Vassar Technology Today | Internet apocalypse scheduled for 2010, says your corporate ISP

Matthew Leung Columnist

At a United Kingdom government forum last week, AT&T Vice President of Legislative Affairs Jim Cicconi warned that unless private companies and corporations round up 130 billion dollars to upgrade the public infrastructure of the Internet by 2010, the Internet will not be able to handle the impending traffic explosion in that year.

Since private organizations such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) built the public digital highways to make broadband traffic possible, they are the ones with the capacities to maintain and expand them.

Cicconi pointed out that the emergence of high definition (HD) video on the Web will strain bandwidth, since it uses 10 times more bandwidth than regular video. There will be additional strain if YouTube adopts HD, as eight hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute. Cicconi and AT&T predicted that three years from now, 20 households will generate more than all of the traffic on the Internet today.

This warning is nothing unfamiliar. Many others, such as Bret Swanson, a technology researcher at Seattle’s Discovery Institute, predict a kind of Internet apocalypse in 2010 when the Web can no longer handle the overwhelming traffic. As a result, the Internet would become partially or fully unavailable to users. Swanson coined the term “exaflood” to describe this eventual disaster.

In fact, 2010 is not the first prediction of an Internet apocalypse. In 1995, Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet connection, prophesied that the Internet would collapse in 1996 due to increasing users and demands. But the Internet kept running, and Metcalfe owned up to his words by eating a piece of paper printed with his warning in front of an audience at a conference in 1997.

Statistically, it is true that the Internet’s current ability to handle traffic will not be adequate for the potentially exponential growth of traffic in the next few years. What is not sensible, is to draw the connection that the Internet will have a blackout or collapse as a result.

Such a catastrophe could happen only if that exponential increase in online data were to happen today. Just as data is constantly increasing on the Internet, so too are the innovative protocols that manage how online data make their way across the Internet. Merely looking at the number of available highways is not enough; you have to take into account how the cars move through them.

One threat that ISPs see to the Internet bandwidth is peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as BitTorrent and Gnutella. But while P2P currently increases traffic on the Internet, efforts are underway to make P2P bandwidth-friendly. In July 2007, P2P providers such as BitTorrent and LimeWire joined with major ISPs such as Verizon and AT&T to form the P4P Working Group to make P2P traffic more efficient and productive.

Some experts even claim that P2P networks can serve as a way to alleviate traffic strain on the Internet. Paul Francis, a computer scientist at Cornell University, devised a system called Chunkyspread, which streams broadband content through P2P networks instead of central servers such as YouTube. That way videos travel less distance to reach your computer because the peers on the P2P network who stream the video to you are closer than the YouTube servers.

It is also worth noting that the majority of the broadband content that we consume is popular content consumed by millions of other people, such as YouTube videos that made it to fame or commercial content. Rather than the present situation of replicating the same traffic millions of times on the Internet, methods for consolidating the traffic and streamlining delivery through technologies such as P2P are likely to be developed in the future.

As for making data travel more efficiently, John Papandriopoulos, a researcher at the University of Melbourne, devised an algorithm in 2006 that allows 100 times more traffic to move through the present DSL connections.

As the Internet is a dynamic environment with an economy of rapid sharing and a proliferation of innovations, it has a resilient nature and maintains equilibrium when one component of it, such as traffic, starts to hamper the Web.

This propaganda from broadband ISPs is merely hype to increase public consumption of broadband.

Only a few years after broadband was first made available in America in 2001, ISPs constructed enough connections to cover 80 percent of the country. Disappointingly, only 10 percent of the country signed up. Even today, only 50 percent of the country is willing to pay for broadband. The rest of the available connections are sitting in dust. By making bandwidth sound like a scarce resource everyone is fighting over, ISPs are simply trying to get more people to sign up for broadband.