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Internet could be overburdened

a_unique_person said:
The internet is doing amazing work to cope with the abuse it gets. That doesn't mean it can cope with that abuse indefinitely.
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I'm saying that the abuse it gets now is because it is still using protocols and mechanisms designed for a "trusting" environment, which the modern internet is not.

A change of protocols and design methodology (eg email needs to have the cost-to-send with the sender, not the recipient as it is with SMTP) would alleviate a lot of it.
 
There are possible bottlenecks at several levels in the Internet infrastructure and it would depend on how traffic patterns change when many more people will be at home, as already mentioned by some others.

Peak hour is in the evening, so that won't change much if everybody connects at daytime. This indicates that the "local loop" won't have much trouble (the connection from your home to your ISP).

I also don't expect much more traffic to popular sites like Google or Facebook (or JREF :) ), I access google all the time from work too.

What could change is that many more people might be working from home. Our company uses a VPN infrastructure to secure your Internet connection when logging in to the company network. The VPN servers might be overloaded if too many people connect at once.

On the other hand during a pandemic wouldn't many people be too ill to connect anyway?

Another question: anybody working at an ISP or telco company? Would normal operations be heavily affected if many people fell ill at your company, or is most of it self-sustaining? That could be the heaviest risk in my opinion...
 
WildCat said:
Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner.

If McCain gets his way there eill be no incentive to increase capacity, just to charge higher prices for "premium" content. Create an artificial shortage so you can charge more.

And this is "Internet Freedom"!
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And the pirates will use this as their rallying cry... and mirrors to popular sites and all sorts of :rule10 to beat the system will pop up like so many dandelions on an ill kept lawn.:mgduh
 
GreNME said:
The internet is far too distributed and segmented to be overburdened as a whole, outside of complete obliteration of every traffic node out there. That doesn't mean it can't be severely limited, but the chances of that happening depend on how limited we're talking about, what the parameters of 'limited' are judged as, and how much raw traffic we'd be dealing with.
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The network protocols used on the internet - especially IP - were indeed designed for a distributed network with the possibility of routing every next packet differently. That was very forward thinking. However, the reality is quite different, AFAIK.

When the AMS-IX goes down, most of the Netherlands is shut off the internet. I experienced this a few months ago when only part of the AMS-IX was down and I lost connection for a few hours.

Australia is connected to the rest of the world by a cable to SE Asia, which accounts for 20% of the capacity, and a cable to the US which accounts for 80%. This hit home quite hard when the latter had a problem, a year ago. The UK has a likewise situation. The UK and Australia can be excused up to a point, being islands and it being quite pricey to lay cable on the bottom of the ocean, but the Dutch situation is quite ludicrous.
 
Fishstick said:
I'm saying that the abuse it gets now is because it is still using protocols and mechanisms designed for a "trusting" environment, which the modern internet is not.

A change of protocols and design methodology (eg email needs to have the cost-to-send with the sender, not the recipient as it is with SMTP) would alleviate a lot of it.
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The problem is, how do you get everyone to change from SMTP to something better?
 
This prediction cracked me up. Don't they realize all those telecommuters are on line at work anyway when they do come in?
 
skeptigirl said:
This prediction cracked me up. Don't they realize all those telecommuters are on line at work anyway when they do come in?
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I didn't think about that. I should have. Oh Lord but I've been taking the stupid pills again...:mgduh But I do worry about parents watching their kids around the Internet though. Some of that Interactive and WOW crap is bandwidth heavy to not mention risky for the youngsters if they aren't supervised.:boggled:
 
ddt said:
Australia is connected to the rest of the world by a cable to SE Asia, which accounts for 20% of the capacity, and a cable to the US which accounts for 80%. This hit home quite hard when the latter had a problem, a year ago.
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We have three cables now! A new 2.5Tbps cable went live three weeks ago. Not sure how much of that capacity is active yet, but it is already in use.

The UK has a likewise situation. The UK and Australia can be excused up to a point, being islands and it being quite pricey to lay cable on the bottom of the ocean, but the Dutch situation is quite ludicrous.
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Yeah, that's just bad planning.
 
ddt said:
The UK and Australia can be excused up to a point, being islands and it being quite pricey to lay cable on the bottom of the ocean, but the Dutch situation is quite ludicrous.
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The UK's not to bad. CANTAT-3, VSNL Transatlantic, Hibernia Atlantic, TAT-14, FLAG Atlantic 1, AC-,1 AC-2 amoung others. Various links out to other countries (eg FARICE-1 and SHEFA-2) and non transatlantic cables such as RIOJA-1, SEA-ME-WE 3 and VSNL Western Europe. Just look at this:

http://www.kisca.org.uk/Charts/Web_SWApproaches.pdf

I suspect the problem is more the amount of traffic going through the UK means than if something does go down a lot of traffic is looking for a new link.
 
ddt said:
The network protocols used on the internet - especially IP - were indeed designed for a distributed network with the possibility of routing every next packet differently. That was very forward thinking. However, the reality is quite different, AFAIK.

When the AMS-IX goes down, most of the Netherlands is shut off the internet. I experienced this a few months ago when only part of the AMS-IX was down and I lost connection for a few hours.

Australia is connected to the rest of the world by a cable to SE Asia, which accounts for 20% of the capacity, and a cable to the US which accounts for 80%. This hit home quite hard when the latter had a problem, a year ago. The UK has a likewise situation. The UK and Australia can be excused up to a point, being islands and it being quite pricey to lay cable on the bottom of the ocean, but the Dutch situation is quite ludicrous.
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Those are infrastructure problems, though. Egypt and parts of the Mid-East have similar bottlenecks due to poor teleco infrastructure, but even if more than one of them went down the internet will still work. What you're talking about are access and transmission issues that are even now still being worked on and improved.
 
Nosi said:
Some of that Interactive and WOW crap is bandwidth heavy to not mention risky for the youngsters if they aren't supervised.:boggled:
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WoW traffic from server to client is a continous 3 - 5kbyte/s, and other MMO's are similar. That's hardly bandwidth heavy, online FPS and other games with a more traditional model have the same kind of overhead.
 
Nosi said:
With all the people projected to be out sick with the flu or home telecommuting, there are fears that the Internet could be overburdened with all the traffic of telecommuters working from home and people who use the Internet for...recreation.

What failsafe is/are in place to keep the system from going splat like a Shetland pony under an 800 lb rider?
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I think this will be almost as big a disaster as y2k was.
 
email spam currently accounts for a large percentage of bandwidth waste on the internet (and is increasing at alarming rates). This is the worst offender and must be stopped. Sorry - if you actually saw the hundreds of spam emails you receive (or are intercepted at your ISP) every day, you'd be alarmed. I don't stop them and am currently receiving over spam 400 emails per day! Think about that for millions of people at hundreds of KB or several MB per day. I'm not resistant to capital punishment. ;)
 
kuroyume0161 said:
email spam currently accounts for a large percentage of bandwidth waste on the internet (and is increasing at alarming rates). This is the worst offender and must be stopped. Sorry - if you actually saw the hundreds of spam emails you receive (or are intercepted at your ISP) every day, you'd be alarmed. I don't stop them and am currently receiving over spam 400 emails per day! Think about that for millions of people at hundreds of KB or several MB per day. I'm not resistant to capital punishment. ;)
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Lock the spammers in a small room with a terminal and force them to read every spam they ever read out loud while eating rations of spam.
 
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