American Cable Association Wants Bandwidth Caps

[Heracles 417]

It's funny actually. Libertarians and certain republicans hate government interventions. Whereas, after living here for x years I have seen why proper government intervention is absolutely necessary to promote the free market. The opposite scenario with regards to monopoly is playing out here. Without government intervention utility companies, that are monopolies, are only looking out for their shareholders rather than providing the best product. Individual consumers simply do not have the buying power to influence the market. Which is why the government needs to step in and promote competition. I know in my area we only have one power company and one high speed internet company. There should be a range of electricity or broadband companies to choose from. Competition is what the free market is all about. Monopolies and duopolies go against this; regardless of whether they are public or private.

Edited May 2, 2009 by Constellation

[GaryC 7]

There is something else to consider.

Beware surfers: cyberspace is filling up

John Harlow

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource. However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.

“With more people working or looking for work from home, or using their PCs more for cheap entertainment, demand could double in 2009,” said Ted Ritter, a Nemertes analyst. “At best, we see the [economic] slowdown delaying the fractures for maybe a year.”

In America, telecoms companies are spending £40 billion a year upgrading cables and supercomputers to increase capacity, while in Britain proposals to replace copper cabling across part of the network with fibreoptic wires would cost at least £5 billion.

Yet sites such as YouTube, the video-sharing service launched in 2005, which has exploded in popularity, can throw the most ambitious plans into disarray.

The amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000.

The extent of its popularity is indicated by the 100 million people who have logged on to the site to see the talent show contestant Susan Boyle in the past three weeks.

Another so-called “net bomb” being studied by Nemertes is BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch high-definition television on their computers. In February there were more than 35 million requests for shows and iPlayer now accounts for 5 per cent of all UK internet traffic.

Analysts express such traffic in exabytes – a quintillion (or a million trillion) bytes or units of computer data. One exabyte is equivalent to 50,000 years’ worth of DVD-quality data.

Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India.

While the net itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by “brownouts” – a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.

Ritter’s report will warn that an unreliable internet is merely a toy. “For business purposes, such as delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, it’s useless,” he said.

“Today people know how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games, but by 2012 that traffic jam could last all day long.”

Engineers are already preparing for the worst. While some are planning a lightning-fast parallel network called “the grid”, others are building “caches”, private computer stations where popular entertainments are stored on local PCs rather than sent through the global backbone.

Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne...icle6169488.ece

[Niels Bohr 72]

Technically, it is the government intervention that created competition. I doubt that without regulation, there won't be monopolies. I have to agree on this.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for “net hogs” who use more than their share of capacity.

Congestion pricing works. We're doing it at work, I work for corporate and we serve out an IT network and various services to a collection of business units. In the past, we charged them all the same amount. Today, we're charging them based on actual usage and rates go up during peak business hours. It is working wonders.

[Niels Bohr 72]

Telephones uses circuit switch network that uses TDM. Totally different compared to internet. Unless the Tele providers uses VOIP to connect to outside countries.

[natty bumppo 297]

** .. there goes good porn ...

[Ban Hammer 13,340]

** .. there goes good porn ...

save the internet, nuke youtube.

[Nikita2Charles 32]

I was in Japan last week, The average household in Tokyo put the us to shame, Their internet is superfast

IT's faster than what we are running at the office i work at. Just at my buddy house he was pulling 8MBPS

at the hotel i was staying it was about 4MBPS on average.

With that kinda of jreking off the customer no wonder why we are lagging so far behind in internet speed.

[Niels Bohr 72]

The internet was invented here in the US. And, I'm disappointed at the rate of progress. Those countries such as Australia, Japan, Singapore, and others who have implemented super high speed internet have government planning that allowed the providers to provide those services.

[mRx 16]

I am sure Matt85 will disagree with this but as one of my economics teachers once said, a private monopoly is just as unproductive as a public monopoly. In this scenario, the government is able to build a high speed network and lease it at cost price for use by a range of other companies. Overcoming an incumbent like a single cable company or single telephone company naturally monopoly under usual circumstances.

I'm sure John Rockefeller would vehemently disagree with your mainstream economics teacher.

Edited May 2, 2009 by Matt85

[GaryC 7]

I was in Japan last week, The average household in Tokyo put the us to shame, Their internet is superfast

IT's faster than what we are running at the office i work at. Just at my buddy house he was pulling 8MBPS

at the hotel i was staying it was about 4MBPS on average.

With that kinda of jreking off the customer no wonder why we are lagging so far behind in internet speed.

My connection through Comcast is rated at 10 Mbps. I get 8 Mbps all the time even during peak hours. I have no complaints about my speed or reliability.

[Niels Bohr 72]

GaryC,

The article has many flaws I noticed. The WEB is an application layer of the internet. Somehow the author linked the WEB and the internet to be synonymous. After that, I had a tough time following him.

And, not only that....The internet has intermediate routers and switches in between that are technically bottlenecks in the internet. Video streaming are alleviated depending on what type of transport layer protocol it uses, UDP or TCP. The author have some issues with upgrading cable transmission whereas the problem of congestion doesn't occur with the wires. It occurs at the input buffer and output buffer of the network routers and switches, and at the end user TCP sockets.

[GaryC 7]

GaryC,

The article has many flaws I noticed. The WEB is an application layer of the internet. Somehow the author linked the WEB and the internet to be synonymous. After that, I had a tough time following him.

And, not only that....The internet has intermediate routers and switches in between that are technically bottlenecks in the internet. Video streaming are alleviated depending on what type of transport layer protocol it uses, UDP or TCP. The author have some issues with upgrading cable transmission whereas the problem of congestion doesn't occur with the wires. It occurs at the input buffer and output buffer of the network routers and switches, and at the end user TCP sockets.

I think that the point is that unless we start laying down a bunch of new fiber backbone there will at some point be saturation. It is a finite resource after all.