Internet to run out of room in 2010

[VirusCoreHacker]

Beware surfers: cyberspace is filling up - Times Online

Originally Posted by Technology.com

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource. However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.

“With more people working or looking for work from home, or using their PCs more for cheap entertainment, demand could double in 2009,” said Ted Ritter, a Nemertes analyst. “At best, we see the [economic] slowdown delaying the fractures for maybe a year.”

In America, telecoms companies are spending £40 billion a year upgrading cables and supercomputers to increase capacity, while in Britain proposals to replace copper cabling across part of the network with fibreoptic wires would cost at least £5 billion.

Yet sites such as YouTube, the video-sharing service launched in 2005, which has exploded in popularity, can throw the most ambitious plans into disarray.

The amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000.

The extent of its popularity is indicated by the 100 million people who have logged on to the site to see the talent show contestant Susan Boyle in the past three weeks.

Another so-called “net bomb” being studied by Nemertes is BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch high-definition television on their computers. In February there were more than 35 million requests for shows and iPlayer now accounts for 5 per cent of all UK internet traffic.

Analysts express such traffic in exabytes – a quintillion (or a million trillion) bytes or units of computer data. One exabyte is equivalent to 50,000 years’ worth of DVD-quality data.

Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India.

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.

Ritter’s report will warn that an unreliable internet is merely a toy. “For business purposes, such as delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, it’s useless,” he said.

“Today people know how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games, but by 2012 that traffic jam could last all day long.”

Engineers are already preparing for the worst. While some are planning a lightning-fast parallel network called “the grid”, others are building “caches”, private computer stations where popular entertainments are stored on local PCs rather than sent through the global backbone.

Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity.

You guys need to stop downloading porn. Your killing out space.

[DarkGuardian44]

[quote=VirusCoreHacker;3920918

You guys need to stop downloading porn. Your killing out space.[/QUOTE]

but porn is good XP

[PLR]

I am pretty sure you've posted this exact same thing before.

[ikkuh2]

It says computers will freeze by the traffic that stresses the backbone, shouldn't they replace that with browsers? After all, internet isn't really necessary to run a computer.

[Nevermore]

From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an "unreliable toy".

So that's what the Mayans were talking about.

[brave little toaster]

Originally Posted by Raven

So that's what the Mayans were talking about.

They weren't kidding. :v

[Vandread]

Meh, by then people will have built better servers that are probably four times the size of the best out there now. Technology advances at such a ridiculous rate that I'm not all that worried about that.

[ikkuh2]

We still have the grid, maybe if the higgs boson is found quickly, we may be given use of it. It's not about servers, which are about memory, it's about the bandwith the core stucture can offer.

[Azurith]

I have doubts..

For one, the current state of high-end switches/routers can handle ridiculous amounts of data.
(Last I checked, around 2.25 Tbpsish... about 280 GB/s.)
Secondly, the highest known fiber connection (OC-768) is around 40Gb/s, for companies that can afford to
roll their own or purchase pipes through a large teleom.
Lastly, the international connections from places like North America to Europe can handle 3Tbs+.

And most of the routers/servers are either in North America or Europe anyways.
(Also consider the fact that the Chinese are self-restricting their own access.)

So really, no its very unlikely.


~~Azu

[Red Velvet]

Originally Posted by Vandread

Meh, by then people will have built better servers that are probably four times the size of the best out there now. Technology advances at such a ridiculous rate that I'm not all that worried about that.

Agreed. And by then, whats on these servers would have had a thorough cleaning anyways. I mean, so many websites out there that are unused xD

[ikkuh2]

I don't think the chinese wall (the firewall, not the real one) can hold back those millions for long, pirated connections through russia are a possibility, you can't cage in freedom. And then the backbone really get's tested, cloud computing won't really help either.

[auron10_KING.dvx]

itt buzzwords