The Internet is Too Crowded?

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KennyFlys

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Experts Warn Internet Is Running Out of Bandwidth

Internet users face regular "brownouts" that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 percent a year, will start to exceed supply as early as 2010 because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC's iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. Beginning in 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the Internet an "unreliable toy."

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the World Wide Web in 1991, the Internet appeared to be a limitless resource.

However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the Web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.
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• Click here to read the rest of this story in the Sunday Times of London.
 
Whatever. People have been saying this crap for many many years. Not even worth reading.
 
If we go back to the 1980's, you can note that most of the internet (which then was a collection of mismatched networks and homespun passthrough gateways) was based on 300 and 1200 baud modems. Not long after, we upgraded to 9600 baud. There have been consistent technical improvements in communication speeds (56kb, 128kb, dsl, cable, T1,T3) along with IPv6. Fiber has replaced the backbone. Technology has improved its speed and reliability as well as distance. You can now drive fiber to the desktop.
Seems to me if you warped back to the '60s and 120bit telex devices, you'd find people saying the same thing.
Don't worry, you'll be youtubing for years. Too many companies have too much invested to quit now.
 
The headline alone made me LOL.

Computers are going to freeze because their internet stops working....

Reminds me of the folk that wanted to get a faster modem so they could word process faster back when dialup was king.
 
jesse said:
Whatever. People have been saying this crap for many many years. Not even worth reading.
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This is a warning volley.
Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity.
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User fees or fees for service are the next step. Service providers are spreading this "fear".
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/b...r-Scraps-Plan-for-Unpopular-Internet-Fee.html

Bowing to mounting public and political pressure, Time Warner Cable Inc. said Thursday it was shelving plans in four markets to charge customers based on how much Internet traffic they generate. But tests of metered billing will continue in Beaumont, Texas.
Consumers now pay based on their download speeds, but they typically face no limits in how much video or music they consume or how many e-mail messages they send and receive. Under the plan from Time Warner Cable, the nation's third-largest Internet service provider, they would have had to pay extra after three hours of online video viewing, for instance.
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Remember, according to Senator Stevens: "The internet is not a big truck, you can't just dump whatever you want on it."

But this is:

DSC_0010.JPG


;)
 
Is the internet a pizza? :D

and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.
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well duh, people who are out of work have nothing better to do than surf the internet or watch cable.
 
To say "the internet is going to get overloaded" is like saying "car traffic is going to be overloaded". The argument is necessarily specific to particular locations. It doesn't make much sense to talk about congestion on "the internet", because the internet isn't a place, any more than "on the highways" is a place.

The internet backbone itself used to consist of 56kbps links. That's not the modems we used to connect to it, that used to be the backbone itself.

The article talks about how the internet seemed to be a "limitless resource" back in 1991, which is a ludicrous thing to say. Back in '91 all my internet porn came through a 1.5 Mbps link to Suranet that I had to share with the internet porn needs of everybody else on the entire U of MD campus that shared that link. Today, that's a mediocre link speed for a home.

The link speeds on the edge increase, the links speed in the provider networks increase, new high-speed applications develop, etc. It's a never-ending battle, but not one for which it makes sense to predict total melt-down on all networks everywhere.
-harry
 
"
Analysts express such traffic in exabytes – a quintillion (or a million trillion) bytes or units of computer data. One exabyte is equivalent to 50,000 years’ worth of DVD-quality data.
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."



Remember - 90% of traffic is spam. Get rid (or minimize) the spam, fewer problems with bandwidth.

Ah....for the days before you could buy a computer at the grocery store...
 
smigaldi said:
That didn't work???


You still get people wanting 1gigbit routers for their 144kbps DSL connections.



;)
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Hey, I've got a 1 gigabit switch in my home network. A couple of computers and my network storage device (used for backups) support gigabit Ethernet, so why have the switch be the bottleneck? Now, the router is 100BaseT, which is still overkill for the 12-20 Mbit cable modem. :D
 
murphey said:
Remember - 90% of traffic is spam. Get rid (or minimize) the spam, fewer problems with bandwidth.

Ah....for the days before you could buy a computer at the grocery store...
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Spam is email. Email (mostly) is text. Text messages are smaller and more compressible than the first slide of "after this word from our sponsor." An email, other than HTML mail with lotsa graphics might be 50Kbytes, and even if there are billions of them...I noticed that I don't 100s of spams a day in my spam folder anymore. They're getting tossed upstream.

The problem is massive media. People are downloading songs and movies. An hour of HD TV is 5-6 GIGABYTES.
 
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