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An American think-tank, Nemertes Research, is warning that the Internet could be seriously lacking in capacity within a year, and that it could be little more than an "unreliable toy" by 2012, reports the Times Online. Over the last several years, demand for bandwidth has increased at a dramatic rate -- roughly 60-percent per year. Visitors to YouTube alone generate as much data traffic in a month as the entire Internet did in all of 2000.
Sites that transmit high volumes of data, like YouTube, Hulu, and the BBC iPlayer, are taking their toll on the Internet's backbone and on the systems that direct traffic through its network of cable. Nemertes Research foresees the exacerbation and increase of Internet "brown outs" -- times where traffic crawls across the Web so slowly as to make it completely unusable. Internet service providers (ISPs) around the world are investing billions in improving capacity along their networks, but explosions in traffic are hard to predict; all of these improvements may wind up to have been in vain.
The idea of the Internet being an "unreliable toy" seems a bit alarmist, and we're wondering what connection, if any, Nemertes Research has to the ISPs. The foretelling of an Internet with insufficient capacity seems to just be giving more ammunition to ISPs that are looking to throttle and cap traffic. [From: Times Online]
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Comments
6
Subscribe to commentsBluesK1dApr 27th 2009 1:39PM
The 20 countries that have vastly better consumer internet plans/pricing than the US don't seem all that concerned.
kcdgeniusApr 27th 2009 2:13PM
what a crock of doomsday kwrap! The servers are continuously being updated and bandwidth is continuously being increased to meet the demand. If these people can see into the future so well, why arnt they buying lottery tickets instead of wasting their time with this nonsense.
numerwanApr 27th 2009 2:28PM
100 bucks says Time Warner paid them to write this article...
matyApr 27th 2009 4:16PM
Sure... so they can report it and call it "alarmist" on their own site? Switched is owned by Time Warner :).
numerwanApr 27th 2009 4:19PM
Hmmm maybe i meant to say Time Warner Cable considering the data caps...
Ted RitterApr 28th 2009 9:20AM
I urge everyone to read our actual report, published in November 2008. As you'll read we do not predict the failure of the Internet. To the contrary, we make it clear that the backbone, fiber and metro layers of the Internet will scale to meet projected demand. The problem is the access layer - the last mile in the US. This is the area where we project the demand to exceed supply in the next 3-4 years. We realize that demand can't exceed supply. But, since we independently model supply and demand we can say that by 2013 there will be more demand than than the access can support.
FAQ:
http://nemertes.com/internet_infrastructure_study_2009_frequently_asked_questions_faq
Report:
http://www.nemertes.com/studies/internet_interrupted_why_architectural_limitations_will_fracture_net
Thanks!
BTW, we never called the Internet a "useless toy." That was the journalist's spin.