Exaflood Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Last year (2007) I was hired to help lobby against “Network Neutrality” and wrote a series of position papers and handouts. Following is one FAQ that I wrote as a handout for the US Congress.
The basic argument is that future Internet demand will be enormous, an accordingly enormous capital investment in Internet infrastructure will be required to meet it, that Industry is doing this just fine, and therefore Government should leave well enough alone.
The argument for “Network Neutrality” is essentially that big purveyors of web resources (like Disney, Go ogle, etc.) should have equal access to retail consumers bandwidth and that no on-line resource should be prioritized.
This argument has its roots in an earlier internet peering dispute between network (backbone plus access) providers and collocation (or web-hosting) facilities. The argument then was whether the Internet was the road or the destination.
References:
1. What is the “exaflood?”
Answer:
Exaflood is a term coined by Bret Swanson in his article, The Coming Exaflood, which ran in the Wall Street Journal on January 20, 2007. The term takes its name from “exabyte” which is a unit of data storage equivalent to one quintillion bytes, or 1×1018 bytes. To better understand this, a single digital character (a letter, number, etc.) is one byte. Modern computers use storage devices with capacities of many megabytes (one million bytes, MB) or gigabytes (one billion bytes, GB). An exabyte (EB) is one billion gigabytes.
The term exaflood as introduced by Bret Swanson and adopted by leading industry analysts refers to the large and growing amount of data, due largely to the exponential increase of streaming and downloadable video, audio, photo and other bandwidth-intensive applications, that is continually generated and transmitted over the Internet’s backbone.
- YouTube uses as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet consumed in the year 2000.
- Internet users upload 65,000 new videos and download 100 million files on a daily basis – a 1,000% increase from just one year ago.
- Experts say more than a billion songs each day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format.
- IDC estimated that in 2006, 161 exabytes of digital information were created and copied – this is equal to three million times all the books ever written. IDC further estimated the amount of information created and copied in 2010 will surge more than six fold to 988 exabytes – a compound annual growth rate of 57%.
2. When will the exaflood occur? When will we begin seeing data rates at this level?
Answer:
- The exaflood is occurring now. Internet traffic estimates from the University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center show that as of December 2006, the Internet was handling 700 million gigabytes of traffic a month or 0.7 exabytes.
- And, while we currently have bandwidth capacity to handle today’s bandwidth consumption needs, new usage and growth rates will quickly use this excess capacity. New applications such as streaming video (NBC, FoxNews, CNN, etc.) as well as video sharing sites such as YouTube are using bandwidth at previously unforeseen levels and the rate of growth of applications such as this and the number of users using these applications is growing at tremendous rates.
3. What benefits will we see as a result of all of this new data being transmitted over the Internet?
Answer:
Telemedicine – While the use of Internet applications within the healthcare industry has grown, particularly in areas of billing, medical information distribution, and insurance communications, the use of the Internet for medical diagnosis and treatment (telemedicine) has risen more slowly. Telemedicine in practice is generally broken into two categories: real time or synchronous and store-and-forward or asynchronous. Synchronous telemedicine may involve procedures as complex as robotic surgery or as simple as a video-conferencing based gait analysis with the diagnostician remotely located from the patient. Other examples of synchronous telemedicine examination methods include the tele-otoscope which allows a remote physician to ‘see’ inside a patient’s ear or a tele-stethoscope allows the consulting remote physician to hear the patient’s heartbeat. Medical specialties conducive to this kind of consultation include psychiatry, internal medicine, rehabilitation, cardiology, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology and neurology.
Asynchronous telemedicine involves acquiring medical data in the form of medical images (MRI, etc.) or biosignals and transmitting the data to a doctor or medical specialist at a convenient time for assessment offline. Dermatology, radiology, and pathology are common specialties that are conducive to asynchronous telemedicine.
Telemedicine is most beneficial for populations living in isolated communities and remote regions and is currently being applied in virtually all medical domains.
The focus of telemedicine has mainly been consultative, meaning a general practitioner consulting a specialist or a specialist consulting another specialist. Monitoring a patient at home using known devices like blood pressure monitors and transferring the information to a caregiver is a fast growing emerging service. These remote monitoring solutions have a focus on current high morbidity chronic diseases. In developing countries a new way of practicing telemedicine is emerging better known as Primary Remote Diagnostic Visits whereby devices examine a patient whereby a connected doctor residing in another location virtually examines the patient and treat him.
Compared to some of the more bandwidth-intensive consumer applications such as online gaming or Video-on-Demand, telemedicine represents an area of rich social and consumer benefit with relatively low bandwidth requirements. It is estimated that telemedicine applications require (on average) a connection rate of as low as 110 kbps and as high as 7,000 kbps. However, the bandwidth needs of these applications, unlike those of gaming or VoD, are sensitive and critical. In terms of economic benefit, a Criterion Economics study estimated that the consumer benefit of telemedicine would reach $20 billion with only 50% broadband penetration and $40 billion with universal broadband penetration.
Additional benefits from this new exabyte-based Internet include expansion of distance learning programs whereby students from remote or rural areas can benefit from educational resources and take part in educational opportunities that were previously unavailable.
Finally, on a more basic and everyday level, consumers are already seeing the advantage offered by exaflood-based applications by way of Triple Play services and consumer choice in areas previously dominated by one or a select few service providers. Consumers today, using robust broadband connections, can receive telephony services from non-telecommunications companies, TV programming from non-TV companies and Internet connectivity from a wider array of providers. The new competition and market expansion has resulted in new services, enhanced features provided on old services and price competition in markets that were formerly dominated by a single provider. However, these new consumer choices come at the cost of the growing exaflood of data that is transmitted over the existing Internet backbone and that is consuming bandwidth at ferocious rates.
4. Is the Internet ready for the exaflood? How will we know if the network isn’t capable of supporting exaflood data levels?
Answer:
Telecommunication networks require continual maintenance and upgrade to keep up with the flood of data that currently exists and that is growing at an exponential rate. Maintenance and upgrades occur at all stages of the network: backbone, ISPs, so-called “last mile” or “last 100 feet” (connections from residences and small businesses to network connectivity), and residential and business networks. Network upgrades include new computers, routers, fiber optics and software to make sure data get where they need to go as fast as possible.
An inability to stay ahead of this data flood will result in slower data transmission speeds, much like traffic jams on a traditional highway. This reduction in data transmission speeds, known as latency, will cause errors and problems for many broadband-sensitive applications including video streaming (telemedicine, distance learning, VOD), and VOIP (particularly VOIP systems found within residential and small business locations). With the rapid rise in VOIP adoption, particularly by small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and the size of the SMB VOIP market projected to reach over $416 million in 2007, a minor latency impact on VOIP applications alone could have dramatic consequences for a large part of the U.S. economy.
5. What can be done to prevent the exaflood?
Answer:
It is imperative to note that we do NOT want to prevent the exaflood. The benefits of having broadband connections to as many U.S. homes and businesses as possible far outweigh any negatives. The benefits of the new technologies being developed and new applications that require high quality broadband connections vastly outweigh the cost and efforts required to maintain our current high speed network capacity. Not only do consumers and small businesses benefit from new applications such as VOIP and IPTV, rural communities will be able to take advantage of new applications such as telemedicine applications where medical specialists working miles or even continents away can view patient data via video, MRI, etc. and provide diagnosis and expertise that otherwise would not have been available. Likewise, universities and educational institutions are currently just beginning to take advantage of broadband applications that allow students and teachers to work together and communicate across state and national borders thereby providing educational access and enrichment in ways not previously envisioned. These applications, and the many new applications and technologies that are only now just beginning to be developed will require high quality high-speed connectivity that must be maintained and provided beyond our current capabilities.
In addition, increased broadband penetration and availability increases the ability and likelihood of U.S. workers to take advantage of telecommuting options, if even on a part-time basis. According to the National Technology Readiness Survey (July 2006), if everyone who could took full advantage of telecommuting, the reduction in miles driven would save $3.9 billion a year in fuel and the time savings would be equal to 470,000 jobs — reducing our dependence on foreign oil, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.
Failing to maintain and continue to upgrade the broadband networks that we currently use and rely upon will prevent the exaflood by causing such dramatic latency and data transmission “traffic jams” that continued reliance upon broadband connections will become unrealistic.
6. What is dark fiber? Can the dark fiber be simply “turned on?” Won’t this alleviate the coming exaflood’s data transmission needs? What happened to all the fiber that was laid during the Internet “bubble” years – 1998 – 2001?
Answer:
Some people estimate that as much as 97% of the fiber optic lines that were laid in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s currently lie dormant or “dark.” There are two main problems with this over-simplified estimate on how much fiber currently exists for use in meeting our growing data transmission needs.
First, while much of the fiber lines laid over the past five to ten years is currently underutilized, there are real and firm costs to activating these lines. New equipment (switches, multiplexers, routers, etc.) must be purchased and installed in order to utilize the existing data lines. This new equipment and the professional staff to install and manage the equipment require funding from the hundreds of private network operators who operate the vast number of networks that make up the Internet.
Second, while the existing network, with upgrades and continued maintenance, may be able to support our near-term data transmission needs, the rate at which our data traffic grows and the rate at which that rate grows are so dramatic that even with an existing surplus broadband networks could be running at capacity within the next 5 to 10 years. Additionally, needs must be met in order to continually upgrade and maintain the data networks including new power sources, better and increased security and personnel to manage the growing networks. Each of these needs, in turn, brings new costs to the equation and require additional and continued investment.
8. Isn’t the problem really at the end points of the network, not the middle of the pipes?
Answer:
While it’s true that much has been made of the connectivity problem that faces many residential and small business (SMB) customers in the so-called “last 100 feet” of connectivity between their home or office and their Internet provider’s high-speed networks, the dramatic increase in bandwidth utilization and the rate at which it’s growing, will impact not only home and SMB Internet users and their relatively lower speed connections, but will also impact commercial networks with their high speed connections as well.
9. Haven’t we heard this before? Isn’t someone always saying the “Internet’s going to break” but it never does?
Answer:
With any large and critically important utility such as the Internet or power grid, etc., estimates on growth rates and true capacity planning are difficult at best. The fact remains that the Internet has been an extremely powerful and empowering resource for U.S. businesses and individuals and has become an intrinsic part of the fabric of the U.S. economy. Likewise, as our reliance on Internet-based services and products has increased, our utilization and data transmission needs have grown at rates unseen with any other utility or media in U.S. history and this growth rate is only increasing. While it is difficult to determine the exact data transmission rates and exact amount of data capacity available within the network, it is not hard to determine the importance and positive impact the Internet has and continues to have within the lives of Americans and the U.S. economy.