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

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

"The growth of services such as peerto-peer video sharing has been staggering, increasing at a rate no-one could have predicted, " said Angus Flett, director of product management at BT Wholesale.

"At present we have sufficient capacity, but this is a big issue that will only get more serious as time goes by. It's not simply a question of building bigger pipes, we have to prioritise needs and come up with a strategy that strikes the right balance between investment and service." That investment is already under way.

BT has begun a GBP1 billion 21st-century networks programme in Scotland which will bring access to wholesale broadband services with speeds of up to 24Mb/s to 50-per cent of the UK and around 570,000 Scots from the beginning of 2008.

The strategy which includes all 1070 exchanges in Scotland will cover rural areas as well as towns and cities. It is scheduled to be completed by 2011 and is the first in the world to attempt to bring next generation network services to everyone, regardless of where they live.

All of which is great, but raises the question of how we will survive in the meantime. It is very unlikely that people will be prepared to wait another four years to sample the full potential delights of the internet age. Despite acknowledging the demands this will place on an already creaking internet, however, many in the industry say that advancing technology will enable the global network to continue at full operational speed.

"There is absolutely no way that the web will fall over. Companies like ours have spent too much money on it to allow that to happen, " said Gordon Thomson, Cisco's Scottish director. "I have total confidence in technology's ability to keep improving the efficiency with which information is channelled through the internet. Some ISPs might experience a slow-down as the volume of subscribers overwhelms them, but overall experience shows that the industry will constantly come up with better ways of handling and improving the traffic flow."

THOMSON backs up this view with examples such as Cisco's own CRSI system, which after being introduced in 2004 enabled the company's engineers to increase the data volume existing lines were capable of handling by over 700-per cent.

With the company already working on improvements and its many competitors similarly focused on the problem of throughput, he maintains that while the issue of proliferating internet use provides a major challenge, it is certainly not insurmountable.

It seems that while the internet might not fall over completely, it is certainly in grave risk of slowing down. YouTube alone accounts for vast amounts of bandwidth use as thousands of Britons access amusing videos from across the Atlantic. With an increasing welter of business activity jostling for position across the same sub-sea cables, many commentators believe that before very long, anybody who wants to maintain today's high broadband speeds will have to pay extra to do so.

"The internet is the same as the highway system. There is a limit to how much traffic you can channel down the M25 before it grinds to a halt, and sooner or later you will have to direct some of it onto the minor country roads, " said Guy. "This process will be replicated on the web. Before long service providers will have to examine the activity on their networks and decide how to prioritise it. Perhaps they will see business information as most important or maybe it will be video. Either way, within two years I believe that in order to guarantee first-class levels of service, customers will have to pay more." This is a controversial view that strikes at the very heart of the democratic ideal of the web, a medium to which most people believe you should have equal access irrespective of your ability to pay.