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When Will the Web Come To A Halt?

  • BBC News, Monday, June 18, 2007 10:45 AM
More frequently, we're seeing apocalyptic stories about cybercrime, net neutrality/censorship, and today, the looming Internet capacity threat. YouTube and other bandwidth-sucking streaming video and music providers might soon bring the Web to a standing halt, as the flood of data exchanged across the Internet increases and the capacity of "the pipes" do not.

A current report says there's been more high-speed fiber optic cable laid than we currently need, but at the end of the day, it's about routers being able to handle billions of bits of information. Meanwhile, the heavy demand on router links grows, and if a few major outposts are taken out through earthquakes, shark bites (yep), or cyber terrorism, traffic would find another way, but the entire infrastructure moves slower.

Blame it on the "YouTube generation" for wanting to stream video and download gigabytes of pirated (and in some cases legal) movies from Web-based file-sharing services. This is no longer the mid 1990s, when all users wanted to do was send a few emails. "In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails; so it's clearly very different," said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems.

Read the whole story at BBC News »

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