Mrs. Mecomber's Scrapbook Talking technology, computers, and the Internet… for the average computer user

The doomsayers are at it again. When was the Internet’s funeral… 4,5 years ago now? From the Times Online:

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource. However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems.

“With more people working or looking for work from home, or using their PCs more for cheap entertainment, demand could double in 2009,” said Ted Ritter, a Nemertes analyst. “At best, we see the [economic] slowdown delaying the fractures for maybe a year.”

In America, telecoms companies are spending £40 billion a year upgrading cables and supercomputers to increase capacity, while in Britain proposals to replace copper cabling across part of the network with fibreoptic wires would cost at least £5 billion.

Yet sites such as YouTube, the video-sharing service launched in 2005, which has exploded in popularity, can throw the most ambitious plans into disarray.

The amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000.

The extent of its popularity is indicated by the 100 million people who have logged on to the site to see the talent show contestant Susan Boyle in the past three weeks.

Another so-called “net bomb” being studied by Nemertes is BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch high-definition television on their computers. In February there were more than 35 million requests for shows and iPlayer now accounts for 5 per cent of all UK internet traffic.

I don’t see what all the hoopla is about. If there isn’t enough room for all that TV and video watching… well, remove the TV and video watching! While I am 100% against government regulation of the Internet, I have no problem with ISPs raising their prices for bandwidth usage (and by that, I mean REASONABLE bandwidth usage pricing), and the blocking of bandwidth-eating video/TV sites. The beauty of the Internet is that it has always been an informational portal. The problem has come because some folks have made it into an entertainment portal. The Internet is just not designed to be the TV set/movie screen/video player that it has morphed into being.

One other thing– I find this news report as something released with uncanny timing– for one, does the federally-mandated switch from analog to digital TV have anything to do with this dire news? Hmm.