Web Video Clogging the Tubes?
According to a New York Times article from last week, the unprecedented surge in web video, social networking and other bandwidth-hogging devices and applications in recent years has created fears that a significant internet slowdown could be imminent.
Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
A study that was released last fall warned that if the current rate of growth continues, “user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011.” And the only feasible way to free up more space is increased investment — big business buying up more bandwidth. Otherwise, the average user will experience longer download times, interruptions in streaming video and other supremely frustrating deficiencies that could result from “clogged tubes.”
But the dilemma raises another question: What if President Bush didn’t misspeak when he referred to “the internets?” That is to say, what if the Net that we’re using isn’t the only internet? According to CNET, the possibility of another or of several other internets running parallel to (or separate from) the existing Net is quite real:
The military has probably already built an alternate Internet — if not more than one, and it’s looking all too possible that the Net itself is about to fracture into a mess of cliques, privately owned networks, and glorified Usenets.
A mess of cliques? Who are the cool kids? Hard to say, and there’s also no telling how far off the integration of several internets might be. The only certainty is that all of these advancements and expansions are going to pose some serious political hurdles.
