[Infowarrior] - Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam

[Richard Forno]

March 13, 2008
Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam
By STEVE LOHR

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/technology/13net.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin
&pagewanted=print

Caution: Heavy Internet traffic ahead. Delays possible.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth
in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to
some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the
increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment ‹
video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital
bits as they traverse the Internet¹s pipes and gateways, requiring, in
industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video
site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire
Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected
that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011.
The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in
Boston sums up the angst: ³The End of the Internet?²

But the Internet traffic surge represents more a looming challenge than an
impending catastrophe. Even those most concerned are not predicting a
lights-out Internet crash. An individual user, they say, would experience
Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration
with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.

³The Internet doesn¹t collapse, but there would be a growing class of stuff
you just can¹t do online,² said Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes
Research, which predicted the bandwidth squeeze by 2011, anticipating that
demand will grow by 100 percent or more a year.

Others are less worried ‹ at least in the short term. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a
professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on
the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent
analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker.

That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for handling
Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well. The router
computers for relaying data get faster, fiber optic transmission gets better
and software for juggling data packets gets smarter.

³The 50 percent growth is high. It¹s huge, but it basically corresponds to
the improvements that technology is giving us,² said Professor Odlyzko, a
former AT&T Labs researcher. Demand is not likely to overwhelm the Internet,
he said.

The question of the problem¹s severity is more than a technical one, since
it will affect the shape and cost of the nation¹s policy on broadband
infrastructure, a matter that is expected to attract political attention
after a new administration takes over in Washington.

While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it
points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks
are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation,
spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags
behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that
are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.

³The long-term issue is where innovation happens,² Professor Odlyzko said.
³Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?²

The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local.
It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together. The worries
about digital traffic congestion are not really about the Internet¹s main
trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways. Instead, the problem
is close to home ‹ the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes
into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home,
analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more.

That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They
depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy.
Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional
conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as
fast and costs far less than his premium ³high speed² service in California.

³When I mention my own service, people here shake their heads in disbelief,²
said Mr. Baker, who is a board member of the Internet Society, a nonprofit
organization that helps guide Internet standards and policy.

In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising Internet
traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable and
telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner of the
Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a number of
forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video applications on
Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more Internet-enabled devices
like cellphones, and shortages of electrical power for data centers in
places like San Francisco.

³We¹re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,² said Mr. Pozar,
whose company¹s data centers support Web sites for customers ranging from
museums to social networks. ³And upgrades needed in data centers are going
to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that all the excess
capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has been gobbled up.² The
pace of future demand is the big uncertainty surrounding the Internet
traffic challenge, and how fast people will adopt emerging technologies is
notoriously difficult to foresee.

In the aftermath of the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000, there was
a glut of capacity ‹ so-called dark fiber, strung around the world and then
left dormant. Now demand is catching up with that supply. In its prediction
of more than 100 percent annual growth, Nemertes, a telecommunications
research firm, assumes brisk use of new innovations like high-end
videoconferencing, known as telepresence, which corporations are beginning
to embrace as an alternative to costly, time-consuming travel.

If this technology becomes a consumer product in the next few years, as some
analysts predict, Internet traffic could spike even more sharply.

Slick video chats are something that William Bentley, a 13-year-old New
Yorker, would like to see. He is fairly representative of the next
generation of digital consumer: He has made and posted his own YouTube
videos, subscribes to YouTube channels, enjoys multiplayer games like World
of Warcraft and Unreal Tournament, and downloads music and videos.

Asked what he would want next from the Internet, he replied, ³It would be
nice to have everybody always right there ‹ just click and you could see
them clearly and talk to them.²

That sort of service is certainly going to require more bandwidth and more
investment, with higher costs across the spectrum of the Internet ecosystem
that includes cable and telecommunications carriers, Internet companies,
media Web sites and even consumers. AT&T, for one, said last week that it
would spend $1 billion this year ‹ double its 2006 expenditures ‹ to expand
its overseas infrastructure.

But even if investment lags behind, there will be no Internet blackout.
Indeed, the Internet has survived predictions of collapse in the past, most
notably by Robert M. Metcalfe, a networking pioneer and entrepreneur, who in
a 1995 magazine column warned of a ³catastrophic collapse² of the Internet
in 1996. There were service problems, but nothing like Mr. Metcalfe
predicted, and on stage at a conference in 1997 he ate his words.

³The Internet has proven to be wonderfully resilient,² said Mr. Metcalfe,
who is now a venture capitalist. ³But the Internet is vulnerable today. It¹s
not that it will collapse, but that opportunities will be lost.²