Thought this might be of interest :-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Conrad Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 21 Nov 2007 08:34
Subject: [KIDMM] Beware the Exaflood!
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hello all,
This isn't really a KIDMM issue, but reasonably interesting...
The Internet Innovation Alliance in the USA (appears to be
a policy studies group, headed by President Clinton's former
Asst. Secretary of Commerce for Communications) is trying to
raise awareness about what they predict will be a crisis in
available bandwidth, which could lead to slow-downs in about
three years time.
They have commissioned a report from Nemertes Research, newly
published, called "The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why limits
in Internet capacity will stifle innovation on the Web."
Start here:
http://www.internetinnovation.org/
But if you want to read the whole 62-page report, you will need
to create an account at http://www.nemertes.com/ (they do have
a lot of interesting stuff there).
The focus is chiefly on North America, where the authors conclude
that core fibre and switching/routing resources will scale well
"to support virtually any conceivable user demand", but that making
sure that Internet access infrastructure keeps up will require an
investment by service providers of between US $42-55 billion --
about 60-70% more than they currently plan to invest.
Among the trends driving this, the authors refer to growing use
of Web 2.0 applications, the replacement of physical travel by
virtualisation of face-to-face contact within friends and families,
users switching from broadcast to IP-accessed versions of radio
and television (especially the latter), and video-sharing.
"Overall, transmitting over a saturated broadband link
will feel a lot like the bad old days of dial-up:
Long pauses between request and response, with some
applications just too painful to bother with.
"But the user experience is really just the tip of the
iceberg. The real impact is the chilling effect that
insufficient capacity exerts on companies that rely upon
reliable Internet performance (YouTube, PhotoBucket,
Amazon.com, etc) could be faced with a crisis if their
customer base simply can't access their 'product' in a
tolerable manner. New companies that emerge-say to enable
high-definition video downloads-may not survive. And
finally that plan to rely upon the public Internet (via
SSL and IP VPNs) as an increasing component of corporate
connectivity may want to reconsider this strategy in
light of the potential downstream performance impact."
Conrad
--
--
Regards,
Dave
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