Internet Collapse Imminent - Again
"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."
This report from the BBC contains some mind-blowing figures - such as YouTube's daily download traffic is equivalent to 75 billion emails.
While it seems the high-speed optical fibre that forms the internet's backbone is in good shape and has plenty of spare capacity, all is not quite so rosy closer to home. This in particular struck a chord;
A lot of the end connections,
the ones that go to our individual home computers, are made of
decades-old copper.
"The real issue that people are going to face, and are already noticing at home, is that ISPs are starting to cut back on the bandwidth that is available to people in their homes... They call it bandwidth shaping.
"They do this because they have a limited capacity to deliver to 100 or 200 homes, and if everybody's using the internet at the same time then the whole thing starts to get congested. Before that happens they cut back on the heavy users."
"The real issue that people are going to face, and are already noticing at home, is that ISPs are starting to cut back on the bandwidth that is available to people in their homes... They call it bandwidth shaping.
"They do this because they have a limited capacity to deliver to 100 or 200 homes, and if everybody's using the internet at the same time then the whole thing starts to get congested. Before that happens they cut back on the heavy users."
That rather smacks of Telecom's Max fiasco of late last year. I reported on it in this blog last October, so where are we now, almost a year on? Same old, same old it seems. With Telecom $2.24 billion richer from the sale of its Yellow Pages division, is any of that moolah going into beefing up our flagging broadband infrastructure? Nope. But half of it is going into the trouser pockets of shareholders. So that's all right then.
In May Telecom Chairman Wayne Boyd said "Any further investment in broadband will be contingent on being able to obtain sufficient regulatory certainty and being able to earn a fair rate of return on that investment."
If you replace "sufficient regulatory certainty" with "a monopoly" and "earn a fair rate of return" with "continue gouging end users forever", you'll get the real gist of what he was saying.
Meanwhile, for Wellingtonians and Christchurchians -- places, incidentally, where Telecom's phone rental and service charges are less than elsewhere (but not, of course, due to competition from TelstraClear; that's just a coincidence) -- broadband's getting better and better;
Web surfers in Wellington and
Christchurch will be able to experience some of the fastest Internet
connections speeds in the world later this year.
TelstraClear is promising to raise the speed of its rejuvenated cable networks in the two cities by 150 per cent, offering customers lightening- fast top download speeds of 25 megabits per second.
TelstraClear is promising to raise the speed of its rejuvenated cable networks in the two cities by 150 per cent, offering customers lightening- fast top download speeds of 25 megabits per second.
Whoo hoo! Bring it on! I mean, sorry rest of country.
Pundits have been predicting the collapse of the internet for more than a decade but it's still in robust good health. Shame the same thing can't be said for our local infrastructure.
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Comments
Well chances are the servers you connect to won't let you use that much bandwidth anyway. I am a Telstra 10 megabit customer and I would never change down. You find however that you are never waiting for anything. and with 17ms ping times who could complain?
Posted by: xandrosx | July 5, 2007 11:36 PM
I'm just curious as to why we need all this extra speed? 25Mbit/s would be great, but with a piddly data cap you can use it all in a matter of hours. Whoopee, you'll be able to download your email in a blink of an eye, but not much else.
Posted by: Paul M | June 21, 2007 9:37 AM