny)
Buy buy buy (Score:2)
There is actually a surplus of capacity (Score:3, Interesting)
Backbone fiber: the fiber cables contain 768 non-dispersion shifted cable. This, and the last mile, is the big and expensive part of the network. Each of these fibers can, with end equipment upgrade, carry at least 10Gb * 135 colors = 1.35Tb, so the cable carries 1Eb/s.
Now, an x264 encoded HD video is 50mb/s, so this cable will carry 20 million HD channels.
(So one cable covers northern california. There are at least three)
A 40GB edge router can support about 1k users, and costs $10k. Thats $100/user. Estimate the same cost
My house is already connected with fiber(GB Ethernet choked down to a few Mb/s) , and you can probably (soon) get 50Mb/s over DSL, so the last mile cost is at least incremental, and probably similar to the above estimate of $4, so the urban part of us should get it for $8 + ISP profit and administrative cost.
So $10/month for 50Mb/s should be the cost to support this upgrade.
Intersludge (Score:2)
oo, hang on actually, I was about to say they all seem so slow, oversubscribed, but these days you have to flip a coin to try and decide if a site or service is flooded out, or you're just being crippled by your own ISP.
Either way things really aren't looking too good are they.
161 exabytes?! (Score:2)
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"Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year"
I don't doubt that we will _transfer_ 161 exabytes around, but _create_? most of the data is the same stuff, transferred to millions of users.
Bogus estimate of amount of Video creation? (Score:2, Interesting)
Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year, and this exaflood is a positive development for Internet users and businesses, IIA says. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes or about 1.1 billion gigabytes. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.
So, 70.5E9 Hours of video? So, 1 billion people each created 70.5 hours of video worth of data? That's pretty impressive
Zombie b/w? (Score:2)
However I am curious about how much bandwidth is eaten by:
- Spam
- Advertising
- Zombie communications and DDoS
Also, bandwidth availability, congestion and capacity need to be examined with respect to net s
More than enough capacity (Score:2)
Not really a problem (Score:2)
Lets say I continue to place the same demands on my dial-up line in 2010 that I do today. That gets me onto the 'core' and it should continue to do so.
Meanwhile, the kid next door gets ever
Don't believe it,... They're lying to you (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are they 'warning' of impending bandwidth crisis? It's pretty simple.
I was just at a customer site last week (a city government). They had a DS3 and were going to get a second one. I asked him why on earth he was getting a DS3 which is OLD telco technology. I went up to his demarc point and showed him that Qwest had a fiber cable coming into their facility that provided 100mb to the net, that they then fed into a Fujitsu FL4100, then passed it off to a DS3 mux and passed off to the customer as a copper coax connection. They had a wall filled with equipment JUST TO SLOW DOWN THE CONNECTION to a DS3 speed. Oh, and the City was paying for the electricity for all the telco equipment.
I told him to call up Qwest and tell them to come get their crap out of his server room, take the fiber and plug it directly into his switch. And he was only going to pay $2000 a month for the 100mb connection to the internet or else good luck ever getting a permit to dig up another sidewalk in this town.
It worked. He didn't even have to resort to the threats. Qwest knows that they NEED TO CREATE A PROBLEM IN ORDER TO CHARGE FOR THE SOLUTION. In 100% of the cases I've dealt with telco's, I've told them what the speed and feed was that I wanted, and what I was going to pay for it. Never have I had an issue. Now, I do live in the Twin Cities Metro Area, where there is plenty of bandwidth to go around, and I'm not demanding that they give me priority QoS all the way to their tier 1 core backbone, but this game they're playing is ridiculous.
Another customer was paying $12,000 per month to get a 200mb connection to the net. I got on the horn with Qwest and told them to give us a gig connection for $10,000 per month or they can come get their gear because we weren't going to pay for the electricity for them any more. They gave us a gig connection.
It costs $100 to provision a 10mb connection port. Heck fiber optic modules are CHEAP. Want to know how much it costs to reconfigure that link for 100mb? Same Price. It is also the same price to bring it up to a gig connection.
They will bring in equipment for the sake of bringing in equipment, they will spend tens of thousands of dollars in gear just to slow your connection down, just so they can charge to speed it up.
Don't fall for it.
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Begone and take your IE with you.