IS THE INTERNET FACING GRIDLOCK? Life without the internet is now

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Mar 11, 2007 | by Iain S Bruce

IT stuttered, then it stopped.

Around the world screens were plunged into darkness, wiping hundreds millions of pounds from the global economy as communications slowed to a crawl. The routes upon which millions of people depended to interact with their employers, governments, suppliers and friends suddenly slammed shut. Welcome to the great panic of 2007: the year the web fell over.

This doomsday scenario is uncomfortably close to becoming true. We may have become accustomed to thinking of the internet as an infinite resource, but according to the latest predictions from Deloitte there is a high risk that the vast volumes of digital information bouncing around the planet could exceed the web's available capacity before the year is out.

Pointing to the huge growth in net use over the past year, analysts fear that the unrelenting growth in traffic expected this year may overwhelm the internet's backbone the fibre-optic cables that connect continents.

"Two key trends underpin the threat to the internet's capacity. First of these is that the total population of users breached the one billion mark last year and is expected to continue growing at a remarkable rate. The second, most important factor is the rise of video, " said David Townsley, one of the authors of the Deloitte report.

"Over a third of all web traffic in 2007 is expected to be peer- to-peer video, with the number of download offerings, IPTV companies and chat services expected to continue spiralling upwards.

"Given that some service providers are already seeing video exceed the amount of voice traffic on their systems and the fact that this places much higher demand on available bandwidth, the threat to speed and quality of service is very clear." Last August, the video-sharing site YouTube was pumping out 100,000 streams to avid users; by September it was serving a staggering 1.2 million. We love the web and with every passing day demand more from it, resulting in predictions that by 2012, the electronic traffic generated by just 20 Scottish homes will equal the volume of data that flowed through the entire internet in 1996. That is great news for dotcommers and digital entrepreneurs, but it has awoken genuine concern among many in the industry.

Experts fear that before long, demand for such services could well exceed what the internet's physical infrastructure is capable of delivering.

"We are already in a situation where the pipes are close to being full up, " said Antoine Guy, European head of web traffic specialist Allot Communications. "The growth of video has brought the problem sharply into focus and it is highly probable that this will result in a slowdown across many service providers in 2007. At the current rate, we will have exhausted the internet's global capacity within two years." Whether you use the web for work or pleasure, this will not make pleasant reading. It might seem inconceivable that a medium so integral to our commercial and personal lives could hit the buffers, but throughout the telecommunications industry there is growing acceptance that the issue must be confronted now if we are to avoid disaster.

At Level 3, the company that provides the internet backbone for all the major service providers throughout Europe and North America, executives plough dollars-500 million (GBP255.5m) worth of capital investment a year into expanding the global network's capacity and resilience.

As you would expect from an outfit charged with providing the bandwidth for companies such as BT, Yahoo, AT&T and MySpace, Level 3 professes to be confident of its ability to keep pace with rising demand, but this is a position tinged with caution.

"There has been a huge change in the way we use the internet. At first we simply accessed it to find information in what was essentially a one-way process, but now we make content ourselves, and the 16 to 24-year-olds spend 50-per cent of their time online viewing material that has been created and shared by themselves or their friends, " said Brady Rafuse, Level 3's European president.

"There has been a huge spike in demand, and sooner rather than later the industry will have to come to terms with the investment and workload that will be required to cope with it." You would not expect Rafuse to suggest that the backbone his company maintains is in immediate danger of being overwhelmed, but the facts speak for themselves. At the Amsterdam Internet Exchange which handles 20- per cent of Europe's web traffic the information flow grows at a rate of 7.4-per cent a month and shows no sign of slowing down. Traffic is doubling year-on-year and in 2007 the total amount of data it will handle is expected to be 500 times greater than that stored in all of the libraries in the US.

While the backbone providers keep a wary eye on the galloping proliferation of internet use, at a national level Britain's biggest provider echoes the need to keep tabs on this explosive growth. Even as the plaudits for making the UK one of the world's most broadband- connected countries continue to ring around it, BT is keen to kick- start a debate on the need for an even faster, newer and bigger digital infrastructure.