The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Last year YouTube used as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in the year 2000. Five years ago, when the Internet economy burst after thousands of kilometres of fiber optic cable had been laid around the world, people were predicting that all of these potential connections would never be used. But no one predicted the explosion of things like podcasting, online video, music downloading, and photo sharing. Now some experts are predicting that in the next several years we will be running out of bandwidth and that consumers will begin to see massive slowdowns in service unless someone comes up with a solution. The problem is that traffic online shows no signs of retreating. For example, last week, AppleÕs iTunes music store became the largest retailer of music in the world, surpassing the sale of real CDs at Wal-Mart. Hundreds of millions of downloads of movies, photos and music Ð both legal and illegal Ð take place each day, and this worries many companies that are involved with the technical end of the Internet. In fact, over the last few weeks both Bell and Rogers have been found to be Òtraffic shapingÓ online. This is a pretty simple concept, actually. An Internet service provider sets up software that tracks the use of certain programs and websites by their users. When the companyÕs software finds a user is on a certain website, they can either slow them down or speed them up, depending on what they want. What this means for users is that if they are dealing with websites that their ISP does not like, their downloads may be slowed down, encouraging them to move to other sites and services, places that their ISP might have a relationship with. Then when people move over to these sites, ISPs can actually speed up their downloads, giving their data priority over anything else that is passing through. This all happens behind the scenes, all performed automatically by software and most times, users wonÕt even be aware that it is going on. Traffic shaping violates ideas of network neutrality. This principle states that all traffic online is equal, that ISPs are basically pipes that should have no say about what their clients use or look at when they are online. But ISPs are first of all worried about the massive explosion of traffic. Huge numbers of new users downloading large multimedia files are swamping their networks. Just as importantly, ISPs are also finding an opportunity to make money by creating advertising and service relationships with other sites and services. When I first got Internet service, it was limited to about 28.8 mbs. It was pretty slow, and often pictures took almost a minute to load. A webpage like you see today, with banner ads, built-in videos and animations running across the page, would have been basically impossible to design because so few people could have made use of it. But now, with so many people getting high-speed access, we can get almost anything we want online. So whatÕs next in webpages? Pages that are live? Pages that show streaming live video and audio feeds all the time? Pages that link us with data that changes on the fly as numbers and news stories are updated? Or will the entire idea of a webpage disappear completely and turn into something else? As long as we donÕt run out of bandwidth, we will see the next generations of things very soon. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
