The Bandwidth Challenge

There is a number of problems that modern Internet development is facing. One of them started somewhere at the time we started "solving" the Y2K problem. At the moment, it wasn't a problem, but a major development - the broadband. The period of first dot-com bubble was when businessmen invested a lot of money into development of telecom industry, mainly to create a huge broadband infrastructure. With the amounts invested it grew faster than bamboo forest. The speeds were raising, the prices lowering.

Although it wasn't long until the bubble burst and it took the Mississippi-sized stream of telecom money and made it into a tiny torrent. The problem began to be more serious when the word "torrent" started meaning something other than a small amount of moving water. The new technologies, like BitTorrent and Flash video quickly started make use all of the available infrastructure, that unwisely invested money created during the dot-com era.

This is the exact reason why we now face things, like bandwidth caps and problems with cheap and fast Internet access even in cities, like San Francisco. The cables were built too fast, they had a lot of room to spare (available bandwidth) and now they're developing at a normal pace (maybe even slower due to recession), but at the same time, the amount of things we can make available online is ever growing - videos, photos... things like unlimited storage in the cloud. All of these things require bandwidth, that is there, but not for long.

The symptoms of the upcoming bandwidth crisis were there long ago, right when providers started issuing bandwidth caps, but today marks passing somewhat even more interesting milestone.

Remember that old joke that nothing has more speed in terms of Gigabytes per second per mile as a falling closet full of hard drives? Guess what, it's not really a joke anymore. Today, Amazon, the biggest provider of storage/computing in the cloud announced the Import/Export feature, that is basically translates to Plain English as: "Send us you hard drive via mail and we copy it to our storage, returning you the device in a matter of a week, because if you want to copy terabytes of data - it's much faster than copying it via Internet."

While it seems like a very reasonable feature, one has to ask himself - why Amazon, probably the biggest provider of cloud services, bothers to implement such non-automated service, requiring manual labor and that targets only small amount of it's current users? Something tells me Amazon analysts come up with some bad conclusions about the bandwidth.

Of course, I can be wrong about the motivation for this particular decision, but the fact that bandwidth crisis is coming is undeniable. That's why YouTube started imposing limits on some of Asian viewers. What would it mean for regular bloggers? Well, less YouTube, less podcasting, more text. Hollywood would probably be really happy with that crisis too - no more file sharing of illegal movies and music.

Slava V is the author of many sites, among which the URLs.seelf, the small automated sites grouping and monitoring service, with one of the categories monitored being Web 2.0.

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