A study by a professor from the University of California at San Diego states that the evolution of YouTube and similar sites is stretching the capacity of the Internet to its limits, and that the biggest problem is not one of data loss, but latency.
This is not totally newsworthy to anyone who watched the Live Aid Concerts in July. Later in the day the feed across many peoples’ connections was slowing markedly, causing enough problems as to almost lose the connection. The ‘pipe’ is just not large enough.
How many people would get really mad if you told them they could drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas as swiftly as their vehicles would allow, with no repercussions from the law – only to have them find out that at Baker (very small city in the middle of the California desert, fits almost any definition of literal hell) the travelers were forced to stop and do Chinese fire drills for half an hour. This negates the benefits of the full speed travel at all other points along the highway, and eliminates the time advantage that would otherwise be available. This is what is happening to many who have ‘high speed connections’. In fact, it is surprising that many who obtain the latest, optical fiber to the home, connections are not complaining of this problem.
While many are saying that larger pathways are needed, it neglects how costly making faster connections is getting to be. Instead of making larger pipelines for data, a better idea is making more pathways for the data. This redundancy allows more traffic in total, but the speed for each connection is not any faster than if no other data was being transferred.
As a partial means of fixing the problems, while waiting for the capacity to be increased, the study calls for prioritization of traffic. This means great things for the video viewers, but those doing other types of transactions on the Internet would be disappointed, as they would likely not benefit from this temporary repair.
The study further states that failing to update the capacity will have major effects on business, and Internet business specifically.
“Unless we ensure an adequate supply of quality bandwidth at reasonable prices, many current and future business models will be stranded, which will have serious implications for economic growth and national competitiveness in the Internet sector,” Kleeman writes.
As an aside, while writing this article, there were references to other data, but it was unavailable as the hyperlinks were indicating that the connections could not be made. This was at 7:30 am PST.
It affects all of us, and is getting more and more like the Interstate 405 freeway in the Los Angeles area – it is never less than 75% filled with cars, and the speed, while posted at 65mph, seldom allows traffic that fast.
[tags] Internet traffic, YouTube, speed, redundant pathways, USC Annenberg Center for Information [/tags]