World wide woes: Heavy traffic threatens collapse of Internet

World wide woes: Heavy traffic threatens collapse of Internet Some software experts seem to have the opinion that the Internet would crumble as a system due to over use and heavy online traffic. But that’s what they said last year. Back in the early 90s, those of us that were online were just sending text e-mails of a few bytes each, traffic across the main US data lines was estimated at a few terabytes a month, doubling every year. But the mid-90s saw the arrival of picture-rich websites, and the invention of the MP3. Suddenly each net user wanted megabytes of pictures and music, and the monthly traffic figure exploded. For the next few years we saw more steady growth with traffic again roughly doubling every year. But since 2003, we have seen another change in the way we use the Net. The YouTube generation want to stream video, and download gigabytes of data in one go. “In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion emails; so it’s clearly very different,” said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems. “The network is growing up, is starting to get more capacity than it ever had, but it is a challenge. Video is real-time, it needs to not have mistakes or errors. E-mail can be a little slow. You wouldn’t notice if it was 11 seconds rather than 10, but you would notice that on a video.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, every year someone says the Internet is going to collapse under the weight of the traffic. Looking at the figures, that seems a reasonable prediction. “Back in the days of the dotcom boom in the late 90s, billions of dollars were invested around the world in laying cables,” said net expert Bill Thompson. “Then there was the crash of 2000 and since then we’ve been spending that inheritance, using that capacity, growing services to fill the space that was left over by all those companies that went out of business.” Much more high-speed optic fibre has been laid than we currently need, and scientists are confident that each strand can be pushed to carry almost limitless amounts of data in the form of light. But long before a backbone wire itself gets overloaded, the strain may begin to show on the devices at either end — the routers. “If we take a backbone link across the Atlantic, there’re billions of bits of data arriving every second and it’s all got to go to different destinations,” explained Thompson. “The router sits at the end of that very high speed link and decides where each small piece of data has to go. That’s not a difficult computational task, but it has to make millions of decisions a second.” The maker of most routers is Cisco. When I pushed them on the subject of router overload, they were confident as usual. “We have enough capacity to do that and drive a billion phone calls from those same people who are playing a video game at the same time they’re having a text chat.” AGENCIES