Telecommunications Threatened By Web Congestion
Many Internet service providers are beginning to consider controlling traffic and/or limiting monthly downloads due to the yearly increase of public demand.
Since Internet congestion is a greater threat to cable companies, Comcast Corp. has already began to limit file-sharing, and Time Warner Cable Inc. is testing monthly bandwidth caps.
In the basic configuration, each cable serves about 500 households, which share about 40 megabits per second of download capacity. If each household gets Internet service with a maximum download speed of 10 mbps that means four of them downloading at full speed can saturate the connection, according to Associated Press.
"Fundamentally, the cable companies have come at this from kind of a disadvantage," said Rob Malan, chief technology officer of Arbor Networks, which provides traffic-management equipment. "One greedy person on that network knocks the whole neighborhood offline."
Cable companies do have options, although they may be costly. They can devote additional channels to data, or they can "split the node" to reduce the number of households on each cable. Also, expected to be released this year, a new technology called Docsis 3.0 which can increase download capacity on a cable to 160 mbps.
Stan Schatt, an analyst at ABI Research, estimates that cable providers need to spend $24 billion through 2012 to upgrade their networks.
Phone companies such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. which operate digital subscriber lines, aren’t in the clear either, although since phone lines aren’t shared, bottlenecks for DSL service are deeper in the system, on routers and fiber-optic links that are easier to upgrade.
The practice of “oversubscription” is as old as telecommunications itself, and is the only way providers can create networks that consumers can afford.
Meanwhile, Internet use keeps climbing, with video being the big driver in recent years. Google Inc.’s YouTube, which started up in 2005, already accounts for about 10 percent of Internet traffic, according to Ellacoya Networks (which is being acquired by Arbor Networks).
"If you want to think of video, think of it as the cholesterol that has the potential to clog the arteries of the Internet," said ABI’s Schatt.
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