Tuesday, November 20th 2007

Internet Could Run Out of Capacity in Two Years

A new study by Nemertes Research Group, released on Monday, suggests that consumer and corporate internet use could overload the current web capacity and lead to problems such as online blackouts in as little as two years. This comes after a sudden rise in the popularity of new web content such as video sites like YouTube, music downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing. Internet users are expected to create 161 exabytes of new data this year - to put that into perspective, one Exabyte is approximately equivalent to 50,000 years of DVD-quality video. The group's co-chairman Bruce Mehlman said the following:
Video has unleashed an explosion of Internet content. We think the exaflood is generally not well understood, and its investment implications not well defined.
The research suggests that internet providers need to invest as much as $137 billion in new capacity (double what was already planned), with investments of $42 to $55 billion needed in North America alone in the next three to five years.
Source: Macworld
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48 Comments on Internet Could Run Out of Capacity in Two Years

#26
imperialreign
yk2000! yk2000! yk2000!

We all knew the millenium bug would get us sooner or later!!!


(cause the Gregorian calendar is supposedly actually off by a few years . . .)
Posted on Reply
#27
wazzledoozle
I dont think so. Fiber optic networks and holographic storage should provide enough storage space and bandwidth for the entire works of mankind.

Of course we have the ISP's like comcast who insist on maintaining ancient coaxial networks. In their case, they are already at their limit.
Posted on Reply
#28
anticlutch
And the funding will come from where? Unless there is profit to be made, neither the government nor any corporation will cough up the dough to expand services before the supposed deadline.
Posted on Reply
#29
imperialreign
increase corporate tax on MS . . . but then MS would pass that along to us consumers
Posted on Reply
#30
panchoman
Sold my stars!
imperialreignincrease corporate tax on MS . . . but then MS would pass that along to us consumers
:roll::roll:

if video sharing sites(like youtube), social sites (like facebook,myspace) porn was removed on the internet, im guessing we'd remove about 90% of the bandwidth used on the internet. but then again, why else are you on the computer?
Posted on Reply
#31
Random Murderer
The Anti-Midas
panchoman:roll::roll:

if video sharing sites(like youtube), social sites (like facebook,myspace) porn was removed on the internet, im guessing we'd remove about 90% of the bandwidth used on the internet. but then again, why else are you on the computer?
GAMES!
why do we all have high end computers? GAMES!
Posted on Reply
#32
panchoman
Sold my stars!
well yeah, but you need the internet for a lot of gaming too.
Posted on Reply
#33
Silverel
www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34854/113/

Granted, this is much smaller scale, but it's one of the many things that pretty much guarantee the internet ain't goin nowhere. That's just for Internet2, their goals aim to extend/replace the existing structure for something better.

We also have the federal version being the FCC via the Office of Engineering and Technology.

They release reports like this one twice a year.
DOC-277788A1.pdf

99% of America has access to broadband, in some form or another. Cable covers 65% of that area geographically, and satellite pulls in 91%. Btw, broadband is defined as a minimum 200kb/s U/D.

:cool:
Posted on Reply
#34
imperialreign
well yeah, but you need the internet for a lot of gaming too.
Damn youtubers keep hurting my ping times! :banghead:
Posted on Reply
#35
niko084
Scary thoughts.... Too think, even when I had "FULL" access to a un-used Fiber T3 I "still" complained it was too slow....

Whats the world coming to...
Posted on Reply
#36
Random Murderer
The Anti-Midas
panchomanwell yeah, but you need the internet for a lot of gaming too.
hell, the internet is HOW i get my games. (using steam, i are no pirate:wtf:)
Posted on Reply
#37
panchoman
Sold my stars!
what are ping times exactly, for me high ping times= higher speeds


high ping time



low pin times


just noticed something on speedtest.net...

Posted on Reply
#38
Random Murderer
The Anti-Midas
panchomanwhat are ping times exactly, for me high ping times= higher speeds


high ping time



low pin times


just noticed something on speedtest.net...

low ping = good.
ping is how many ms it takes for a packet of data to go from your computer to the server and back again.

and australasia is the region that includes australia, new zealand, and melanesia.
Posted on Reply
#39
imperialreign
what are ping times exactly, for me high ping times= higher speeds
ping times are how long it takes a prompt to be sent from your computer to another computer (i.e. server) and to be acknowledged and sent back to your computer.

it's commonly used as another term for latency. Ideally, the lower the ping times, the quicker information travels from your computer to the server and back. The higher the ping time, the logner it takes for an information packet to make that round trip.

(someone correct me if I'm wrong here) Theorhetically, on a high-bandwidth connection, higher ping times can equal higher speeds because more information can be transffered and recieved at a time

edit>> Dang! Random Murder beat me to it by a second!
Posted on Reply
#40
Pinchy
Its not all on porn. I remember a TPU news post saying it was something like 3% :p...

EDIT - Here we go:

www.itnews.com.au/News/NewsStory.aspx?story=42304
Study shows around one percent of all internet content is pornographic.
Granted that 1% is still a hell of a lot of porn, considering the size of the net...
Posted on Reply
#41
Swansen
Yeah, it was mentioned a couple times, but one of the major reasons why the "internet is going to run out of space" would be the base structure. For most places in the US, this is the case, as well for developing countries. If they upgraded from coaxial lines to fiber optic cables it there would be way less if an issue.
Posted on Reply
#42
hat
Enthusiast
Hm, I wonder if there will be an Internet F@H thing... give out a portion of your total hard drive space to the net and gain points for every TB that flows through :laugh:
Posted on Reply
#43
Swansen
hatHm, I wonder if there will be an Internet F@H thing... give out a portion of your total hard drive space to the net and gain points for every TB that flows through :laugh:
HAHAHA, lol, except, that won't be half as cool as F@H, lol, but that is pretty funny.
Posted on Reply
#44
hat
Enthusiast
I actually do all I can with F@H. I've gotten rid of the single core clients realizing those are much more common among folders, and not many have dual core, even less quad core. So I do what is best.
Posted on Reply
#45
newconroer
There's also a nice write up by a networking adminstrator (I haven't the bookmark anymore), where he talks about the origins of TCP, and how it expanded to IPv4 and then carries on to discuss IPv6.

It points out some interesting statistics concerning the available amount of IP addresses.
Apparently, four billion is the max via the IPv4 technology, and currently we have used/reserved upwards of 2.5 billion. We also consume/reserve about 200 million addresses per year. Simple math would suggest that by 2015, there will be none left. The question of claiming back previously owned addresses is valid, but a convulted process, as there's no law that would require people/companies to have to relinquish ownership.

Fortunatley IPv6 is built with a different format, so that every person living now, and born, until the sun explodes, would be able to own fifty of their own addresses. Hence, we'd never run out so to speak.

While IPv6 was introduced over ten years ago, and it is used, the cross over isn't quite so simple.


It will be neat to see how these two issues tie-in together.
Posted on Reply
#46
mdm-adph
NicksterrWhat are you talking about? Unless you use voip or other critical packet services, you should have QoS disabled in your windows networking options. You especially don't want to have it on if you fileshare.
Not client-side QoS -- ISP QoS. All ISP's would have to do would be to give email, web browsing, gaming, etc. high priority -- give torrents, file-sharing, etc. a much lower priority. Simple as that.
Posted on Reply
#47
Fuse-Wire
If we were going to run out of space we would have done it by now, again im contrubuting to 6KB of internet space consumption just by writing this out. Now gaming should have its own high priority on the internet so us gamers can have some fun, all yhe youtubers get slammed with crap bandwith and slow loading videos fair i think, maybe it might just get those sad gits to leave their houses!!
Posted on Reply
#48
Sh00t1st
in the end, we can realy only blame ourselves, be it the obsessing over streaming and downloadable porn, or the extended replays of chinface on youtube, we all play our part in clogging the internet.
Posted on Reply
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