Will the Internet collapse from overload?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6756899.stm


Warnings of 'internet overload'
Spencer Kelly



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.

Back in the early 90s, those of us that were online were just sending text e-mails of a few bytes each, traffic across the main US data lines was estimated at a few terabytes a month, steadily doubling every year.

But the mid 90s saw the arrival of picture-rich websites, and the invention of the MP3. Suddenly each net user wanted megabytes of pictures and music, and the monthly traffic figure exploded.

For the next few years we saw more steady growth with traffic again roughly doubling every year.

--snip--

and there's that "other" net out there for academic and "security" use because this one's too slow.

I've noticed over the years that no matter what my connection is, everything loads slower and slower. Server overload is everywhere-- I started downloading a huge Linux distro a while back when it was 10 AM in Germany and the download speed was 21K! Finished it from a California school when it was 3 AM there and it flew down at around 5Mb. Don't tell me German universities have inferior servers-- it just was daytime and everyone was working then.

A while back a friend of mine told me he's switching from cable to DSL because in his NYC neighborhood so many people had cable there wasn't enough bandwidth and it was getting as slow as dialup.

Nobody wants to sell you a box of software any more-- they want you to download 175 megabytes of Nero or an office suite.

Netflix? Why bother when you can download movies? It might take all week to download "Gigli" so you can laugh at it with your friends, but what the hell...

Podcasts, videos, phone service... Everyone's got to add a ton of graphics to a two-line note...

And then complain things are slow.

As long as one backs it up, of course... who doesn't?

This sort of belief has been going on since the late 1990s. Meanwhile, the advances of broadband allow far more than images and videos to be downloaded at rapid speed. (it also allows offshoring. AND telecommuting.)

and has a lot more to do with dedicated lines and leased satellites.

That's been the deal for well over 20 years when everyone went global and wanted updated worldwide information. Somebody in London wants immediate financial information from a subsidiary in Hong Kong, General Motors automates its worldwide accounting... Ain't the Web they go to for that.

Wal-Mart is the most efficient at immediate updates of sales and inventory worldwide, but NCR had been selling systems doing that back when DARPAnet was just a dream.

It still costs a bundle to set up a reliable system that isn't going to drop dead when some asshole across the street decides to download every John Wayne movie ever made on "our" internet.

:P

:scared:

Trust me...it's a place no one wants to go.