Thanks to Slashdot, I think I’ve found the source of the badly mangled story from Australia I reported from yesterday: Nemertes Research, which is quoted in this Times Online article. (It would have been easier had Seven News just mentioned the name of the research group in their original coverage.)
And it’s a shame too, because it deserves to be taken more seriously than “I thought Cyberspace just came from the air” – now that the original study has been located, it is, in fact, serious.
To sum up: Nemertes believes that predicted demand for bandwidth will outstrip the predicted capacity of the Internet infrastructure, and will do so within the next couple of years, making the Internet unsuitable for business purposes.
Because the idea of an “exaflood” has been used before by non-independent think tanks, paid by vested interests before, I approached the idea with some skepticism, but Nemertes Research knows what they’re doing, and as far as I can tell, did a very methodical job.
Granted, Nemertes, like most think tanks, is in the future predicting business to some extent, and even if they’re coming to the best conclusion that can be obtained from the information they have now, there is no such thing as an unavoidable problem with network infrastructure. In fact, this is a problem with an obvious solution: Increase the capacity of Internet infrastructure to keep up with the demand. If demand increases exponentially and investment in infrastructure increases linearly, then yes, it’s time for exponential investment in infrastructure.
I’ll leave future prediction to Karnak the Magnificant. But what I can say is that the possibility of Internet brownouts just serves as a reminder not to place all of your infrastructure out on the cloud – that leased lines and private WANs that your company can monitor and control from end to end make it easier to retain and improve network performance than relying on the Internet.
Thanks for doing some more digging on this – I had a similar reaction to the article, but couldn’t find the actual report. Can you please post the title or the URL of the actual report?
Also check out from /. (Slashdot) this article which argues against SAAS (software as a service) on the grounds of freedom, not necessarily security, bandwidth and all that jazz.
Basically they say having software as a service is like having to go through your nanny to play with your child.
here is the original article slashdot was talking about
Thanks for digging. I would like to point your readers to the source study and FAQ:
FAQ: http://nemertes.com/internet_infrastructure_study_2009_frequently_asked_questions_faq
Study: http://www.nemertes.com/studies/internet_interrupted_why_architectural_limitations_will_fracture_net
We launched into this research in 2007 since no organization had independently modeled potential Internet supply and demand. And, since ISPs refuse to share their demand and capacity numbers the only option is to model.
Regards,
Ted Ritter
Nemertes Research