How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis? 478
lopy writes "First Google claimed the internet infrastructure won't scale to provide an acceptable user experience for online video. Then some networking experts predict that a flu pandemic would bring the internet to it's knees and lead to internet rationing. We used to think that bandwidth would always increase as needed, but what would happen if that isn't the case? How would you deal with a global bandwidth shortage? Would you be willing to voluntarily limit your internet usage if necessary? Could you live in a world without cheap and plentiful broadband internet access?"
How would I deal with it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
And I'd have to stop downloading porn. Oh, the humanity!
"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
You're thinking about it wrong here. When you are talking about Internet transit, you are talking about shipping your packets all over the world. Services like that are productized in all corners of the marketplace, and services cost money just like physical products. In the case of Internet transit, you're paying for a certain number of packets per second (often expressed as "bandwidth" allotment in a contract) to pass through a gateway, and usually in a residential service relationship, you are paying for a maximum performance with no set guarantees or dedicated services.
How do people get these concepts so wrong is beyond me.
Re:"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:5, Interesting)
This whole story sounds a lot like FUD created by the people who don't want Net Neutrality. By manufacturing a "crisis", the government will HAVE to deregulate and then you'll see so much bandwidth you won't believe it, but it will cost a lot of money. The main purpose of the PR campaign that is behind this story is to make sure nobody gets a free lunch. If there's one thing that corporations hate, is people getting something for nothing, or next to nothing. Politicians and corporations HATE the internet as it has existed for the last 15 years. It makes them shit-crazy to think of people doing stuff and it not putting money in their pockets. They have come to believe that the very act of communicating is something that everybody should have to pay them for.
Remember, some 30 years ago, there was an OIL SHORTAGE. I mean serious. Rationing. You could buy gas on even days but not odd days. Cars that got over 40 miles to the gallon.
Today, there are so many Lincoln Navigators driving down the Kennedy Expressway it looks like a locomotive convention. Each getting about 9 miles to the gallon. Each one with one person in it, usually a 30-something with a small dick. Is this sudden abundance of oil because suddenly Exxon found a huge oil reserve under the caribou-mating grounds of the arctic? Not a chance. The reason we've got a lot of oil all of a sudden is because they can charge 3 bucks a gallon for it. See? Eighty cents a gallon and there's a shortage. Three bucks a gallon and there's abundance. Now how did that work? These "crises" are the corporate strategies for turning the usual laws of supply and demand on their head. The guys in the record business are knocking their heads against the wall trying to figure out a way to create a music crisis, right?
And, as I said, it's because it pisses them off to no end when people can get something cheap or find a way to live without them getting paid. Every time an oil truck passes me on when I'm on my bike, I watch for a gun barrel to peek out the side window, you better believe. When they see me pedaling down Elston Ave on two wheels, singing my head off and my only fuel the fried egg sandwich and coffee I had for breakfast, I become their sworn enemy. True.
Re:"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:5, Funny)
1. Deliver a thoughtful and witty reply in a slashdot thread.
2. Illustrate the reply with Yet Another Car Analogy.
3. Bend the car analogy into an angry, frothing rant against SUVs... or rather, against the people who drive them... or rather, against the people who can afford them.
4. ???
5. Hard-on! I mean, profit!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't imply that... his post absolutely reeked of it. I was just pointing out that his SUVs-are-environmentally-harmful point was the end of the psychological progression for him, rather than (as he would have us believe) the starting point of his condemnation of those who drive them.
Re:"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh actually I don't know about you, but sometimes it would take me hours to be able to log in due to busy signals at the modem banks, so yeah, I guess there was a bandwidth shortage.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. How many people cuold connect to a BBS running a 300 baud modem? How many times was a modem not downloading at it's optimal spped? Bandwidth shortage!
Doesn't mean it wasn't fixable, you that technology wouldn't evolve, but at that moment it was a bandwidth shortage. I mean come on, I had only so long to download topless pictures of the Barbi twins!
its 15 mpg not 9, dumb ass.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, gas was MORE EXPENSIVE at $0.80 per gallon in the 1970s than it is at $3.25 per gallon today. There's this thing called "inflation", which along with its close cous
Re:"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:5, Insightful)
When they all jumped into the same market at the same time, they created an oversupply, or what has been euphemistically called as laying a lot of dark fibre, a huge amount of it in fact, this B$ about having filled all the dark fibre is just marketing hype and trying to force up the price.
Especially as technology has marched ahead and has allowed a lot more traffic to pass down the exact same fibres, except of course those dark ones ;-). As for live TV streams, they can be cut back to near nothing, with effective caching at the ISP level (don't send hundreds of thousands of streams over seas, send one and cache/mirror locally for re-distribution).
There you go, a brand new patentable business opportunity, automatic local caching/mirroring of offshore/long range streams, to reduce bandwidth/traffic costs.
Re:"Global bandwidth crisis" is a crock (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
--jeffk++
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Reloading /. article is almost .8MB a hit (Score:5, Interesting)
The text on this page, saved using Firefox, came to 140kB. The HTML, not including the CSS and other stuff, is 196k. The whole thing, including all Slashdot graphics (but not including ads) and all the referenced CSS, was 792kB.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Whoops, no need. It just crashed again...
Re:How would I deal with it? (Score:4, Funny)
Then the terrorists will truly have won...
Re:How would I deal with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
My answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple, I wouldn't put up with it. I would demand that they make technologies that do scale. With all the breakthroughs that we've seen lately in storage, CPU power and bandwidth on I2, I just can't believe these kind of statements. These kind of fear tactics I believe are meant to help drive up the price of bandwidth when people are driving it down.
Re:My answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Shhh. not so loud. Do you realize what might happen if people thought about how fearmongering, in the form of rediculous "what if?" scenarious, is used to influence the barely concious masses? Next you're going to tell me that it might be better to have the evening news present stories about serious issues, instead of the human interest stories that help soothe our fragile populace. You Sir, are a Menace.
Re:My answer (extended) (Score:5, Interesting)
To say that the Internet is not scalable is just rediculous talk. Its like saying cities are not scalable. Maybe nobody can build buildings more than 100 floors, but that doesn't mean the city can't grow. Its scaleable to the point where there is a Youtube mirror and 10Gbit/sec provider for every major city on earth. Sounds kinda like how TV is distributed via affiliates huh?
Re:My answer (extended) (Score:5, Insightful)
BitTorrent is the problem, not the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Compare this to Usenet, which doesn't stress the backbone at all: it's a connection between my local ISP and my computer, so it's fast and doesn't require taking a piss in the global bandwidth pool. BitTorrent will only prefer downloading data that's geographically closer when connection to the stuff that's
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
But isn't that the whole point? You can't build a 'distributed Youtube' with only one copy of each video.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd start selling bandwidth.
No Chance (Score:2, Insightful)
GET STUFFED! I moved to the boonies and put up with dialup for 2 weeks, then satelite for 6 months till I finally got on the supernet.
You can pry my bandwidth from my cold dead hands!
This is America. (Score:3, Funny)
United States (Score:5, Funny)
I Live in the United States you insensitive clod!
From what I understand (Score:5, Informative)
re: I worked for an ISP until recently.
They're just cheap when it comes to actually upgrading the infrastructure.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There isn't... and thus they aren't...
Well, maybe YOU want more bandwidth, but I know that in my household we never use even a fraction of our quite nice cable modem bandwidth, even with 4 computers going.
I do some freelance work for a hosting company in Chicago. Their network has more than enough bandwidth to serve all of their bandwidth-chuging clients... yet if they have
Self-limiting congestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Did 9/11 choke the Internet? I'd say that was a heck of a lot more of an immediate go-to-your-computer-for-news crisis...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The likelihood of them being overwhelmed is quite............. silly to contemplate. In reality, the market would adjust, and technology would quickly be built to compensate for it. Google's already prepping.
Re:Self-limiting congestion (Score:5, Informative)
Submarine cables are actually surprisingly small. At most they are a few inches thick, which I don't think really counts as "huge". They might seem larger if you ever see them where they come ashore, but that's because in the shallows near the coast they are encased in armoring. Also surprising is that only fairly shallow cables are maintained by submersibles. Deeper cables are actually pulled to the surface by dragging a hook along the seabed until it snags.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:morning of 9-11 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:morning of 9-11 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Self-limiting congestion (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it didn't choke the internet, but it pretty much choked it for that corridor. Of course, that was mostly because a huge chunk of New York's comms infrastructure was routed through the WTC and/or the Verizon building across the street.... Amazing how the whole premise of ARPANet was decentralizing everything, and now we've slowly reverted back to a situation where a failure in certain key core backbone facilities can really wreck things, and a failure in only a handful of root DNS servers can similarly decimate usability.
We should be looking for ways to use P2P technology to solve these high bandwidth problems, decentralizing the data as much as possible, caching it regionally as much as possible, etc. Instead, all the players seem to be too focused on who controls the rights, thus ensuring that no progress is made....
SNAFU.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
YouTube, maybe, but certainly not P2P, large file downloads, etc. Once anyone starts feeling the effects of internet congestion, the cascading failure has already started, and can only get worse.
An overwhelmed website isn't the same as an overwhelmed backbone. It doesn't downgrade cleanly, things get very messy.
Trim that Forward! (Score:2)
I can remember ten years ago being told that you have to trim every extraneous character from messages, refrain from quoting more than one sentence, and keep your sig to three lines, all because we were worried that we were gobbling up precious bandwidth.
Now I routinely e-mail 5 meg attachments and download DVDs and movies (PD of course).
Why am I not worried?
I'd do the same thing I always have (Score:5, Insightful)
Texting (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Nah, but it was a better joke that way (Score:2)
I was assuming links/lynx and/or pine/elm. (IIRC, links is actually better than lynx.)
I actually still use pine. First time I used elm was around 1988 or so. Only had one other friend with an e-mail account, though. I used lynx back in the day when I only had dial-up. I've since done a few things with links where I wanted some automation control. (Haven't touched it in several years, however.)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Become patient (Score:2)
Large files would likely switch to bittorrent like downloads.
I wouldn't mind if debian/ubuntu left
As long as the packages are securely signed I don't see a huge issue with it.
Renewed focus on efficiency, more compression.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not going to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously...this is a pretty lame attempt at a "What if" scare-tactic article!
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly, I guarantee you that until we see *extremely* major changes on the switch hardware side, there isn't much immediate hope that the Internet can scale further. The
Re: (Score:2)
The physically distributed datacenters being bought up left and right might make a difference too. The way the US is doing things, it will be possible for Comcast or Qwest to build a large datacenter that caches down
Re: (Score:2)
Part of the fear is that bandwidth usage is or will-be growing faster than more bandwidth can physically (or economically) be added.
We already live in a world (country) without.... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
The government needs to do the same thing they did with electricity to the internet. Mandate it. No company will ever want to distribute high speed access to everywhere in the nation. But it is something that is increasingly needed as an infrastructure for the future of the nation itself. Just like phone service and electricity before it, quality, reliable, high speed, low latency connection to the internet needs to be de
Raise the price (Score:2)
it will be self-limiting (Score:3, Informative)
If the crisis lasts more than a few days, I expect national and local leaders to order ISPs to throttle bandwidth and reserve enough for "emergency services." Email and low-bandwidth web sites will get through but there may be annoying delays. It will feel like dialup. Youtube? Fuggetaboutit. Since it's a crisis most movie downloaders will stop for the duration once their government leaders tell them to stop. Viruses that automatically swap files will still be a problem, as will people who forget to turn off their torrent programs.
In areas without local outages, there will be a high demand for video from local TV news stations.
10 years from now this won't be nearly as much of an issue since a lot of "major" sites will have "regional caches," making much of the end-user-generated traffic truly local or at least regional.
Much ado about nothing. (Score:2)
All they're doing is playing to the audience in saying "we need you."
Well, that's simple... (Score:2, Funny)
Market Pricing? (Score:2)
You mean.... (Score:2)
Some company makes it so I can download HD videos straight to my computer. But god it's slow on my old 1.5/384 DSL. So I go to my phone company and say, "hey, can I get something faster?" They then hook me up with 10/1 fiber or some such at a higher price. Meanwhile, they go and buy more bandwidth from their upstream providers. The upstream providers buy more pipes to connect to their peers, etc. Simple supply and demand.
Invariably fluctuations will cause bandwidth, latency, et
in the old days (Score:2)
there's no crisis (Score:5, Insightful)
if it is true that the internet won't scale in the scenarios outlined above, it won't scale only in a specific context: the context of bps hungry applications
ok: so you won't be able to watch the latest youtube laugh video. whoop de friggin doo
you'll still be able to communicate, plain text emails, simple html pages, etc.
in other words, applications that use very little bandwidth, that, until a few years ago, was more than satisfactory for our requirements, will do just fine
no MMORPG, no video, maybe no audio: oh well
remember: the internet was originally conceived to survive a nuclear strike
i think the internet (as we need it, maybe not as we want it) will survive youtube + WoW + bittorrent + huge spam hordes, or the Flu Armageddeon Telecommute Scenario (tm), just fine
Re: (Score:2)
TFA is nothing more than another turd coming out of someone's fat PR ass.
We are already able to play networked games, watch YouTube videos and download entire movies via BT. How the hell will Internet not scale to deliver the throughput which we already have??? Will it magically implode when a few more million people start using it? Will the telcos downgrade the phone lines?
May be it is true that Internet is not ready to replace the TV right at this moment, but it in no way implies that it is about to b
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, it doesn't work that way. Once ANY network starts nearing capacity, widespread congestion takes hold, and nobody can do anything. It's especially true for the internet, as TCP b
Stockpile! (Score:5, Funny)
How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?
I'd stockpile porn and make a killing selling DVDs to all the geeks in the neighbourhood suffering from withdrawal..
I'm in the lucky position that... (Score:2)
So
Get rid of all spammers (Score:5, Insightful)
(Of course, I favor doing this today, regardless of any crisis.)
More important things to worry about (Score:5, Insightful)
Over my dead body! (Score:2)
These are our worries? (Score:2)
We're discussing what would happen if we failed to lay more and more fiber as needed?
Are we really this fat and bloated our new fear is what would happen if rich content and media couldn't be downloaded on demand?
Honestly?
Two stoners sitting in a park late at night would come up with a better conversation piece that "What if we ran our of bandwidth, dude?".
Is anyone really stimulated by this?
I'm sure Microsoft has this covered (Score:2)
emergency services? (Score:2)
I'd tell Al Gore.... (Score:2, Funny)
So much for the fiber glut (Score:2)
I think you should pay for bandwidth anyways (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's my "ideal" price plan:
Minimum consumer package: 1 month, enough bandwidth for 95% of consumers, enough email addresses for 95% of consumers - probably 5 or 10, a web page for every email address, and 100 MB or more of disk space, security software, parental controls, and consumer-grade customer service all for a low price.
Add
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except, bandwidth doesn't cost anything. Seriously. My home network costs me the same whether I keep it saturated, or almost idle. The same goes for every later of telecomm all the way to the top.
Sure, you have to pay to get access outside the network you control (which applies whether you talk about your LAN, your local ISP,
Re:I think you should pay for bandwidth anyways (Score:4, Insightful)
All fixed costs. NOCs, and the lines between them, cost $X in overhead whether they push 5Kb or 5Pb per day. The actual use costs nothing (except perhaps electricity, but even then, virtually all modern signalling protocols preferentially use electrically-off states).
Now factor in the requirement for spares, peering agreements, FIX fees, necessary support contracts from the hardware vendors
With the exception of peerage, which I mentioned (and for end users, basically means paying your ISP bill), the rest just amounts to overhead. Same no matter how much traffic you have, up to your peak capacity. You can try to inflate the numbers however you want, but they still stay flat with respect to throughput when you factor in everything above you.
This is such horseshit.
Really, now? So, which tier-1 do you work for, that you wish to justify your profits?
The internet amounts to one big LAN, divided into a bunch of fiefdoms with petty little corporate barons charging fees at every drawbridge and intersection. Take away all the troll bridges, and you end up with fees based on the overhead (hardware and human maintenance) for a given capacity, totally uncorrelated with actual throughput.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Once upon a time that might not have been such a bad plan, but these days, a computer that was turned off would probably consume a good chunk of that allocation based on just the port scans and random worms flying around the internet, depending on how you were connected to the internet.
I'd increase the bandwidth by adding (Score:2)
Or, I would buy more of those fatter pipes that can handle 5,000 TB/PSI.... hehehhe you know, the kind that Senator or Senator's writing staff invis..., umm, envisions
Use something like... hm... CTC technology? (Score:2)
links (Score:2)
Ironic Story and relevance to localized problems (Score:2)
Simple. (Score:2)
First: QoS. Edge routers can do it all. Make sure each group, sub group, sub-sub group (etc) gets only an even share of the available bandwidth, then downgrade speeds as needed.
Second: Caching proxies can make a huge difference as well. In this day and age, with incredibly high-capacity hard drives being dirt cheap, it's unbelievable that ev
Go outside (Score:2)
Holy crap! (Score:2)
What is it that you do on the Internet that's SO valuable that it just couldn't stand the test of rationing? Aside from online businesses, I believe that the importance of the Internet is wildly overstated in today's office. I'm a tech writer and our ISP shit the bed the other day -- we were without any Internet service whatsoever for two days (
How would I deal with a global bandwidth shortage? (Score:2)
Allow the market to set the price of bandwidth. Duh!
Lets see (Score:2)
I seriously wonder if the scare mongers who put this stuff out have ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?
DARK FIBER! (Score:5, Informative)
Never underestimate... (Score:4, Funny)
As silly as worrying about "road shortage"... (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, are we predicting the end of human civilization because we have an infinite demand for youtube and P2P? It's a non-issue. Get any major trouble with congestion, and broadband subscribtions would simply fall back to capped bandwidth.
The article seems to ignore the fact of all-we-can-eat subscribtions. And then worries about how we're running amok with it. Duh. Because it's free, stupid.
However, to prevent the imminent destruction of humankind, I propose:
1: That damn dirty pirates only download things they're actually going to watch, instead of attempting to build a local copy of media history. (Est. bandwith savings: 60%)
2: That governments introduce makes it a felony to upload tasteless content on youtube. (Est. bandwith savings: 30%)
3: That the US declares War on Spammers and puts its military to some proper use. (Est. bandwith savings: 20%. And world peace)
Inciteful ;) (Score:2)
You've obviously been listening to Dumbya and the "pre-emptive war" doctrine. It's a remarkable refelction of the US Government (as a slave of the capitalists) attitude. What's odd of course, is that it is completely at odds with the will of the American people.
Who is it here that has this wonderful siggy? "In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In
Re: (Score:2)
Get yourself a woman and eliminate the need for pr0n altogether? Oh, yeah, right - they're not worth putting up with all the bitching. I remember now. Sorry