September 19, 2008 -  How Jabber Fits into Cisco's Unified Communications Plan [1]

 

September 19, 2008 - Build a Solid Virtual Foundation [2] -

September 19, 2008 - Interop: Green IT under spotlight [3] -

September 19, 2008 - Focus on virtualization as financial world shakes [4]

September 18, 2008 - Interop: What Are Your Datacenter Metrics? [5]

September 17, 2008 - [6]Privacy Issues Darken Cloud Computing Plans [7] -

September 16, 2008 - Don't let your users set UC strategy [8] -

September 11, 2008 - IT can't let users drive mobile unified communications strategy [9]

September 9 , 2008 - Companies Adopting Mobility Strategies See 60% Increase in ... [10]

September 8 , 2008 - Beware of UC Security Threats [11]

September 3, 2008 - Internet capacity growing along with traffic [12]

August 26, 2008 - What a Verizon-Google deal would mean [13]

August 25, 2008 - Unified Communications Still Promising, Still Complex [14]

August 21, 2008 - Storage: New Technology Helps CIOs Save and Manage Data [15]

August 21, 2008 - Software-based unified communications help flower wholesaler blossom [16]

August 11, 2008 - Social networking at the branch [17]

August 1, 2008 - Another Charge up the Hill ... [18] [19]

July 31, 2008 - Wanted: A National Broadband Policy [20]

July 30, 2008 - What are critical issues with VoIP service? [21]

July 30, 2008 - As SaaS takes off, mobile browsers start to matter more [22]

July 29, 2008 - The trend is toward centralization [23]

July 23, 2008 - VPNs: Answers to Six Burning Questions [24]

July 23, 2008 - IBM Sharpens Weapon for UC Battle [25]

July 22, 2008 - Automation of branch management picking up steam [26]

July 16, 2008 - Building a new data center? Think WAN [27]

July 14, 2008 - Branch-in-a-box simplicity and security: 5 simple questions [28]

July 8, 2008 - Why Integration Is a Good Reason - and Possibly the ROI - for SOA - [29]

July 7, 2008 - Color Your IT Strategy Green - [30]

June 30, 2008 - Group suggests an Exchange to Trade Internet Capacity [31] -

June 30, 2008 - Is Now the Time for Unified Communications? Voicemail Upgrades May Tip the Scales [32]

June 27, 2008 - Wireless data standards: Important to business customers - [33]

[34]

June 26, 2008 - UC Security [35]

June 26, 2008 - Study: So Far, So Good with SOA - [36]

June 26, 2008 - Security Podcast Series: Information Security [37]

 
 

June 22, 2008 -Internet Gridlock [38] -

June 19, 2008 - Mystery and Margin [39] -

June 17, 2008 - Mobile internet is taking off [40]

June 17, 2008 - Unified Communications: Slowly Gaining Ground [41]

June 17, 2008 - Will Enterprises Buy Hosted UC? [42]

June 15, 2008 - Minnesota: An Internet backwater soon? [43]

June 13, 2008 - Those Creeping Unified Communications [44]

June 10, 2008 - Studies Show that Unified Communications IS Gaining [45]

June 7, 2008 - Next Big Wireless: LTE [46]

June 6, 2008 - Hosted VOIP Services. Is it for you? [47]

June 5, 2008 - Microsoft OCS Powerful but Needs Third Parties for Complete Solution [48]

June 4, 2008 - How Nortel Networks is Getting It's Groove Back [49]

May 22, 2008 - Analysts Predict Gloomy Future for ISPs [50]

April 29, 2008 - The Essence of Collaborative Technologies [51]

March 13, 2008

Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam [52]

By STEVE LOHR
[53]

New York Times

Caution: Heavy Internet traffic ahead. Delays possible.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging
growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat,
according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems
mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and
entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer
games.

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 [54], consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm
projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network
capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a
technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the
Internet?”

But the Internet traffic surge represents more a looming challenge
than an impending catastrophe. Even those most concerned are not
predicting a lights-out Internet crash. An individual user, they say,
would experience Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download
speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less
useful or enjoyable.

“The Internet doesn’t collapse, but there would be a growing class
of stuff you just can’t do online,” said Johna Till Johnson, president
of Nemertes Research, which predicted the bandwidth squeeze by 2011,
anticipating that demand will grow by 100 percent or more a year.

Others are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota [55], estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems [56], the big network equipment maker.

That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for
handling Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well.
The router computers for relaying data get faster, fiber optic
transmission gets better and software for juggling data packets gets
smarter.

“The 50 percent growth is high. It’s huge, but it basically
corresponds to the improvements that technology is giving us,” said
Professor Odlyzko, a former AT&T [57] Labs researcher. Demand is not likely to overwhelm the Internet, he said.

The question of the problem’s severity is more than a technical one,
since it will affect the shape and cost of the nation’s policy on
broadband infrastructure, a matter that is expected to attract
political attention after a new administration takes over in
Washington.

While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that
it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed
networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of
innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American
investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing
competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed
Internet access a priority.

“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Professor Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay [58] or Amazon [59] come from?”

The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly
local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together.
The worries about digital traffic congestion are not really about the
Internet’s main trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways.
Instead, the problem is close to home — the capacity of neighborhood
switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing
high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or
more.

That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country.
They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government
subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending
a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is
more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high
speed” service in California.

“When I mention my own service, people here shake their heads in
disbelief,” said Mr. Baker, who is a board member of the Internet
Society, a nonprofit organization that helps guide Internet standards
and policy.

In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising
Internet traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable
and telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner
of the Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a
number of forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video
applications on Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more
Internet-enabled devices like cellphones, and shortages of electrical
power for data centers in places like San Francisco.

“We’re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,” said
Mr. Pozar, whose company’s data centers support Web sites for customers
ranging from museums to social networks. “And upgrades needed in data
centers are going to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that
all the excess capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has
been gobbled up.” The pace of future demand is the big uncertainty
surrounding the Internet traffic challenge, and how fast people will
adopt emerging technologies is notoriously difficult to foresee.

In the aftermath of the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000,
there was a glut of capacity — so-called dark fiber, strung around the
world and then left dormant. Now demand is catching up with that
supply. In its prediction of more than 100 percent annual growth,
Nemertes, a telecommunications research firm, assumes brisk use of new
innovations like high-end videoconferencing, known as telepresence,
which corporations are beginning to embrace as an alternative to
costly, time-consuming travel.

If this technology becomes a consumer product in the next few years,
as some analysts predict, Internet traffic could spike even more
sharply.

Slick video chats are something that William Bentley, a 13-year-old
New Yorker, would like to see. He is fairly representative of the next
generation of digital consumer: He has made and posted his own YouTube
videos, subscribes to YouTube channels, enjoys multiplayer games like
World of Warcraft and Unreal Tournament, and downloads music and videos.

Asked what he would want next from the Internet, he replied, “It
would be nice to have everybody always right there — just click and you
could see them clearly and talk to them.”

That sort of service is certainly going to require more bandwidth
and more investment, with higher costs across the spectrum of the
Internet ecosystem that includes cable and telecommunications carriers,
Internet companies, media Web sites and even consumers. AT&T, for
one, said last week that it would spend $1 billion this year — double
its 2006 expenditures — to expand its overseas infrastructure.

But even if investment lags behind, there will be no Internet
blackout. Indeed, the Internet has survived predictions of collapse in
the past, most notably by Robert M. Metcalfe, a networking pioneer and
entrepreneur, who in a 1995 magazine column warned of a “catastrophic
collapse” of the Internet in 1996. There were service problems, but
nothing like Mr. Metcalfe predicted, and on stage at a conference in
1997 he ate his words.

“The Internet has proven to be wonderfully resilient,” said Mr.
Metcalfe, who is now a venture capitalist. “But the Internet is
vulnerable today. It’s not that it will collapse, but that
opportunities will be lost.”