Hattix

It’s been touted so long that it has its own catchphrase. “Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted”, a term used derisively whenever any claim of anything that would harm the ‘net arises.

In the late ’90s, it was legislation crafted by ignorant lawmakers which outlawed vast swathes of online activities or technology. In the mid ’90s, it was a fear of running out of bandwidth, subscribers were signing up in such numbers that every three months the number of ‘net connected people was doubling.

As 1999 turned to 2000 and the dotcom bubble burst quite amusingly, various ‘experts’ claimed that the Internet was not viable for commercial operations, yet Google and Amazon, starting out as academic experiments and online bookstores respectively, have become corporate behemoths with valuations in the high billions.

The fickle nature of the net claims its casualties, however. Yahoo, once the darling of the web, saw its marketshare obliterated by a combination of MSN Messenger in the IM space and Google in the search space. Altavista, formerly the king of search engines, is now a little used curiousity next to the mighty Google.

So when we get alarmist re-runs of the Internet’s imminent death, it’s quite easy to turn a disbelieving eye.

The gist this time is that the ‘last mile’ is becoming too much of a problem. In 1998, the Internet became the World Wide Wait as users stuck on 56k modems managed to overwhelm websites full of graphics but this time it’s not the websites being overwhelmed, but the users themselves. The feed to the home is usually piggybacked on fibre or copper originally intended for television or telephone and it is these links which are becoming inadequate.

User generated content, such as what makes up the entirety of YouTube is growing exponentially and the bandwidth available to the home is not. BBC’s iPlayer has become so successful that many ISPs in Britain are throttling it back during the day, artificially slowing it down so it doesn’t clog their networks.

There are two key points of congestion to consider. Firstly, especially in the UK, most ISPs do not own any of their own infrastructure. Service providers like TalkTalk don’t own a single router, instead buying capacity from other service providers such as Tiscali or BT. Wanadoo have, even in their early Freeserve days, been a customer of Planet Online. It’s good business sense to buy as little capacity as possible, so the ISPs are deliberately throttling users during the day and even disconnecting heavier users.

BT, for example, market their “ideal for families” plan with a pathetic 5GB per month allowance. One child on YouTube over a rainy weekend can use that entire 5GB in just the weekend. Heavier users still, such as myself, can burn through 5GB in hours. With the advent of high definition content and services such as the BBC iPlayer, the end user bandwidth use is only going to get bigger.

This conveniently brings us to the next key congestion consideration: The last mile. A standard BT DSL link touted as “up to 8Mbps” is nothing of the kind, most users achieve between 3Mbps and 6Mbps. Even worse is that the upstream speed is a worthless 400kbps (448kbps, but ATM overhead ‘wastes’ one part of every nine), not even half of one Mbps. Wondered why uploading that video to YouTube was so slow? That’s why. Even the new ADSL2+ services, offering “up to 24Mbps” or 12Mbps are not any faster, usually offering only 400-600kbps upstream, let alone not improving download speed at all for anyone who already doesn’t get 6Mbps or more.

Cable’s even worse for many users, while it can theoretically go much faster, it is limited by the number of subscribers on one cable loop, usually an entire street or estate. A single fibre cable can perhaps handle 100Mbps or even less if it’s being loaded with many TV channels. A copper cable is a bit worse. Divide that up by the 8Mbps being offered to most cable subscribers and you have a grand total of twelve people who can use the service at full speed. Add a thirteenth and the speed drops. Most residential cable loops have fifty to two hundred subscribers.

The last mile connection just isn’t getting any faster or any more spacious anywhere near quick enough to keep up with demand. Is it going to be a crunch? It’s too early to tell but signs are there that over 2009-2010, the web will become the World Wide Wait yet again as the limits of DSL and cable become the proverbial brick wall awaiting the unwary driver.