Internet Could Slow to a Crawl by 2010

[Scorpio]

Well, I hope this is just exaggeration, but according to this story, $137 Billion in infrastructure investment is needed to keep the internet from slowing to a crawl by 2010. I read somewhere else that the planned investment is less than half that amount.

http://www.techspot.com/news/27959-inte ... rizon.html (http://www.techspot.com/news/27959-internet-slowdown-on-the-horizon.html)


According to some figures released by researcher Nemertes, Internet performance could start to decline by 2010 due to a growing gap between access capacity and demand, unless backbone providers invest up to $137 billion in upgrades to current broadband networks – more than double what ISPs plan to invest, according to the study. Nemertes bases its conclusions on current consumer demand for bandwidth and internet infrastructure.


“Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years."

Video and peer-to-peer file sharing have unleashed an explosion of content for which apparently telecoms haven’t prepared well to deal with. Service providers don’t appreciate how fast bandwidth demand is growing and proof of that is the Comcast controversy that has been running around the news lately

[BW]

lies

if there's demand, they will build it. Heck, earlier this week Verizon announced 50Mbit residential service (unlimited, uncapped, unthrottled) in some parts of the US.

[Scorpio]

Well, I certainly hope it is a lie, BW.

[skl]

lies

if there's demand, they will build it. Heck, earlier this week Verizon announced 50Mbit residential service (unlimited, uncapped, unthrottled) in some parts of the US.

not really.

right now there's a bottleneck in the refining of oil because demand is growing but refining capacity isnt because very few if any are building new refineries.

[deathwinger]

Lies. Every day they are finding new ways to push more and more bandwidth through different means, less costly and more efficient than years before. This projection is only based on if things stay the way they are and is as helpful as if it was predicted in the days of dial up where the crawl would have probably been by 2002.

[guyguy]

Has the internet changed the way things are done?

In true IT tradition, version 2 is now ready. With an initial 55,000 servers already installed on dedicated fire optic cables, it's at least 10,000 times faster for plodding users like us, much more so in physics labs where it's destined for research! An entire movie in 5 seconds? "Web-cam" holographs instead of video?

Scientific researchers will start it using this summer - might take four or five years to get to the rest of us, as was the case with the original web. We'll probably all have to buy new PC's again - just after Windows finally arrived, and we got all our drivers working right!

See:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 689881.ece (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece)



From The Sunday Times
April 6, 2008
Coming soon: superfast internet
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.

It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.

Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.

The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.

The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.

Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.

It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.

“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.

“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.

“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

[x_phatman1x]

Mmmm, best stop my downloads then, maybe the speed will improve. :D :D

[caribking]

Well, I hope this is just exaggeration, but according to this story, $137 Billion in infrastructure investment is needed to keep the internet from slowing to a crawl by 2010. I read somewhere else that the planned investment is less than half that amount.


Whether its a lie or not is beside the point. The important thing here is the fact that, the ISPs are saying this, so they have the ability to stop hosting limit bandwith as they see fit in order to save money. In fact they have already made plans to start doing this. For some subscribers they are alloted something around 30gbs of transfer per month. Which is alot for anyone. However, for people who like to download and stream constantly it is not. Not to mention those who play video games.

[lexbarker]

I used to have a 5mb line up to 3 months ago but now it is down to 2.5. I complained to my carrier who said that my connection is now coupled to the new fibre optics and my old ADSL modem, even though it can handle up to 8mb, is not matching the interface of the fibre. He said that I have to get the new ADSL 2+ modem to get higher speeds. These new modems can handle speeds up to 26mb.

[BW]

Well, I hope this is just exaggeration, but according to this story, $137 Billion in infrastructure investment is needed to keep the internet from slowing to a crawl by 2010. I read somewhere else that the planned investment is less than half that amount.


Whether its a lie or not is beside the point. The important thing here is the fact that, the ISPs are saying this, so they have the ability to stop hosting limit bandwith as they see fit in order to save money. In fact they have already made plans to start doing this. For some subscribers they are alloted something around 30gbs of transfer per month. Which is alot for anyone. However, for people who like to download and stream constantly it is not. Not to mention those who play video games.

True that. I've done checked my logs for the past year or so-- it almost always works out to about 1 gigabyte per day, and I'm no hardcore downloader. That's just YouTube and some image and video-centric websurfing. I could very easily break that limit if I had a SONY™ PLAYSTATION™3 or Xbox360 setup.

Haven't seen this mentioned so far, but TSTT has taken an interesting (and much smarter) solution to distributing bandwidth. What they do is leave your connection uncapped/unrestricted completely during off-peak hours, and only monitor during 8pm-12am interval. At which point, they do set a bandwidth limit (4GB per day during those hours), but even if you go over that-- you won't necessarily be cut down to a lower speed. They'll just give your connection a lower priority than everyone else's (meaning pretty much nothing changes unless the network actually gets under severe stress and there isn't enough bandwidth to go around).

That's different from a hard-cap, where they'll artificially slow your connection once you go over some limit (which happens to be pretty arbitrary). From a bandwidth management standpoint, that's a pretty darn inefficient way to go about things (and I'll suggest these companies had other motives when they chose that approach).

[lexbarker]

More problem for the Net?

INTERNET SURVEILLANCE AND SHUTDOWN :

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qACflYqMbVQ