The Internet is running out of room!
 

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/90339

Doom-filled warnings arrive from AT&T this week. The company says that without substantial investment in network infrastructure, the Internet will essentially run out of bandwidth in just two short years.

Blame broadband, says AT&T. Decades of dealing with the trickle of bandwidth consumed by voice and dialup modems left AT&T twiddling its thumbs. The massive rise of DSL and cable modem service in the 2000s has had AT&T facing a monstrous increase in the volume of data transmissions. And that's set to increase another 50 times between now and 2015. That's enough, says AT&T, to all but crash the system.

In response, AT&T says it's investing $19 billion to upgrade the backbone of the Internet, the routers, servers, and connections where the bulk of traffic is processed.

Of course, AT&T is using this breathlessness in part to point fingers beyond simple broadband use. Web video (especially high-definition video) is the most commonly mentioned bandwidth hog. AT&T says video alone will eat up 80 percent of traffic in two years vs. just 30 percent now. One wonders how YouTube doesn't collapse under the pressure. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, many are wondering whether this is prelude to AT&T announcing (or not announcing, but doing anyway) a traffic prioritization/shaping system like Comcast has been tinkering with... and which has earned it nothing but scorn. Net neutrality (which would forbid premium pricing for certain Internet applications and destinations) is a topic that continues to be hotly debated on Capitol Hill, and telcos are anxious to kill the idea since they'd love to be able to charge additional money for different kinds of web traffic. If the whole Internet is about to crash, well, that makes AT&T's argument all the more compelling, doesn't it?



Well, this is kinda interesting. Never would've thought that the internet of all things could run out of room so fast. Must be all the porn sites and webspam out there.

Anyone else's take on this?

They might just let it die just to kill net neutrality...

as far as i can see here, what they might do (if this is a serious issue.....) is to make the standar of DSL connections to have a traffic limite per month.

So like, say, You pay X to have 20 Gb of Downloads woth per month. If you want 50Gb you pay Y if you want 100Gb you pay XY

if you want more, you must be a company or something like that.

That's the only way i see it to make possible to not kill the online freedom.. to charge more to the people who want to move more stuff in and out of cyberspace

So the internet may very well die by collapsing against itself? How fitting...

Welcome to Shaw cable. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my total traffic limit is 60GB/mo.

Doom-saying is a bit much. Yes, infrastructure upgrades are needed. They're also doing them. It was pretty clear that upgrades would soon be needed; AT&T is just pissed that they're having to spend money on them sooner.

In 2 years the internet will still be here, and I will still be shoving data through the tubes.

The old server technology is really becoming obselete nowadays anyway.

Hail to the grid, baby!

So, how much does it cost to run a G1 line to your house? I'd be interested in that, methinks :p

I beat the internet once.

The last guy was hard.


OnT: Somehow I'm not so savvy on this internet rationing thing. There's entire markets based around online gaming, with huge patches and constant incoming and outcoming flow. I'm not sure there's anyway you could have a system like that and still run WoW consistently, for example. Blizzard may not be AT&T, or Comcast, but it's still big, and it's not alone. Hundreds of apps all use it, and all their business is going to take a hurting by that unless the ration is fairly cheap.

Unless I misread the proposed rationing system?

Them grids sound better then them tubes.

Good lord, what can't the Large Hardon Collider do?

Telecom companies are ridiculously profitable so I'm not really gonna cry too hard that they gotta throw some cash into upgrades and similar.

Re: that link of Arhra's okay seriously that's just too damn fast for an internet to reasonably be.

Re: Hardon Collider, http://www.nuklearforums.com/images/icons/icon13.gif

Hadron.

It will be called the Hardon Collider by all.

So, the internet is running out of tubes and the "Hardon Collider" ( Heh... hard-on collider... hehe...) is the solution?

Really... the internet is still fucking amusing to me... next thing you know they will ban Lolcats out of the web clearing about 100 Terabytes of data per month

Regarding Arhra's link...

That's both tragic and awesome, that we would literally be destroyed by the internet.

Unfortunately, not only are those launching the lawsuit idiots, the LHC isn't actually the grid. Sorry.

Arhra always knows the best stuff.

Well, when they actually switch the Large Hadron Collider on in mid June, there's a chance it will kill us all.

Either by creating a miniature black hole that doesn't dissipate as fast as predicted or by making strangelets, which are a theorised form of matter that would convert all matter on earth into more strangelets.

Kind of like how they were afraid a runaway nuclear reaction could possibly set the atmosphere on fire back when they were developing the atomic bomb.

SCIENCE!

Wow. So, I guess here's to me being afloat in space somewhere to eventually be found by another civilization.

If I need to explain that, you haven't read my Wiki article.




But, thankfully, I'm pretty sure that it won't create a black hole or damage the entire planet by converting its matter state, or else they'd have built it elsewhere to minimize losses. The moon still would have its gravitational effect; we just wouldn't be able to go there anymore.



But to comment on the original point of the thread, half those jerks are nerfing their service as it is, so forgive me if I'm less than sympathetic when they whine about actually having to keep up with what people are paying their hard-earned cash for in the next few years when they should be on it already.

http://overcompensating.com/comics/lhc.png

Way to drop the ball, Seil.

The internet fascinates me, but so do black holes. This is a win-win for me.

Well, at least the world will get one Large Hardon before its sucked into the hole.

Quit harshin' mah doom-buzz, maan.
Now see that right there is more like it.

http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u...h/080106-1.gif

What this comic fails to explain is that half of these popular internet activities are accessed by NPF users for the GENERIC INTERNET HILARITY THREAD THAT HAS A NEW NAME EVERY 12 HOURS thing that Fifthfiend has going there.

EDIT

I got called into work on a Saturday. So sue me. I'm making up for it, though. Took me long enough to respond to that, though. I was actually more interested in the comic than who posted it or why. Does that make me a bad person?

ALTERNATE RETORT

Pfffft, who the heck reads "Over Compensating?"

ALTERNATE RETORT

I just glanced over the post once I saw the words RickZarber. Seriously, who listens to that guy? That one is kinda mean. I'm sorry Zarb, I still love you!

See? right there... i think that is what is going to happen. The Hardon Collider Doomsday Device ( HCD² ) will, as soon as its turned on generate a MeMe so huge that will colapse reality.. those little jokes we do is actually a side effect of them testing the device right now

So, what, there's 200 people on the internet? That leaves an awful lot of spambots out there.

Exponentially more people than listen to you?

Of course.

Well, everyone who's able to be on NPF is on NPF. They just lurk, is all. But yes, there are quite a lot of spam bots out there.

What? We're a gated community now?

This revelation worries and frightens me.

Considering that between half and 4/5 of all NPF's forum viewership at any given point in time consists of unregistered users, this is a surprise how?

That has absolutely nothing to do with the joke I made.

The internet is going to collapse from overuse!?

Odd, somehow I always thought that either me or that-terrible-place would be to blame.

If Net Neutrality gets pwned and people have to pay a lot more to keep sites running, what does that mean for NPF?

it means we will all become penpals ofcourse...

I look forward to a return to the world as it was in the 80's and early 90's. It was nice and quiet, and you didn't have an endless stream of absolute insipid stupidity shooting like a gyser of horrible out of your computer screen.

So, when the internet implodes, who wants to open a Museum of internet history? Just so Bravefencer shinryuu never forgets

The ruinations of most of your minds will constitute enough of a memorial to last for generations.

Been there, done that.

Meh, due to the fact that we currently have limited space, I'm really not that surprised.

Once we get quantum computing and a similar network like the grid, however, we'll have massive amounts of space..

Ladies and Gentlemen, the gyser of horrible.

Yes, I'm sure thinking that far into the future the scientists will just manage to find a way to put a website server into a bag of holding. Problem solved.

EDIT: Dangit, every third time I click a link somewhere in the site I get "500 Internal Server Error". I think its happening already.

That's not how you spell geyser.[/spelling nazi]

Also, I think it would be funny to take the Internet offline for a day, just to see what happens.

Well as far as I understand quantum computing ( I know lots of quantum stuff but pratically 0 computer stuff) the theory is that it will be faster for complicated operations but not noticeably better for small everyday operations, and won't really save much for the everyday user.

And you guys all need internet caps, like the rest of the world. At first you'll rebel, you'll scream, but soon you'll love your cap like the friend you never had.

There are theories.

We already have caps. They're imposed by lazy ISPs who don't feel like providing the actual amount of bandwidth their customers are paying for. Sometimes by half.

Seriously, we have Silicon Valley. Considering how fast computers are advancing, it shouldn't be that hard to compensate at least a LITTLE quantity with better quality for only a little more per unit.

just to be othe outlinig of relevant news... this would never happen, beause coporations got most of the web...

or do you think blizzard, google, apple, microsoft and sony (to cite a few) wont do a thing if it was real

it really is jut stupid BS to point against net neutrality

It is so very horrible, I misspelled it twice.

Isn't that illegal?
I mean we have caps but we pay based on how much you want and how fast you want it.

For those of us on Shaw Cable (In Canukleda!), $40/mo gets you 5 Mb/s downstream, 512 Kb/s upstream, and a combined bandwidth cap of 60 GB/mo (Thank god for the capital B).

I am, understandably, pissed. Not only are we getting terrible speeds when compared with other regions, we're paying high fees for annoying limits.

I swear, I'm going to live at a Norwegian university someday. A mate I talk to apparently has a 50 Mb/s line with no cap. Jealousy = Me.

For comparison, $50 gets you 10 Mb/s down, 1 Mb/s up, 100 GB bandwidth, and 15 Mb/s down for the first 10 MB of a file. I'm tempted. Very tempted.

5 Mb is a bit above the standard in North America (I think the most common package on DSL and Cable is 3 Mb/s). Which, as far as I can tell, is perfectly fine unless you are planning on downloading everything in existance, and downloading it so you have it RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW.

I've been operating off of 768 kb/s, or whatever the number is around there, and it hasn't hindered me at all. Sure, things download a tad bit slower, but I don't have problems with youtube videos stopping on me, and I can just do something else while that mp3 or that free album from a netlabel downloads. It hasn't strangled my Skype, chained my chatting, stoppered my surfing.

To me, it's senseless to pay so much for a faster connection, unless you are hosting a server yourself.

I transfer a fair bit of data. Before I realized that I was capped, I was transferring ~120GB a month. Speed also helps when you have other people on the network to contend with; schedule downloads to run at night, you don't have to worry about disturbing others, and they're ready in the morning. Or if you need something right now, boom, 1 MB/s. That 3 GB file? Done in an hour.

Well pretty much any university you go to will give you fast internet. I mean I get ridiculous speeds here with no cap. Of course I need it for my research, and my "research".

What the hell are you doing that requires 120 Gigs a month? I don't even have that much worth of data on my harddrives and CD/DVD-Rs.

And I operate fine on 768 with 3 others using the network at the same time.

This. I mean, between all my HDDs, I have 1 TB of capacity, and I'm 90% full. Next time NCIX runs a sale I'm picking up another 500 GB WD, and then I'm going to have to get a NAS to extend any further.

I'm like a one-man wayback machine. I don't delete things. I just shuffle them.

My torrents are capping at my maximum downstream speed. In addition, my upstream is disproportionately low compared to my upstream. Therefore, when I'm downloading, the internet gets slow.

If you are using this for anime, I swear I'm going to hunt you down and hurt you. Probably by taking all your hardrrives and forcing you to use a measly 18 gig one.

However, it would make sense if the internet's bandwidth ran dry because of anime, thus making yet another crime against humanity that's come about from anime.

Replace anime with porn and you'll have reality facing at you.

I don't know. How much porn does any one person need? One of my friends owns 12 harddrives, approximately 6 which are full of anime. All the shows are going to be different and offer something unique, whereas porn is all going to be pretty similar and does not lend itself to marathon sessions.

..... *moves to Canada and assumes new identity*

Porn can be pretty creative.... trust me...

You can have 12 60gb hd's full of japanese porn without a single one being like eachother

and i dont mean that in a good way

If it were porn, than I'd almost admire him. Unless it's the really weird stuff. Then, not so much. And if it were hentai, well, then he'd live with only a 28k modem for the rest of his days.

I know this is late, but I wanted to reply to this.


With US law, it's ambiguous, because Congress hasn't kept up with technology. That's where the Net Neutrality issue comes into play, but it also means that despite big corporations like Comcast and Verizon not giving people the product they pay for, there isn't actually a law that says "You guys have to actually supply the full, unhindered 3Mbps you promise." Which leaves a lot of room for old, fat, white guys to look at a fascinating wall while a kid in a suit supplies them with Grant-printed pocket squares.

...not all of it is porn.

Seriously though, I have ~200 GB of iso's, 125 GB of installed programs, ~50 GB of unsorted downloads, 34 GB of music, ~400 GB of videos, and about 50 GB in miscellany. I recently took 100 GB off by burning stuff onto DVDs, though, so that freed up a hefty chunk of space.

Oh, and 20 GB for Windows. That gets it's own partition.

Bluestar, I must say, that is sad to hear. I'm not exactly satisfied with my price/performance ratio, but I can say that Shaw never skimps on it's service. I did have an abysmally slow connection a while back, but it was a modem error, and they just showed up and replaced it for me.

EDIT: FYI, a good number of my vids are in 720p, so about 1.07 GB per 43-minute episode.