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.'"
ahahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lets crank up those clouds (Score:2, Insightful)
I didn't see this.
There just is no good reason not to start moving everything over to cloud computing and SaS.
Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Computers? (Score:3, Insightful)
...waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts â" a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
Will all computers do this? I think not. They are either referring to servers or the network as a whole.
It's all very logical. (Score:3, Insightful)
The network is not the device! Yet! (Score:5, Insightful)
(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.)
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
$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" (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Lets crank up those clouds (Score:2, Insightful)
There just is no good reason not to start moving everything over to cloud computing and SaS.
Lets see....there's too much data flowing over the Internet, and it's going to cause slowdowns.
And your solution is to move all data and software to the Internet, therefore causing even more data flow over the Internet, and more slowdowns.
Brilliant.
Not to mention that when your computer "jitters and freezes" you'll have to tell your boss "Sorry. We can't get that sales report out in time, because the cloud is down......Yeah, that means we can't get the proposal for that $10 million project out before deadline, either. Sucks to be us, I guess."
Re:Metered Service (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Share and Enjoy (Score:4, Insightful)
Meh... this just smacks of astroturfing for "tiered service agreements" that the ISP's have been trying to push for a decade!
Besides, aren't random freezes and jittering just part of Windows "charm"? :)
Respected (Score:4, Insightful)
> "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research.."
What does that mean, respected? By whom? Some IETF plenary council? Paris Hilton?
Is "respected" meant to imply the report is accurate? Why don't we judge reports on their own merits - soundness of methodology, reproducibility - rather than alleged reputations of the report's issuer?
Do they expect people to take them seriously? (Score:1, Insightful)
When they make such technically brain dead statements as, "Internet brownouts will make computers freeze!" do they really expect anyone to take them seriously?
Think-tank, where thinking tanks. (Score:2, Insightful)
Subject says it all but since it is so funny, insightful and shows how amazing a human being I am in 5 little words (and because the lameness filter forces me to showing that slashdot coders are silly and not worthy of kissing my furry butt, I will repeat here).
Think-tank, where thinking tanks.
Can't at least the "experts" get it right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ahahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
Streaming video will tend to be self-limiting. When the slowing produces a maddening result, folks will go back to watching cable.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
Same old same old (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Metered Service (Score:3, Insightful)
Citation Please
Re:Metered Service (Score:5, Insightful)
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:ahahahaha (Score:0, Insightful)
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.
Home computers slow down when adults get home from work, come home, and start watching streaming porn.
There corrected that for you
Re:Metered Service (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you think ISPs would lower the fee on the lowest-bandwidth tier?
Something is missing from the article (Score:4, Insightful)
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:ahahahaha (Score:3, Insightful)
Home computers slow down when kids come home from school and start playing video games?
Who is going to notice on a single-user system?
Re:Metered Service (Score:5, Insightful)
What OS would "freeze" with network brownout? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:ahahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ahahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
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:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What OS would "freeze" with network brownout? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:ahahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
This report brought to you by your local cable or DSL ISP.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
"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:Lets crank up those clouds (Score:1, Insightful)
No, but you can tell someone further up the food chain that you are sorry, the reports can not get out because ___fill_in_the_blank___ decided that your company did not need to invest in new hardware to meet capacity needs, but instead invested in licensing for "cloud services" and now, having saved $100k from last years budget by using old computers and some online service instead of new computers and servers you control, you can suddenly not get to documents when you need them and are at the mercy of how fast the net is today. As ong as the call was not yours, and you can demonstrate that before the shit starts flowing downhill, you might just make out all right
Re:Metered Service (Score:2, Insightful)
that's not allowed here
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What OS would "freeze" with network brownout? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google "Mac Finder FTP hang".
Microsoft isn't the only company that shoots their users in the foot by trying to put a "hard" network protocol somewhere it doesn't belong.
The Finder behaves really badly with dodgy network shares; but with FTP, it's really easy to have an unresponsive server. AFP, SMB and NFS tend to be used a little closer to home, even if they don't have to be.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Metered Service (Score:3, Insightful)
Common sense would indicate that SOME number of Internet users is paying significantly more for bit delivery than others due to their lower use. However it doesn't say what their value proposition is relative to another user.
Further, common sense doesn't indicate that anything would "drop like a rock" and it also doesn't substantiate the remarkably high percentage of users that it is claimed would be affected.
So, Citation Please.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
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" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ahahahaha (Score:3, Insightful)
drop the DSL part and one can agree, as the cable turned isp companies have a vested interest in selling package solutions that involve bulk channels.
same deal with the mobile network operators. as more and more people use IM and email rather then more profit laden sms, the operator becomes just another isp. no options for lock-in, no option for selling extra services, and so on.
this is probably scaring the people in suits silly.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Insightful)
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:ahahahaha (Score:3, Insightful)
Like any real geek, I downloaded Ubuntu in an overnight automated session with time of day bandwidth controls so my wife wouldn't complain about the Internet being slow while she's up using the computer.
Well, the wife part might not be the same for other geeks.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:3, Insightful)
In a fully capitalist society, all points of Internet access would be owned or controlled by John D. Rockefeller. All the ISPs would be charging the same inflated price for the same deflated products.
You could start your own ISP, but there would be a sudden drop in all your competitors' prices to $0 until you went out of business.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:1, Insightful)
Part of their job is to control the purse. The problem is that they got a credit card and went to town.
Re:ahahahaha (Score:1, Insightful)
Wrong, adults wait for their spouse or girlfriend to go to sleep before watching streaming porn so their effect would be much later at night.
ads (Score:1, Insightful)
remove all the damn ads and Im sure we'll be just fine
Re:ahahahaha (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ahahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does this get modded insightful? You throttle based on s_ip and the number of connections they can open is irrelevant. You throttle at the access edge, not your backbone, so there is no degradation on your peering.
You never worked for an isp did you...
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Not so much. [wikipedia.org]
Government is the only thing that can step into stop that.
So in order to protect ourselves from monopolies, we need to support a really, really big monopoly? And that really, really big monopoly is going to act in the interests of people with no significant amount of money or political influence, rather than in the interests of rich, savvy, well-connected businessmen?
When have things ever worked that way?
FUD to push tiered pricing. (Score:3, Insightful)
The key sentence in this whole thing: "Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity."
Of course you have to wade down to the very last sentence before you find the motivation of this little bit of astroturf, which is "we need to punish the big users of the 'net because if we don't, your computer will crash."
Translation: "give us tiered pricing or die."
It's just FUD designed to push an agenda.