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Is the Internet on the brink of a meltdown?

By David Smith
THE OBSERVER, London
Wednesday, Apr 09, 2008, Page 9

They are calling it the broadband crunch. Experts have warned that the amount of data traveling across the Internet is growing so fast that the network could become overloaded and grind to a virtual standstill.

Online video is the biggest drain on the capacity of copper wires that were originally intended to carry only voice calls. But demand for YouTube, the BBC’s iPlayer and other data-hungry Internet TV services is surging. Last year it was claimed that YouTube consumed as much bandwidth in a year as the entire Internet took up in 2000.

The prospect of the Web’s arteries clogging is to be the subject of a debate, “The End of the Internet?” at a technology conference in Boston this month while the industry trade press has published apocalyptic headlines: “Is the Internet doomed?” and “Internet might collapse in 2010.”

The worst-case scenario is not so much a crash as a global gridlock in which e-mail, social networks and everything else on the Internet slows to a crawl, with potentially devastating consequences for both government and business.

“Our streets in cities like London or New York were designed for a certain amount of traffic,” said Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, an industry group lobbying for universal broadband.

“There are times of the day when you can get around and times when there is congestion because the roads were not made big enough to cope with so much traffic. London does not shut down, it carries on, but everything slows down. The Internet is something like that,” he said.

NETWORKS

Roads are a useful way to imagine the Internet, essentially an amalgam of privately built and owned interconnecting networks, all the more robust for not having a physical “center.” The quantity of data speeding up and down this network is hard to measure, but everyone agrees it is getting bigger by the day.

Irving said that estimates show US Internet traffic increasing at more than 50 percent a year, with capacity expanding at only about 40 percent a year.

The craze for video clips and full-length movies on the Web comes at a price: A one-hour film can eat up one gigabyte, a hundred times more than an MP3 music file of around 10 megabytes. The traffic runs both ways because consumers, especially younger users, are keen to upload their own videos or share files through peer-to-peer networks, all of which adds to the strain.

“Four million people are watching a Barack Obama video on the Internet,” said Irving, who was assistant secretary of commerce under US president Bill Clinton. “Twenty-six million people watched Desperate Housewives over a six-month period. The American version of The Office got 7 million viewers on TV and 2.7 million online. We’re watching a slow but inexorable increase in the amount of time people are spending on online video. Whatever the number is today, that’s the lowest it will ever be.”

Bill Thompson, a technology commentator and visiting lecturer at City University, London, said: “I think we’re in trouble. If you’ve got kids on YouTube and parents on iPlayer and other things going on, it all starts to go very slow.”

Some — but not all — analysts say that the problem is not in transmitting data from one city to another, or even from one side of the world to another, because these fiber and underground cable “motorways” have huge capacity and are continuously gaining efficiency from new technology. Instead the biggest risk of a bottleneck is in the local “country lanes”: In the routers, switches and copper wires running from an exchange into the home over “the last mile.”

Scott Bradner, technology security officer at Harvard University, who is taking part in the “End of the Internet?” debate, said: “There are going to be some real crunches, some real hard times coming. It’s because of the market and the business models which don’t see a way of making a profit.”

On both sides of the Atlantic there are complaints that a potential crunch is much less to do with technology than market economics. Internet service providers in the UK have been criticized for striving so hard to undercut each other on price that they are failing to invest in the infrastructure necessary to keep up with demand.

Although BT is spending £10 billion (US$19.8 billion) on one of its biggest upgrades, turning its old networks into a single “21st century network” launching at the end of this month, it will not address the issue of the “last mile” copper into the home. Replacing this with high-speed fiber optics would cost an estimated £20 billion. Thompson believes that, because such investment is against short-term commercial interests, the government should intervene to provide fiber to the home in the spirit of a public utility.

CHALLENGES

Anthony Walker, chief executive of Britain’s Broadband Stakeholder Group, said: “There are big investment challenges ahead. Replacing copper with fiber optic, taking it closer to the consumer, we’re talking about billions of pounds over almost a decade. It’s some way off but it’s being talked about. It may mean there are new, faster, high-capacity services that consumers are willing to pay for. I don’t think there’s any cause to panic, but at the same time we shouldn’t be complacent.”

Mike Bartlett, a spokesman for BT, said: “There will not be a fiber-to-the-home network in the next 20 years. It would be a massive call to say, ‘Let’s fiber up the nation.’ It would take many years, cost billions of pounds, involve digging up all the roads and we don’t know if people really want it.”

“As a public company we can’t go to our shareholders and say we need to spend the equivalent of our market cap value on this. But we are very much committed to providing fiber at the new housing at Ebbsfleet Valley [in Kent] from August, which will be a really useful test bed for the whole industry,” he said.

An independent study on the UK’s broadband infrastructure led by Francisco Caio, the former chief executive of Cable & Wireless, is due to report to Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling in the fall. It is unlikely to find a solution which would allow the UK to catch up with Japan, which has the world’s fastest connections, delivering more data at a lower price than any other country. The technology has enabled broadcast-quality full-screen TV, high-definition teleconferencing, mass working from home and “telemedicine” in which doctors can diagnose conditions from far away. Japan benefits from new wiring installed in the aftermath of World War II.

Not even pessimists believe the Internet will crash and burn. An overload is likely to result in consequences that are sluggish rather than spectacular.

“We’re not saying it’s going meltdown, but you could have latency,” Irving said.

“It’ll be like trying to get from point A to point B in London on a Wednesday afternoon. Good luck,” he said.


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