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.'"
Metered Service (Score:5, Interesting)
We would see massive power brownouts if electricity was being billed as an unlimited service too. The fact the internet service is still this way is silly. Meter it and move on.
Distributed internet? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure if we just set up some sort of beowulf cluster among our desktops and set up a cloud on top of it it would solve all of our problems.
Windows 7 is already going there - the actual plan is to use the XP VM to host the internet locally - like freenet, but umm... controlled by Microsoft instead of the evil... umm... people. Yeah.
Peak Internet Apocalypse (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems most of these fluffy fear pieces are mere convenient flak for those that want some government excuse for broadband rollouts. These rollouts may or may not be warranted, but fear mongering is not convincing, especially when they tout increasing use of you tube or BBC iplayer as bringing down the global backbones. As you tube and BBC gain users, the response will be more and more local CDNs. There is no reason anyone's global backbones need be involved to stream you tube from India to USA.
Nemertes and Net Neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Same group (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember this from an earlier slashdot of the same group saying the same thing.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/20/0024248&from=rss [slashdot.org]
In that article, they predicted brownouts in two years, i.e. November of 2009, so really they've just moved the timeframe back a few months. On the other hand, Bob Metcalfe thought the Intertubes would collapse in 1996. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_predictions [wikipedia.org]
thank god! (Score:4, Interesting)
Thank God! I'm glad someone knows what's going on in this confusing world of ours!
As far as what the OP says, aside from the wild fear mongering and hilariously dumb power distribution "analogies", I do tend to experience connectivity problems during peak hours (Sunday nights specifically). That is, I lose connectivity: upstream and downstream simply cease for periods of time (5s+), and I'm unable to connect to anything (including DNS) on the outside. It's infuriating.
Re:Too bad (Score:2, Interesting)
Fifteen years ago? Twenty two (22) years ago I was told that we would have fiber-to-the-premesis within a year or two by the Southwestern Bell installer. It hasn't happened in that area yet. When you have a monoply there is no incentive to change.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:2, Interesting)
Tons of unused bandwidth (Score:2, Interesting)
There's 20,000+ miles of dark fiber in America owned by a couple of shells or consortiums. All this was laid out during the late 90's dot com boom and the bandwidth per fiber was tripled with DWDM. Most of the holding companies acquired the infrastructure for pennies on the dollar as deployed fiber costs fell with dwdm.
On top of that the telcos laid out an extra set of conduits with all fiber to snake future fiber through..all the backbone they need to double of triple their bandwidth is already available..
The ISP's are really reluctant to invest money in leasing more fiber and upgrading their switches, god forbid they accidentally invest money in something actually beneficial for their customers. they prefer to spend money lobbying and threatening out the competition.. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86081/big-us-isps-roll-out-push-polling-to-stop-cheap-internet/ [zeropaid.com]
Let's create some more FUD on 'brownouts' and roll out the bandwidth caps... On a related note TWC will be repackaging a recent Southpark episode as a documentary on excess internet usage and broadcasting it for free on all channels tonight..
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:1, Interesting)
bullshit. in a true free market, all the power would rest in the hands of a few corporate entities. It would be impossible for new startups to appear as the cost of entry would be too high. True capitalism breeds a corporate feudalism similar to the train barons of the 1800's. unless you like the prospect of company stores then regulation is a good thing.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:2, Interesting)
They're funded by the Internet Innovation Alliance, who is funded by AT&T.
Don't believe a word they say. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Interesting)
There's one more aspect to the free market that's often overlooked: it requires perfect information to be available about all competitors and products. While not knowing that product B beats the pants of product A is also an entry barrier for the company that produces product B, that's not the common understanding that people have of it - nor is it ever mentioned outside of academic circles.
BTW, your argument is the reason that Britain bought all British rails, and leased its usage out to private companies. Kinda like the road system in the US. And, just like the road system, success is mixed. But it'd be worse if the rail and road system would be private as well - like we're finding out with private ownership of the fiber and copper.
There's a reason there's enough dark fiber out there to fix any possible "internet brownout" that might come up. If there'd just be a reason to use it.
Re:why would a computer "jitter and freeze" (Score:5, Interesting)
The programmers of these P2P apps, either brilliant jerks or unwitting fools (both equally dangerous), have made applications that are so irresponsible on networks that just opening them can bring networks to their knees -- intentionally so, as these apps were specifically designed to break college P2P filters.
Please choose one of those so I can be properly offended. I guess I prefer brilliant jerk, but I'll leave it up to you.
Now, no P2P application I know has been designed specifically to break college P2P filters. The fact P2P applications open tons of connections is because, well, they are P2P applications. Unless you plan on creating a network by connecting to one or two peers, the point of those applications is to connect to a lot of peers. This is akin to claiming that Facebook's social network could be achieved while keeping a user cap of 3 friends. That simply doesn't work.
On top of that, you seem to be extremely oblivious about the default values for connection limits on p2p applications like eMule, or most bittorrent clients. As someone mention bellow, p2p applications can't open by default tons of connections because home routers tend to have small routing tables, and in many cases those routers crash when exceeding that point. P2P programmers would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were to set such limits.
You are right in the fact that ISPs are to blame. Somehow you are able to see that selling unlimited bandwith means that people can't be to blame for using as much bandwith as they want, but you can't see how that applies to connections. Unless you can claim that ISPs sell *limited* connections, people are still totally in the right of opening as many connections as they want, and network congestion derived from it means it's the ISP's responsibility to maintain the health of the network, and to improve the infrastructure if needed.
Are you telling me that companies using the bittorrent protocol for distribution like Blizzard are also to blame?
Really, you have a very nice view about bandwidth caps, but it also seems that you are completely biased against P2P (and uninformed, too).