Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?
Posted on 07 September 2008 by Jack
Everyone hates their Internet service provider. And with good cause: In the age of ubiquitous Internet access, Web service in America is still often frustratingly slow. Tired of being the villain, telecom companies have assigned blame for this problem to a new bad guy. He’s called the “bandwidth hog,” and it’s his fault that streaming video on your computer looks more like a slide show than a movie. The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth—sometimes more during peak hours. While these “power users” are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load.
The ISPs are certainly correct that there’s a problem: The current network in the United States struggles to accommodate everyone, and the barbarians at the gate—voice-over-IP telephony, live video streams, high-def movies—threaten to drown the grid. (This Deloitte report has a good treatment of that eventuality.) It’s less clear that the telecom companies, fixated as they are on the bandwidth hogs, are doing a good job of managing the problem and planning for the future. The ISPs have put forward two big ideas, in recent months, about how to fix our bandwidth crisis. We can arrange these plans into two categories: horrible now and horrible later.
Popularity: 16% [?]
September 7th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
You can bet that Telus & Bell are going to glom onto this as another way to raise their revenues, even if it’s not necessary. This is even better than charging for incoming messaging.
September 7th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Deconstructing The Exaflood Myth
There is no bandwidth crunch boogeyman
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Deconstructing-The-Bandwidth-Crunch-Boogeyman-97440
For the second consecutive year, the rate of underlying international Internet capacity deployment outpaced global Internet traffic growth, leading to lower utilization levels on many Internet backbones (see Figure: International Internet Traffic and Bandwidth Growth, 2005-2008). Between 2007 and 2008, average traffic utilization levels decreased from 31 percent to 29 percent while peak utilization fell from 44 percent to 43 percent.
So if backbone capacity is fine and core carriers are easily keeping pace, what’s the problem? No ISP would ever admit their last mile networks aren’t the top of the line, but problems are frequently caused locally, where carriers aren’t willing to take the investor knocks necessary to upgrade capacity. It’s generally a direct result of skimping out on upgrades to beat quarterly estimates, but it makes much more business sense to blame the problem on terrifying, nebulous and uncontrollable externalities.
September 7th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Thanks for posting that up, Lindsay. We pay for internet service and part of that cost is to pay for infrastructure and upgrades. If your ISP isn’t performing, give ‘em hell. There are websites like this one which allow you to check the upload and download speed of your connection. Use them regularly and if your ISP isn’t supplying what they’ve contracted to do so, complain… long and loud…