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May 1, 2009

The Internet is such a big part of our lives today that it becomes easy to take it for granted. We use the Web today for just about everything: online banking, eCommerce, reading the news, searching for a gazillion things on Google, watch YouTube, go on Twitter, browse your favorite blog- and oh yes: let's not forget email! The list is endless.

Now there are a few observers predicting that Internet consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent plus a year, will start to exceed available Internet bandwith supply from as early 2010, simply because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as YouTube and a few more.

When Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee initially wrote the code that literally transformed a small private computer network into the world wide web exactly twenty years ago, the Internet was born, and at that time it seemed like almost a limitless resource.

But today, a study being done by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, is about to warn us that the Internet has reached a critical point in its development stage, and that even the current global recession has failed to impede problems.

Soon, Nemertes thinks that computers on the WWW could somewhat become disrupted and go offline, some for just 30 or 40 seconds. Others could be offline for several minutes at a time. But from 2012 on, computers and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the Internet a lot less reliable, according to researchers at the think tank.

In North America, ISPs (Internet service providers) and telecommunications companies are spending over US $50 billion a year upgrading various networks and servers to increase throughput and available bandwidth, while in Britain proposals to replace copper cabling across part of the network with fibre cables would cost at least £5 billion or more.

Ted Ritter, a Nemertes Internet analyst says "with a rapidly growing number of people working from home or using their computers for entertainment, Internet demand could easily double this year alone. At best, we see the economic recession delaying some of the problems for maybe a year or so, but after that period is over, that's what really has us worried.”

Ritter warns that the amount of Internet traffic generated each month by just one single site such as YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the WWW for the whole year in 2000!

Another so-called “Net Bomb” being studied by Nemertes is BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch high-definition TV on their computers and laptops. Just two months ago, there were more than 35 million requests for shows and iPlayer now accounts for over five per cent of all U.K. Internet traffic!

Yet sites such as YouTube that was launched in 2005 and which has exploded in popularity can literally throw the most ambitious plans into disarray and very fast.

Internet 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. That is a LOT of Web traffic by any standard...

While the Web itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge in 2010, when computers would jitter and freeze. Others disagree. This would be followed by “brownouts” – a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed, since they will be 'starved' for data.

Ritter’s report will only be available in a few months, but it will warn us that an unreliable Internet is merely a toy.

“For dependable business applications, such as delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, online banking, transactional processing, it will become almost useless,” Ritter warned.

After all, who wants to wait 5 minutes or more for a page to load?

Network engineers all over the world are already preparing themselves for the worst. While some are planning a lightning-fast parallel network called “the grid”, others are building “server caches”, sort-of private networks where popular entertainments are stored on local servers rather than sent through the real backbone.

Overall, ISPs and phone companies want to recoup some escalating costs by increasing prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity. And that's fair, most observers say.

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Source: Nemertes Research.