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?"
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.
Additional charges for additional services, but not more than 2x the charges for 2x the services. In other words, if it's $30/month for basic service and you use twice your allocated bandwidth, you pay no more than $60. If you paid the full $60 you'd get twice as much disk space and additional email and web addresses for the month also.
Uber-users that keep their 6MB/sec connection going full blast day-in-day-out will be billed at the actual usage, around 15.5TB/month. If that's 10x the "95% of consumers" limit, they get to pay $300/month, but they get 1GB of disk space and 50 or 100 email and web addresses and customer service to match.
Comment removed (Score:5, 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:From what I understand (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 2Gbps (number out of the air) of bandwidth that customers have purchased, they are NEVER going to hit over say 1.25Gbps... it just doesn't work like that... and if everybody had gigabit lines on your block, it would be the same...
Re:Self-limiting congestion (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:From what I understand (Score:2, Interesting)
At the consumer level, there's demand for faster and faster connections, yet those haven't materialized. SBC even canceled its "Lightspeed" fiber rollout and used the capital to buy up other baby bells instead of improving their infrastructure. The fact that its not materializing has little to do with the "market demand" for it.
it just doesn't work like that... and if everybody had gigabit lines on your block, it would be the same...
No, actually it wouldn't be the same. According to the ISP execs, the core of the network neutrality argument is over companies throttling what little bandwidth I have so that they can be sure they'll have enough bandwidth on my tiny pipe to force-feed me television channels and voice over IP whether I want them or not. If they established gigabit lines to the house, even if I could never download a file from the internet at gigabit speeds, there would always be plenty of local bandwidth for local services like IP television.
But upgrading subscriber lines to ensure that they have enough bandwidth to use both the internet and the ISP services is expensive. Much more profit in not upgrading the lines and squeezing extra cash out of other companies for the right to fit into the straw.
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:"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:morning of 9-11 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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 far away is so saturated that it starts coming in really slowly. But even then it will try to get as much data as it can from that saturated connection. And that's exactly the problem. We don't want the world's long-distance connections to be permanently saturated. That squeezes everything else that's competing to use them, like VoIP.
Good purpose: "global", bad argument: "flu" (Score:1, Interesting)
It fits for tabloids headlines though.
I think that this article is refering to an event that will prevent people from moving geographically from their home location to their work location, yet they are still able to perform administrative and managerial activities. It seems that the flu pandemic is used as a poor example. I think a better example would be similar to todays events on the east coast, where a major snow storm has slowed down the presence of workers at their work place.
This article did not consider the rest of the case, where every member of the society is affected by the crippling event, including, but not limited to, government workers and officials, technical support staff of the internet and its networks, healthcare individuals, and agriculture and Industrial sectors.
I think that the purpose behind the article is to point to the importance of the Internet today in our daily life in the "first world", and to point to the need to expand it on the access level in the "3rd-world", by expanding the capacity of the back-bone. It needs to increase also by contrast on the front end to give access to a more bandwidth.
I believe that the hidden message is a reference to a near future when everyone, who has access to the internet, will start using video conference instead of telephone systems. It is a reference also to "Global", which is a clear message to the third world countries in middle Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, whom do not have the advanced infrastructure that exists in USA, Japan, S.E.Asia, and EU.
This means more investments, more jobs, more infrastructure, and more job and economic security.
Speaking hypothatically of course.
Re:BitTorrent is the problem, not the solution (Score:3, Interesting)