Exaflood

Check out Taylor Frigon’s blog post, “A paradigm’s shift in the way you get information,” which links to a story in the Wall Street Journal by Esther Dyson entitled: “The Coming Ad Revolution.” Dyson’s column discusses major changes in advertising that have been on their way for years but which few people today even see coming. Frigon writes: The article outlines an impending paradigm shift in the way people find information, which will have a tremendous impact on the advertising business and those that support it. But this revolution in the way that people find information will impact more than just the ad industry. We wrote about some of the potential implications in the world of search two months ago Read More ›

In preparation for the “Exaflood” paper, I read the November 2007 paper by Nemertes Research — “The Internet Singularity Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web.” It is an exemplary supply-side work (low utilization rates signify inadequate bandwidth rather than lack of demand). Failure to invest in infrastructure will produce not a breakdown of the Internet but a breakdown of the innovation culture of the net that brought us YouTube et al. I recommend the paper to all as a guide to the prospects of our network processor and hollow router paradigms. It contains a number of obvious errors (dates reversed on charts (p.22), confusions between zettabits per second and petabits), and a “What me Read More ›

Bret Swanson and George Gilder predict that the U.S. Internet of 2015 will be at least 50 times larger than it was in 2006. Their report, “Estimating the Exaflood: The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet — A ‘zettabyte’ by 2015?,” estimates that annual totals for various categories of U.S. IP traffic in the year 2015. It projects: Movie downloads and P2P file sharing of 100 exabytes Internet video, gaming and virtual worlds of 200 exabytes Non-internet IPTV of 100 exabytes, and possibly much more Business IP Traffic of 100 exabytes Gilder notes that an exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes, or approximately 50,000 times the contents of the U.S. Library of Congress. This report expands Read More ›

Two links of interest: (1) The New York Times technology blog BITS takes up the Exaflood question here. and (2) Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic endorses Paul Krugman’s broadband vision that says the U.S. has fallen hideously behind other nations because of too little regulation. Here was my reply in the comments section: Hyper-regulation of telecom networks in the late 90s and early 2000s blocked investment and helped cause the telecom/tech crash. America fell far behind Korea and other Asian and European nations, with Korea by 2003 boasting some 40 times the per capita bandwidth of the U.S. Then the U.S. wised up, the FCC and state utility commissions relaxed or eliminated many of our dumb anti-investment regulations, and fiber-optic Read More ›

This is just one of a flurry of stories about a new Internet traffic study from Nemertes Research. Nemertes approaches the topic from a different angle than, say, the Cisco study, which projected growth of particular Net applications. Nemertes instead believes that many new applications and innovations are beyond our ability to predict with any degree of precision and thus uses estimates of future network capacity and utilization rates to arrive at traffic projections. The one thing we know for sure, they say, is that we will find ways to use up a certain large portion of new bandwidth, just as we find creative ways to use or even “waste” digital MIPS and storage. Nemertes’ approach is somewhat appealing on Read More ›

High definition is coming to YouTube.

Peter Huber tours the exotic locale of a teenager’s bedroom. There he finds the fiber-fed 3D digital trickles that are beginning to puncture the narrowband dike and feed the exaflood. Let’s not forget how rotten today’s Web really is. Amazon is useless if you love picking your way through books stacked high on tables, flipping pages and skimming dust jackets. Normal people don’t shop for groceries by clicking boxes on a meticulously prepared list; they make choices as they stroll down aisles packed with merchandise. Or, for an expert opinion on your so-called digital life, drag your teenager away from his Xbox to help you shop for a new minivan. Show him the neat video feature that takes you inside Read More ›

Verizon’s fiber-optic FiOS service will boost its high-definition content five-fold to 150 HD channels. VZ also says it has gotten a better response to its high-end 50 Mbps broadband offering and could move faster towards its goal of delivering 100 Mbps by reducing the number of homes served by each 2.4 Gbps GPON (passive optical network) node to 24.

…and pretty soon we’re talking real Internet traffic. On Monday I gave the keynote at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference in Orlando. I opened my talk by citing an amusing article by John Markoff of The New York Times from 1993. In that year, Gopher, an early Google of sorts, grew 400%. It retrieved an unimaginable “200 billion bytes a month — about 7 million newspaper pages.” Or about the size of today’s average PC hard-drive. “At the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Ill.,” the article continued, a new service that answers requests to an electronic library called the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in Read More ›

Professor Andrew Odlyzko has long been one of the key trackers of Internet traffic. See here his brand new website — called MINTS for Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies — dedicated to U.S. and global Internet trends.