Peak Internet
In a report to be published later this year, analysts with Nemertes Research warn of cyberspace capacity limits that could reduce Internet usage to the status of an “unreliable toy” by 2012.
The report predicts that Internet users will soon face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers. With consumer demand climbing exponentially at 60 percent every year, peak usage is just around the corner. Growing numbers of web-based businesses and bandwidth heavy websites like YouTube and Hulu are cause for concern
Nemertes intends to signify the limits of what was once thought to be a limitless resource, stating that the web has in fact reached a critical stage that not even a global recession can slow down. While telecom companies are spending upwards of 50 billion dollars per year to upgrade cables and supercomputers to amplify capacity, sites like YouTube are throwing forks in the gears (YouTube generates the same amount of traffic every month that was generated over the entire web in all of 2000).
Analysts refer to such traffic in exabytes – a quintillion (or a million trillion) bytes or units of data. One exabyte is equivalent to 50,000 years’ worth of DVD-quality data. Now, traffic across the web is running at about eight exabytes per month.
Internet users can expect “waves of disruption” by 2010 that will freeze computers and reduce them to slower speeds according to experts. This raises red flags for Internet commerce, data storage, and especially the electronic transfer of medical records. The report will warn that by 2012 web traffic jams could last as long as a full day.
Image: "Firefly Supercomputer (22)" by Travelin' Librarian on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.
Story via The Sunday Times of London
- 5-1-09
- Alan Scheurman's blog
- Login or register to post comments
ShareThis- Printer-friendly version
Comments
The freezez
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.
Expert opinion! LOL weird how my computer seems to go faster when its not downloading anything! Must be because its a Mac :)
from the comments on the Times page:
Computers would slow down and freeze?
I've been in Microsoft operating systems since the original DOS and that function has been built in since day one. Now you can freeze multiple windows, your system, or your entire network.Previously, I could only freeze one computer at a time. Progress? --------------------------------------
Yea this is definitely either a marketing ploy or another "reason" for them to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. This will be a complete breach of our rights. The most powerful weapon 'we the people' have is information. The best tool for obtaining information is the internet. TPTB know this.
maybe
While the bandwidth needed to push all of this tech everywhere maybe hitting its limit our ability to produce software and software compression techniques is only getting better. Moore's Law was the standard for chip development for years and now has been broken, largely due to the need for smaller faster chips that allow the 'net to be used everywhere. This bandwidth problem is one area where we can invent ourselves out of a problem. Even if the rest of the world goes to shit, the networks will still be up, and if they do go down, line of sight communication will take over anyway.
When confronted with the truth, the fool always laughs.
Afternoon Dee-lay
I volunteer at a computer lab for the homeless and have been noticing a definite slowdown in the afternoon, especially after 5PM.
Thinking now about all the people on YouTube watching pointless crap while people here try to send out their resumes really chaps my hide.
Of course the solution will be to make Internet access so expensive that regular folks won't be able to afford it--- an information superhighway that only the wealthy can travel.
I better go watch that "Christian the Lion" clip on YT before it all comes crashing down.
www.flickr.com/photos/21366765@N03
I doubt it...
...I don't think it's likely unless there are price controls or other related regulations maintained/put in place on internet providers. There's really a pretty simple solution to this problem (but then what do I know? I don't work in the business) and telecoms are already implementing it, which is bandwidth-usage rates. Right now, in most cases, people pay the same fixed monthly fee regardless of what websites they're using or how much time they spend on the internet. Not only do use-based rates offer incentive for sites and surfers alike to reduce their bandwidth use, but the added profits from the higher fees can then be invested in expanding bandwidth capacity.
Dito on the Data
I guess this problem is no different than any other problems of resource and usage ... how to prioitize necessities ... the hardest thing for the modern man to do.
Each others freedom ... each others bondage
Maybe as we evolve our inner vision we will be seeking less and less external stimuli.
This petty "micro-version" of the "cosmic web" ... will never prove ultimately as anything more than a disraction in the ultimate analysis.
Like each and every promise of sci-fi "virtuality" ... lacking only the "actual"
Even with basic economic hardship, so many of us shoukd be becoming inspired for more local and indigenous types of practical endeavors ... how hyped up can a hobby be ... pretty much so in todays world apparently
How many ways can one say ... "whats up" ... "cool" ... how attractive is cyber communication really?
How different is each of our local circumstances that we have to endlessly chat each other deeper and deeper into the virtual wormhole.
When times get hard ... "less" becomes the new cool.
Like recycling and other conscious concerns, it will be left to the thoughtful to self-regulate
Really
doubt it. I would bet money this will never be a problem.
www.raptitude.com -- The gentle art of sanity amidst civilization
???
Who knows, maybe this is just a ploy, like "swine flu" or "war on terror" ... to prepare us for the surrendering of web-freedom
So many of us base all of our "yea's" and "nay's" only relative to whatever idiocracy gets cast out into the "media ether"... as they "fish for our attention"
They have become 'oh so expert at keeping us busy with "relative karma" that "eternal dharma" will never make the headlines....
... "hurry up and bite that apple Adam ... so you can get back to the strategy table and help us figure this self-created dilema out" ...
Planned
not sure about this
Can someone explain
please, what and where is 'cyberspace' exactly? Where are all these bandwidths floating around?? Are they just in the air, like radio waves, and if so, how can there be limits? And if that's where they are, does it strike anyone else besides me as a little creepy that all those 'information' waves/particles are flying around us everyday at such levels?
If I sound naive, I 100% own that--it's possible there are important aspects of the situation that only be seen by stepping outside the paradigm. All this information, and yet our lives are scarcely improved. So a village in Nepal or Vietnam gets hooked up to the internet--BFD. Wow, they can chat meaninglessly with their web-personas to someone in England; they can be advertised to by US corporations. they can watch Kanye West's new video on YouTube. Meanwhile life goes on and their crops need tending, their families need caring for,etc.
sure, I suppose in our hyper-civilized context, the internet provides useful services--useful but almost never essential. There are endless numbers of other ways information can be passed around. remember how popular tape-swapping used to be? Or writing letters? And tape-swapping and letter-writing themselves are slightly alienated forms of teaching someone a song or talking to someone (oral transmission).
Our ability to imagine is a skill that, i argue, has only atrophied with the development of communication technologies: what we once did naturally with our minds, we now have machines to do for us, and it makes us weaker. If the internet went down like this article describes, is that really so bad?
Seriously though, where is cyberspace?
"God sends meat, the Devil sends cooks."
Give me FiOS or give me...
In the popular mind, the internet is indeed an amorphous, omnipresent nebula, not bound to any physical thing or limited in any way. The reality is that the internet is a surprisingly local technology tied to a deeply fragile, energy intensive infrastructure with pitiful geographical reach and is, like any other resource, limited. The jist of Nemertes and similar writings on the cables is that we're now (as in presently, as in this isn't a proposed possible future but an emerging reality) scraping up against those limits. The technology was simply not made to be used in the way that most of us do, and we will continue to (as in, we already do) see it whirring and smoking and failing under all the weight of the SecondSpaceTube.
Where we'll stand in three years, or ten, or thirty, I haven't any idea, but it's naive to imagine that the internet will last very long in its current state.