My favorite quote from the report itself (full text
here):
One could even whimsically speculate—as we did in the title--that the lack of investment could be holding back the time at which the Internet reaches a “singularity” (a point at which accelerating change creates an unpredictable outcome, such as the Internet becoming independently sentient).
So throttling the internet may be a
good outcome, if we don't want a real-life Terminator movie. Unfortunately, things go downhill after that...
Basically, they're saying that at current consumer consumption
growth rates, combined with a continued
growth in the appearance of new web 2.0 apps, the internet will choke on the traffic within 3 to 5 years. Mark.
Note my emphasis of "growth" up there... that's key to their whole study, which they acknowledge early on. However, that particular metric bugs me for a couple of reasons. In section 4, "Modelling User Demand" they describe their methodology for predicting how much bandwidth a typical internet user will consume in the future. They base this on a dataset of consumer devices purchased from 2000-2007, add up all the bandwidth each device can use, then throttle it back by the max speed of consumer internet gateway components. Their findings:
We found that, counting all devices and all port interfaces, an Internet-attached North American user in 2007 is theoretically capable of generating approximately 61 Mbit/s of traffic, equating to 20 Petabytes of traffic per month.
*TILT* Uh... what? My Comcast "business internet account" has a max down speed of roughly
6 Mb/s, or
10x less than their number. Things are already sounding fishy. But I do like the 20 Petabytes of traffic a month; that sounds sexy.
But wait, they acknowledge these are top-end numbers, and adjust accordingly:
It’s important to note that by this measure, not only does maximum possible demand exceed Internet capacity today, but it has always exceeded capacity and very likely always will, because of the fact that port speeds on Internet-attached devices tend to be within an order of magnitude or so of Internet circuits themselves (and there are far more devices than circuits).
Wait, no! That's even worse! Where's the "yes we know using this 'theoretical max' number in actual calculations is stupid" statement? Ah, here we go...
Moreover, access circuits (the last mile typically connecting Internet-attached devices to the Internet) tend to run at speeds several orders of magnitude lower than the devices they serve. A typical DSL circuit, for example, delivers a maximum of 1.5 Mbit/s to one or more Internet-attached devices in each household (and each device, keep in mind, has a port speed of 100 Mbit/s or up). This means that the Internet-attached devices in a typical household are fully capable of saturating the household’s Internet connection; the same holds true for business sites.
Ahhhh! Go back! You're making it worse!
However, simply because the devices can saturate the “Net doesn’t mean they will. In practice, network-attached devices very rarely (in fact, almost never) generate traffic at 100% of port capacity for a sustained period of time.
Thank god. They've come to their senses. Well, not really... because that's all they say on the subecjt before skipping onto the next section, "Predicting How Much Porn Users Will Download". Well, it's not really it... more like an analysis of
how users will use the choked, Terminator-controlled internet of 2010. There's a discussion of web 2.0 impact and YouTube's new "We Give Up" initiative where they start streaming pornography in 2009, which crashes all their servers and frees up an additional 25% bandwidth which is one reason why things still work in 2010.
But I digress.
The authors really seem hung up on the "port speed" of the device (100 Mb/s on my PC), not the at-the-curb demand made as measured on the public side of the gateway (6 Mb/s here) which, when you're predicting the doom of the internet is the only number that really matters.
It's a bit like freaking out because all those people riding a bus
might go buy cars and overrun the freeway system.
So to summarize, the internet will choke on consumer traffic sometime in 2010, but only if every projected household upgrades their broadband speed by a factor of 10, then saturates their connection 100% continuously 24/7 between now and then.
Aieeee! Run for the hills.
Recent Posts
