Relax, The Internet Backbone Still Has Room For Your lolcats

[Ehtyar]

This one is mostly for us lolcat lovers, but there is a serious article behind it.

Many people have feared that lolcats and other traffic are going to block the ‘tubes, but Ars says today that the net backbone bandwidth is in fact growing and plenty prepared to swallow those cats.  Actually they use a prettier analogy–

Given recent media coverage, it’s easy to believe that P2P and streaming video traffic is a rising hurricane battering upon ISP levees, that ISPs are frantically sandbagging their systems against disaster, that throttling, bandwidth caps, and traffic management are urgent and absolute necessities to keep the storm surge at bay. But new research from Telegeography only confirms what we’ve been saying for some time: the Internet backbone isn’t drowning beneath any kind of exaflood. In fact, backbone capacity has grown faster than Internet traffic in the last year—for the second year in a row.

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Ehtyar.

[housetier]

If bandwidth was scarce ISPs could make more profit. They keep telling the story of the clogged tubes so they can sell the "guranteed bandwidth plans" which of course cost more than the average home use connection.

[Ehtyar]

If bandwidth was scarce ISPs could make more profit. They keep telling the story of the clogged tubes so they can sell the "guranteed bandwidth plans" which of course cost more than the average home use connection.

Disgusting.

Ehtyar.

[Lashiec]

The "OMG, BitTorrent is going to bring down the whole Internet" stories varie from ISP to ISP, and from country to country as well. The exaflood catastrophe is mostly told by certain U.S. ISPs, for economical reasons as housetier points, and also to back up some of their "secret" practices towards controlling bandwidth. In South Korea or Japan (with their monthly upload limit of 250 GB), the exaflood does not seem it's going to happen by looking at their ISP plans. In Europe most cable providers are also testing DOCSIS 3.0, which also means better plans for the customers who can't afford the new and speedier plans.

Let's see if those P4P projects mature as well, for they mean even less chances of P2P-complaining by ISPs. Everything is not enough for LOLCATS!

[Deozaan]

I remember chatting in IRC about 12 years ago, having discussions about how the net was about to collapse under its own weight and we'd see WWW 2.0. This was when it was still more frequently called "the World Wide Web" (which brought to the mind spider webs and surfboards used for "surfing the web") and not "the internet."

[housetier]

You are OLD! 

[Deozaan]

You are OLD! 

Heh. I must be getting there because that's the first time I've heard that one.