As the flood of data across the internet continues to increase, there are those that say sometime soon it is going to collapse under its own weight. But that is what they said last year.Since 2003, we have seen another change in the way we use the net. The YouTube generation want to stream video, and download gigabytes of data in one go. "In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails; so it's clearly very different," said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems. "The network is growing up, is starting to get more capacity than it ever had, but it is a challenge. Video is real-time, it needs to not have mistakes or errors. E-mail can be a little slow. You wouldn't notice if it was 11 seconds rather than 10, but you would notice that on a video."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, every year someone says the internet is going to collapse under the weight of the traffic.
Looking at the figures, that seems a reasonable prediction.
"Back in the days of the dotcom boom in the late 90s, billions of dollars were invested around the world in laying cables," said net expert Bill Thompson. "Then there was the crash of 2000 and since then we've been spending that inheritance, using that capacity, growing services to fill the space that was left over by all those companies that went out of business."
The digital meltdown is not the only threat facing the net. There are other, more sudden, real world hazards which the net has to protect against. Anything from terror attacks to, would you believe it shark bites, can and have taken out major links and routers.
"There's a perception that the internet is very resilient," said Paul Wood, senior analyst of security firm MessageLabs. "The way it was designed means that if any particular part of it is disrupted then the traffic will find another route.
"It only takes an earthquake, as we saw at the end of last year, to take out a significant segment of internet infrastructure. Then the traffic finds another route, but it goes over a very slow route, which then becomes saturated and can't handle the bandwidth. Then you lose the traffic and that part of the world goes dark for a while."
For decades the internet has kept pace with our demands on it. And demand continues to grow.
And the service providers will continue to insist that the net will survive, and the doomsayers will continue to insist that it is just about to collapse.
Link & Image: BBC
Tags: Internet | Overload
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