Why the Coming Data Flood Won't Drown the Internet 146
High Waters writes "Ars Technica examines predictions of an 'exaflood' of data that some alarmists believe will overwhelm the Internet. A closer look reveals that many of those raising the alarm about an exaflood are generally doing so to make the case against internet neutrality regulation. 'There's a reason that "exaflood" sounds scary. It's supposed to. Though Brett Swanson's Wall Street Journal piece tried to avoid alarmism, it did have an explicitly political point in mind: net neutrality is bad, and it could turn the coming exaflood into a real disaster'."
Quick get to work! (Score:5, Funny)
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Should've been:
Grab two of every packet and archive them!
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True, I thought to correct myself after posting, but decided somebody else probably would
Ah yes, Versatile (Score:2)
Sometimes it fucks you... [wikipedia.org]
And sometimes you fuck it... [cryptome.org]
This is a really old story (Score:5, Funny)
6 And it repented the ISP that Oscar winner, Nobel laureate, and all around handsome fellow Al Gore, Junior, had made man to surf on the Internet, and it grieved them at their heart.
7 And the ISPs said, we will destroy the neutral face of the Internet, (which we have implemented from the primordial swellness of Gore) from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth us that we have made them to access information in an inexpensive and convenient way.
8 But NOAA found grace in the eyes of the ISPs.
9 These are the generations of NOAA: NOAA was a tidy little bureaucracy, and perfect in its generations, and NOAA walked with the ISPs.
10 And NOAA begat three acronyms: SHEM, HAM, and JAPHETH, which are not relevant to this jape at the moment, but will be cleverly decoded later for humorous effect if need be.
11 The Internet also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with sex and violence, because it was just another show, like the news.
12 And the ISPs looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto NOAA, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth with a bolt from my wand of bogus legislation. 14 Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.
15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. If ye know not the length of the cubit, check http://www.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org] but make haste, because Moby Dick shall be sent to devour Jimmy Wales shortly after this post self-destructs.
16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And though shalt part one mother of a datacenter therein; such that yea, even Marc Andreesen shall be made to blush at the smoking bandwidth thereof.
17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring an exaflood of data upon the earth, to destroy all data, wherein is the breath of binary life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall crash like Internet Explorer.
18 But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy acronyms, and thy support contractor, and thy acronyms' support contractors with thee.
19 And of every living thing of all data, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be stored at RAID99.
20 Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive, but they only need, say, RAID5.
21 And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them: plenty of frozen pizza and jolt.
22 Thus did NOAA; according to all that God commanded him, so did they, once they got the budget plus-up.
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However "Implemented from the primordial swellness of Gore" is pure gold.
Keep up the good work!
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Missed a <br> tag and a plural in my haste to get a first post.
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA TROLL TUESDAY
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An internets was sent by my wife at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internets commercially.
And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amount
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http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt [umich.edu]
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Check Billy's books if you want..
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Where's the bit about "His noodly appendage," huh?
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Go forth and proverb.
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But I did manage to work Jane's Addiction into verse 11.
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The actual procedure was to to copy the appropriate chapter from the Book of Genesis, and spend, maybe, two minutes sexing it up, another two putting in the HTML, and then, of course, the required 20 second delay to Submit.
As noted earlier, this was in pursuit of a First Post, and you'll note it was, in fact the 'tooth' post, which is a sizeable deadline.
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OK, I've read the Bible enough to know right where to look...
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Why? Simple! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it was designed that way, that's why. The Internet is the largest distributed network in the world. TCP/IP was purposefully designed to be scalable on a massively large scale. Sure, we've improved the technology along the way, but the bottom line is that the routers directing all those tubes aren't going to buckle under the pressure anytime soon, and routing technology is just getting better all the time.
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(Serial Experiments Lain reference, for those wondering what the hell I'm talking about.)
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The "exaflood hypothesis" is not based on solid fact. It is a ploy, a PR stunt, as the article intimates, by our friends at the Discovery Institute, who are keen on floods and other prophecies of mass destruction.
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And TCP/IP is massively scalable, but it has limits. There are probably a hundred or so major choke points that will get creamed without major hardware upgrades, just as major hardware upgrades were necessary to increase capacity in the mid-late 90s and early 00's.
You don't really think the
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Re:Why? Simple! (Score:5, Insightful)
There's money to be made in building new servers. There's money to be made in selling bandwidth. Infrastructure is relatively inexpensive compared to the income they can generate. And it gets cheaper everyday. The ISP's are sitting on a gold mine and complaining that gold is too difficult to mine.
Re:Why? Simple! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm kind of in the business facilitating anti-neutrality (I know, I know...), and carriers are worried about their future - e.g. Telcos selling DSL see broadband killing their long-distance calling income, or cable providers see online content killing their cable TV income. They don't want their value reduced to providing a fat pipe for $45/mo, losing all their other business, and they want to know how to extract more money from their customers.
The "message" that they're rubbing their hands with glee to hear is "STOP creating more bandwidth, it's killing you. Create a bandwidth shortage by not upgrading, and we can help you make people pay to get priority for their (now shitty) VOIP, or IPTV stream etc.." Currently, the best-effort network is often good enough, but they need to create a shortage. It's pure manipulation to gouge for money, and as long as all the carriers play ball, it will work, since traffic is growing 50-100% a year. It'll be sold to us as a great improvement/bonus ("We can guarantee your bandwidth for glitch-free VOIP and IPTV, gaming etc, for only an extra $30/mo."). They'd much rather plow money into the infrastructure for this which will make them more money (smarter routers, identity management services) than more bandwidth, which will keep their revenue/customer static. Good for the NSA too, to track everyone more efficiently, so they can be charged.
The only hope is that maverick flat-rate, high quality carriers will provide us connectivity in competition to these bastards.
Incidentally, it's pretty much what Enron did for electricity in California - shut off supply to drive up prices, profit!
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"oh - computer security is SOOOO hard, those Russian hackers are soooo sneaky. Pay this extra fee, and we'll protect you from identity theft!"
It's just another variation on the protection racket.
Incidentally - it's what the Petroleum industry has been doing for the past 60+ years.
The fact that there *IS* competition, and it's virtually impossible to militarily CONTROL all the petroleum in the world, and they STILL get away with collusion and market manipulati
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That plan will only work so long as the average american citizen pays no attention to the state of things in the rest of the World.
Oh wait.
Except maybe.... (Score:2)
That's exactly the kind of enterprise that are going to spread big scares about "exaflood" and try to justify why "net neutrality is bad, throttling bit-torrent is necessary". Whereas the actual problem isn't the growth of internet, but the wr
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Before that, network traffic was email, webpages, etc... Most people on dialup. Sure, all sorts of stuff was available one usenet, but this was when it went 'mainstream'.
Suddenly people were sharing hundreds, even thousands of MP3 files, most at 128kbps. Call it 5 megs.
A couple years later video files started appearing, but processor power and codecs weren't quite there, especially with more limited bandwidth.
Now
Brett Swanson? (Score:4, Informative)
There is more info at Ars, [arstechnica.com] and they also mention Brett Swanson's name - he's from the 'discovery' institute. [discovery.org]
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That's how it goes since people invented language. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing new here.
No need to fear! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No need to fear! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No need to fear! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No need to fear! (Score:5, Funny)
Pointless exercise (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:No need to fear! (Score:5, Funny)
And two by two, the meme's were entered into the ark made from Ethernet. First boarded the "all your base are belong to us's", then the "welcome to our new [] overload's", and so on and so forth, until after "?????" boarded, at last "Profit" came on board. And lo, as "Profit" entered, so the ark was raised into such a ruckus, with some of the OSS repositories that had come on board disembarking from the ark, and some did turn into the dreaded "closed-source" thus infected the post flood world. Some even forked and did more than one of these.
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The thought of two Natalie Portmans covered in hot grits overwhelmed me when I tried to add it before, you insensitive clod.
The only people who are making this claim... (Score:4, Insightful)
Media companies wanting to shut down distribution of content not authorized by them (not just illegally copied content but content created and shared under licenses that specifically ALLOW sharing)
News organizations and governments wanting to continue to maintain control over what news we read, view and listen to so they can make sure that the "sheeple" stay "sheeple" and dont actually try to CHANGE their lot in life
Telecommunications providers (including providers of cellular telecommunications) who want to maintain profits for services THEY control and not allow the growth of alternatives to the telco-provided services
Churches and other groups opposed to pornography, gambling and other "vices" who want to be able to ban such content (or if thats not possible, at least control it to the point where its effectively banned)
Manufacturers, distributors and retailers who want to control your abillity to buy stuff to keep bricks & mortar stores alive or to keep people from buying stuff from a country where its cheaper than their own (for example, here in australia, a number of online stores were selling Panasonic DVD recorders really cheap due to the low overheads of those stores. Bricks & Mortar electrical stores complained since they couldn't sell at the price the online guys were selling at and actually make any money. So Panasonic stopped selling the DVD recorders to the online stores)
Governments and spy agencies who want to control the internet so that its easier to spy on the people and look for people who might "rock the boat" or that want to use internet control as a way to hang on to power (look at what happened recently in Burma for example where the government restricted internet access to try to stop the world from finding out how many innocent civilians were being hurt and killed in the name of keeping the dictatorship in power)
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Most of the slashherd and editors here are already on board with the governent controlling the net via net neutrality laws. \
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Media companies should be allowed conduct business however they like (including lawsuits against people who are violating their copyright). However, they should NOT be allowed to control innovation or shutdown distribution methods for content which is being distributed with the permission of the copyright holder (and there is more and more "le
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(Forgive me in advance if you're already aware of everything I'm about to say :) )
While relatively free markets are, in general, a good thing, there are certain markets t
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However, the problem right now is that some markets that need to be treated as regulated monopolies (or oligopolies) are not regulated anywhere near enough to ensure that the best outcome is being generated for consumers (i.e. my comments about the Telcos needing to be regulated so they cant dictate what services consumers may use on top of their wires/airwaves). On the other hand, there are markets that are OVER regulated such as the airline industry. Get rid
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Au contraire. While it's perfectly acceptable for anyone to do business freely on the Internet, if some groups are allowed to control access to certain types of information/goods by throttling/blocking access to it, then that goes against free trade and the free market. It would mean short term profits, but long term loss, as much of the economy would move underground to places where there would be unfettered access.
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How's the weather on Ferenginar these days?
Scaremongering as usual! (Score:5, Insightful)
When traffic increases (overall, or peaky) to handle more video (for example), capacity has to be added or it quite simply will not get moved. Squeezing out/delaying other traffic will not go very far. Dark fiber has to be lit. When capacity is added because there is more traffic, there is also more "gaps" to fit in "low priority" traffic.
The fundamental problem is people think of the internet as a water pipe, with very simple capacity constraints. It is not. You don't care about water latency while data packet latency or jitter are extremely important.
It is beyond annoying that certain commercial entities are exploiting this misunderstanding to further their own interests at the expense of their customers. One cannot help but see them as grasping and acting out of malice.
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What, it's a truck now?
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Its not very profitable... (Score:2)
Exaflood (Score:2)
Strange link usage (Score:1)
Master Chief (Score:2)
What a wonderful write-up! (Score:2)
Excellent logic!
Don't believe it (Score:2)
And if it did, Internet2, with all it's research, technology and connectivity is just over there -> somewhere.
Genie is out of bottle (Score:1)
* If ISP never really reaches the bandwidth they somehow promised or - god forbid advertised - he'll be sued, anyway.
* For video? Have buffer time. DVB-T already lags analog cable two seconds on live events just for recoding and buffering.
* Mesh radio concepts became technically viable before broadband became really cheap.
* And those people in rural areas won't see a difference anyway
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Except they are very careful to include bullshit language like "up to", so they can never really be sued for this.
That has absolutely nothing to do with bandwidth. Unless your buffer time is quite a bit longer than the video itself, you're not going to get high-def vide
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I have you beat. 2mbit DSL, and my town has less than 30 people in it. The nearest gas station is 30 miles away, the nearest movie theater ~45.
For the farmers, point to point radio can be an answer. Use high gain antennas and you probably won't cause much inteference.
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Excuse me, but you are NOT really a rural customer and 10,000 is NOT a small town. I live in town of about 8000 and yes we have cable and DSL as well as natural gas, paved streets, sidewalks, street lights, and way too damned many traffic signals. I think we may get fiber in the next decade (but only, I suspect, because the largest surviving industrial plant in New England is abou
Old news. Metcalfe already predicted this in 1995 (Score:4, Interesting)
The only news here is the invention of a new scare word, "exaflood."
The only thing that could really make the Internet collapse would be to abandon the principles of neutrality and end-to-end connectivity, and I'm sure the dire alarmist predictions are intended to soften us up for some proposal... like one to hand over control of the Internet to the telcos so they can allocate bandwidth and prevent "exafloods."
By the way, what happened to all the "dark fiber" that was so spectacularly overbuilt during the dot-bomb era? Is all of it lit up now?
Parent overrated, RTFA (Score:2)
For that matter, TFA is strongly agreeing with you that it's not a problem. It's more of an analysis of different ways of solving the problem -- for instance, do we get to keep net neutrality?
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ams-ix (Score:5, Informative)
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Lies, damn lies, graph axis offsets, and statistics. When dealing with a nearly innumerate population, they're al
'exaflood' is simply telecom propaganda (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's say you needed your own acquired infrastructure to run your own cable system or your own cell/mobiles system. Let's say you didn't want your competitors services and content to be clogging your wires at your 'expense'. Let's say that it galls the living hell out of you that you can't control or throttle the full breadth of packets going over your own network!
And worse, some damn US Senator from Conn. decided to derail your immunity from prosecution over handing over data to the Bush Administration. Can't win that one? Then inject the fear of an 'exa' or peta or oogle event to scare the living shit out of people.
Propaganda. Every last fear-mongering fib.
Dire predictions... (Score:3, Insightful)
How many times did people predict that Usenet would collapse due to the massive amount of data being passed around on the old modem network? It never did happen.
Good thing we're not using SI units (Score:4, Funny)
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I'll take a data slowdown over that any day.
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Excellent neologism, and if you don't get +5 Insightful, the mods are asleep.
powers of 2 not ten (Score:2)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix [wikipedia.org]
Two Internets? (Score:2, Interesting)
I2: One for the original intention (legitimate email, web browsing, perhaps online gaming, minor file transfers).
One for the massive data transfers (to include streaming): video, file sharing, online or internet backups, etc.
Take your steenking music and video downloads to the overloaded one, and leave the _real_ internet clear for my WoW, if you please.
Oh
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The exoflood is coming! Start hoarding now! (Score:1)
Oblig comparision (Score:1)
No good tech story is complete without a comparison of a tangible tech object to *bytes. FTA:
Cisco notes that three exabytes is equivalent to 750 million DVDs.
I'm having a little trouble wrapping my mind around that number. Tell me, how many songs is that? How many 40GB iPods Beowulf clustered together make three exabytes? Consider this, you could pave a 4 lane highway from New York to LA with 1GB flash drives and that road still wouldn't have enough space to hold three exabytes.
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three exabytes is eq
and after the exaflood came... (Score:2, Funny)
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Moving to peer-to-peer? Wasn't that the design? (Score:4, Insightful)
But the growth in file sizes is made worse by a concurrent increase in the use of P2P as a delivery mechanism. Distribution gets pushed from the center of the network to the edges as users increasingly become both the consumers and providers of content, so the tubes could be clogged in both directions.... The [US Internet Industry Association] describes this transition as a traffic shift "from the Internet backbone to a peered system in which content is streamed directly to consumers," and the group notes that it will require ISPs to upgrade the most expensive part of their networks to keep pace: the last mile.
Wasn't the Internet designed from the ground up to be "peer-to-peer?" Yes, I know we started with client/server technologies and "the Internet backbone," but fundamentally every machine with a public IP address is, and has always been, the peer of all the other millions of machines with public addresses. That's what makes the Internet so profoundly democratic and so profoundly threatening to established interests.
I suppose cable operators weren't used to seeing the world in those terms, but telcos certainly were. Voice/data services were always interactive, not unidirectional broadcasting. Why should anyone be surprised that the Internet is being used for the purposes its designers envisioned?
Oh, and why is a system where "content is streamed directly to consumers" described as "peered?"
Funny article (Score:2)
Already, in just six years, broadband has reached 25 percent penetration, according to McKinsey & Co.lready, in just six years, broadband has reached 25 percent penetration, according to McKinsey & Co.
So the internet was created 6 years ago?
The Washington post article also mentions nothing about network neutrality. IMHO, if it is a disguised case against it, it is very very well disguised. The only thing even possibly relevant is this line:
The formula for encouraging such extraordinary investments is clear: minimize tax and regulatory constraints and maximize competition.
This line is followed by a list of things that should be passed, and NN is not one of them. Perhaps it is intentionally absent, perhaps it is not. Either way, it really isn't worth using the term "network neutrality" to stir up interest in the article.
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I'm pretty sure they're wrong, though. I've had broadband for at least six years, and it was being rolled out before that.
There are some real problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, there are things to worry about.
Too many new applications have hard real time constraints. Copying movie-sized files around, no problem - TCP will throttle. Streaming HDTV without stuttering is much tougher. We're entering an era where the highest-traffic application needs a high quality of service. If resources are tight, there's good no place to throttle. VoIP works because it's a small fraction of traffic. Streaming HDTV looks to be a much larger fraction of traffic.
We still don't have a good answer to managing backbone congestion in pure datagram networks. The Internet today works because the congestion is out near the edges. If we get enough "last mile" bandwidth deployed that the backbone congests before the edges, packet loss rates will go way up. If we have about 2x excess capacity in the backbone, no problem. That's the solution we know.
Microsoft has proposed systems where "broadcast" video is multicast in real time with a high quality of service, while "video on demand" is heavily buffered and sent with a lower quality of service. That's an obvious solution; it's what multicast is for.
(Amusing thought: one solution to video buffering problems is commercials. When transport can't keep up and the player is getting close to running out of buffered content, play an extra locally-stored commercial or two. This lets the buffering refill. Download commercials in advance based on personalization info, then insert them as needed during playback. Don't put them in the main video streams at all.)
...but it /will/ drown users and lawyers (Score:2)
uh, which flood? (Score:2)
Re:Drown the internet? (Score:5, Funny)