Think-Tank Warns of Internet "Brownouts" Starting Next Year 445
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.'"
Same group (Score:5, Informative)
Does slow internet really cause freezing? (Score:2, Informative)
brownouts that will freeze their computers
In my experience, when the internet is slow or a server is having problems, the webpage takes longer to load. It doesn't affect anything outside the browser, and my other programs remain "unfrozen."
Re:Respected (Score:5, Informative)
Respect in this case comes from the Internet Innovation Alliance [internetinnovation.org] 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.
Re:Computers? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Does slow internet really cause freezing? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Slashdot has that feature now. It's bad ad code. (Score:4, Informative)
Take a look at why Slashdot's pages load so slowly. There are several layers of "document.write(some javascript that loads something else)" just to load ads. The browser can't do the loads concurrently; they all take place sequentially. Each "document.write" has to finish before the code in it can be run. Also, some of the CSS is being read from "s.fsdn.com", which is a rather slow server at times.
It can get worse. Try Rushmore Drive [rushmoredrive.com], the slowest-loading search engine home page known. This is a spinoff of Ask. There's enough ad-related crap on that page that it takes 10-15 seconds to load. And this is without any personalization or content-related overhead. It's all inept ad serving.
Those are both sites maintained by supposedly competent professionals. Sites where some third-tier web programmer just cut and pasted code from other sites can be much worse.
We can probably deal with increases in Internet traffic just by improving ad-blocking.
Ha! (Score:4, Informative)
The summary was so bad that I actually read the article, expecting that I could then come here and post the usual flame about mangled, misleading, or otherwise just bad summaries.
That was a HUGE mistake. The article really is bad enough that no improvement in the summary would have been possible.
The author of that article confuses "computer" and "network streaming". The confusion seems to be quite deep, perhaps to the point that the author thinks of computers as mere display screens for this magical "internet" thing that does all the work.
Imagine that you read an article about a traffic jam, but rather than saying that the flow of traffic at the moment didn't seem to be very fast, it instead suggested that the cars would "jitter and freeze". That's how I felt when I read that article.
Re:It's all very logical. (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, there are cases where you get this effect, usually not because you are unplugged, but because you are plugged into a network that's broken in some way, and all kinds of processes on your computer block waiting for replies that never arrive. This is utterly pathetic, and should never happen, but it does.
Revisionist History (Score:3, Informative)
From TFA:
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource.
Really? The internet was limitless in 1989 and now its slowing down? Which internet were they using?
That's pretty much a complete rewrite of history if I've ever seen one. The internet was really slow in those days. My whole university of 40,000 students had a 64kbit connection to the internet as late as 1993 or so. Anybody remember the www being called the world-wide-wait? I think the first couple of years I was more limited by the backbones the by the last mile. And that was on dialup!
Then at some point in the late 90s, probably during the dot com boom, they finally got the backbones to where they could keep up. And by and large, I think they do that pretty well even with the much increased traffic today. Did these guys just make up some facts to support their fearmongering theory? Like 'home computers' slowing down when kids start playing games?
Lies and Stupidity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Too bad (Score:3, Informative)
Questions (Score:3, Informative)
First off the Think Tank is well respected... by who exactly? I am pretty neck deep in the industry and I've never heard of them. If you are going to tell us "they are well respected" then a journalist would provide us with who holds them in high regard.
Second: A think tank, in this sense, is usually funded. In full disclousure when talking about "THINK TANKS" it is usually customary to indicate the sponsors of said think tank.
Third: More statistical mumbo jumbo. 60% growth each years is irrelivant without the baseline numbers to go with it. I can have a 60% growth rate no problem but 60% of what? 60% of the base population? 60% increase in the new traffic? (In short if it went up last year by 100 people and this year went up 160 or were there 100 people to begin with and we added 60 more...)
I could go on but I am tired, cranky, and due for a nap...
What's that sound? (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds like that wolf crying again...
Seriously, I've been hearing that long distance bandwidth is plentiful, it's just the last mile that is the limiting factor.
Re:Alternatives? (Score:2, Informative)
why isn't anybody using it?
Because multicasting requires everyone to be watching the same thing at the same time!
It doesn't fit in with the concept of 'video on demand' which is what sites like youtube provide.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:4, Informative)
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:ahahahaha (Score:3, Informative)
>>You let it stream to the break point, then rewind and watch it without any stuttering.
Works for youtube, but not the daily show, cobert report, south park, hulu, netflix, or pretty much anything I want to watch. They all use this terrible DRM that only pre-caches like 3 seconds of video- You can pause it, but it will stop downloading the stream when it hits that limit. This makes all of the above services unusable with anything less than 100 kbs (real speed) connection. "Hello and welcome to the" wait 90-120 secs- "Colbert report. No, sit do" wait 90-120 secs- "wn."
Grrrrr.
-b