From: Fred Baker [mailto:fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com]
I read in the paper this morning that the "Web" is running
out of bandwidth. The article quoted Metcalf and others and
their predictions of the death of the Internet, and noted
that Bob finally blenderized his columns in front of an
audience. My company figured in the article. So did the
advent of video content, which requires significantly more
bandwidth and significantly lower loss rates than more
traditional voice services or TCP-based applications. Had the
author had a clue, s/he would have said something about the
Internet once again changing its fundamental service, from
enabling terminal service, to moving files using FTP and
Network News, to moving smaller files using SMTP and HTTP, to
basic audio services, to peer- to-peer file sharing, and now
to video. Not that the old goes away right away, but we add
on and the old becomes less important.
I think the author has it 180 degrees wrong.
The Internet is not running out of bandwidth, it is the improvement in
bandwidth that is the driver here, the Internet is now within reach of
supporting full definition video. The market demand for high definition is
growing. So demand outstrips supply for a short while. The same thing happened
in the early days of the Web, when embedded images were first plonked into
Mosaic the Internet bandwidth was not sufficient to support them. The whole of
CERN was sitting off a pipe thinner than some non-IETFers have running into
their house (yes I know some folk have an OC 192 into their house, I remember
when having a personal T1 was considered having won the bandwidth wars).
At the end of the day we can probably be confident that a saturation point for
Internet bandwidth as far as user applications goes will come when we have
enough bandwidth to saturate each of the five human senses. There might well be
other uses beyond that of course but there will definitely be some breakpoint
there.
The bigger challenge is how we put this bandwidth in the hands of a billion
plus users without having collosal abuse issues. If the Internet pipe into your
home has enough bandwidth to support live high definition video you have the
ability to send one heck of a lot of spam.
The changes I see are not fundamental, Fred is entirely correct in pointing out
that we have always had certain types of complexity in the core. The
differences are subtler, of degree, of balance. The scales that tipped one way
in 1980 tip in a different direction today.
Clark expected this of course, that is why the core message of the E2E paper
might be summed up by J.J.Watson's mantra: Think!
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