The Internet is 75 times larger than it was just five years ago, and shows no sign of stopping until every last person on the planet has, effectively, infinite bandwidth. Despite the burden of surging traffic and attacks on its very foundations, the internet has yet to crash. But give the world a chance; it’s working on it.
Spurred by a new wave of Skype-linked families, Hulu-watching flash mobs, and HD- video downloaders, global internet traffic is likely to quadruple by 2012. That’s an internet 75 times larger than it was just five years ago. It will be generating 27 exabytes—nearly 7 billion DVDs worth—of data each month. Start stacking those DVDs on January 1, and you’d be at the moon by tax time.
Furthermore, most of those DVDs would be full of video. In 2008 alone, traffic generated by YouTube video was more than the whole sum of traffic crossing the U.S. internet backbone in 2000, according to Cisco. Right now, streaming video’s slice of the pie is estimated at 25 percent, and is expected to account for a full 90 percent of global traffic by 2012.
Creak though it may under the weight of new traffic, the internet is holding its own against this onslaught of new data. Internet service providers are simply ramping up their infrastructure upgrade plans in response to the traffic growth. As a result, international internet backbone utilization actually declined in between mid-2007 and mid-2008, according to the communications analysts at TeleGeography.
A big part of making this crush bearable is the continued development of content delivery networks by companies like Akamai. Their software and systems accelerate the delivery of their corporate customers’ Web content by putting copies of those files closer to the people requesting them. It's a little bit like delivering a truck full of Coke to your grocery store rather than insisting you fetch a cold one from Atlanta every time you get the itch for a soda, explains Akamai director David Belson.
Wireless broadband in the US is caught in a crossfire. Two new technologies, capable of delivering five to six times the speed of 3G networks currently used in the U.S. are battling for dominance. Verizon Wireless embraced one of the standards, called Long-Term Evolution, while Sprint Nextel choose the competitor, WiMax. Other mobile operators are simply fine-tuning their current networks to wring out every bit of speed possible without having to install the added equipment the newest technologies would require.
In the long run, improving broadband service in the face of a massive traffic increase comes down to a series of rather mundane infrastructure improvements. Last year, for instance, Comcast deployed new software that doubled download speeds for about 30 percent of its broadband customers. Internationally, homes in Japan, the Ukraine, and the Netherlands are starting to get optical fiber connections capable of delivering gigabit- speed connections.
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