Breaking the Internet

[HIPAR]

Does the Internet have infinite capacity?

Millions and millions of file downloads going on right now. Millions of uploads going on right now. All of that e-commerce. Every radio station on the planet streaming audio. VOIP phones. HDTV delivered on demand through your internet modem.

Who knows what else? Something has got to give!

--- CHAS

[Tom Robertson]

There have been many predictions for the Internet meltdown. And by people I respect for their thoughtful articles in computing magazines.

It hasn't happened yet, but the closest in my mind have been the denial of service attacks against the most highly trafficked sites.

Will ipTV and VOD via Internet finally do it? Who knows. Might. Then again, it might ramp up slowly enough to allow the big routing guys to build up their capacity. The smart ones have to be watching things unfold! :)

And there is dark fibre running across the US waiting to be leased and lit up. So, it will be an interesting race.

Cheers,
Tom

[joelstad]

Nahh, we're good; there won't be an internet meltdown. If you have 1 fire hose putting out a fire and you need more water, just add another hose. :0)

If the internet needs more bandwidth, add more fiber. Some company out there will keep us all supplied...

--Joel

[Tom Robertson]

Welcome to the forums, Joel! :welcome_s

Cheers,
Tom

[Drew2k]

You might be interested in this article on MSNBC:

Researchers explore scrapping Internet
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18095186/

(Essentially, the Internet is already broken.)

[Steve Mehs]

There more 'the sky is falling' reports on DSLReports. Apparently in 2007 the internet is supposed to slow down. Just like on 1/1/2000 at 12:00:00 all chaos was supposed to break out. In internet will be fine, let’s not worry about things that will never happen, like how we were all supposed to die from bird flu a few years ago.

[funhouse69]

I thought I would throw my two cents in here. I work in a Major Tier 4 Hosting / Data Center. With that said we have some major customers that use an insane amount of bandwidth (many, many Gbps) and all they do is add more bandwidth. Since we are also part of a Telecom Company that is easy to do. The Pipes on the Internet are getting fatter and fatter and the technology is allowing companies to push more data through the same pipe (fiber).

Rest assured that we are not the only company that is doing this. All major Telecom / ISP's have to "Keep up with the Joneses" in this area to provide their customers with the bandwidth that they need as well as their end users the ability to get to the customers in the least amount of hops as possible. This is where things like Internap come in - this is basically a group of backbone companies that all agree to pass each others traffic on / through their network(s) to give customers as quick a connection with as little latency as possible.

Does this mean that we aren't going to see some issues or deal with some struggles? Absolutely not - The problem might not be the backbone connections themselves but the ISP and or Servers that are hosting the site(s) / Services that we are trying to reach. Things like Online Gaming and VOD are going to utilize a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

With that said it is going to be very interesting to see how good the upcoming VOD service that D* is promising this year. This is going to utilize everyone's existing broadband connection. This hopefully means that they are going to have some centralized servers strategically located throughout the country with some major backbone connectivity to handle the demand. D* Says they have about 16 Million Customers. Lets say that even 10% of them are downloading something on a regular basis at an average of 2Mb/Sec. So 1.6Million times 2Mb / Sec. That is an insane amount of bandwidth and makes me wonder how reliable this is going to be. :eek2:

[Nick]

Thanks, Funhouse. It's interesting to have your perspective, and it's good to know
that the 'net isn't going to choke like a cheap-ass trailer toilet dowloading a huge...

:p