Increasingly Complex Web Sites and Content Will Slow Us Down

[Allan]

The Web will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers, a study by business technology analysts Nemertes Research has found.

"Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," says Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it."

Nemertes says that its study is the first to project traffic growth and compare it with plans to increase capacity.

The findings were embraced by the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), a tech industry and public interest coalition that advocates tax and spending policies that favor investments in Web capacity.

"We're not trying to play Paul Revere and say that the Internet's going to fall," says IIA co-Chairman Larry Irving. "If we make the investments we need, then people will have the Internet experience that they want and deserve."

Nemertes says that the bottleneck will be where Internet traffic goes to the home from cable companies' coaxial cable lines and the copper wires that phone companies use for DSL.

Cable and phone companies provide broadband to 60.2 million homes, accounting for about 94% of the market, according to Leichtman Research Group.

To avoid a slowdown, these companies, and increasingly, wireless services providers in North America, must invest up to $55 billion, Nemertes says. That's almost 70% more than planned.

Much of that is needed for costly running of new high-capacity lines. Verizon vz is replacing copper lines with fiber optic for its FiOS service, which has 1.3 million Internet subscribers.

Johnson says that cable operators, with 32.6 million broadband customers, also must upgrade. Most of their Internet resources now are devoted to sending data to users ? not users sending data. They'll need more capacity for the latter as more people transmit homemade music, photos and videos.

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[Nicholas-c Veteran]

well no... content is getting bigger but internet speeds and stuff are getting bigger, i like to make small sites anyway

[Mordkanin]

well no... content is getting bigger but internet speeds and stuff are getting bigger, i like to make small sites anyway

Will the bandwidth increase fast enough for the increasing amount of content that we want? Probably not, given our somewhat dated infrastructure, and how much money they'll have to pour into it to keep up.

[Guest]

Will the bandwidth increase fast enough for the increasing amount of content that we want? Probably not, given our somewhat dated infrastructure, and how much money they'll have to pour into it to keep up.

Will compression technologies improve? If the infrastructure can't cope with more bandwidth, then don't make more bandwidth.. but still make more content like we are!

Sounds like a logical step to me.

[LG1]

Its so true though, and websites forget rural areas many of which still use dialup.

Making sites that require tons of bandwidth limits your market as people with dialup arent able to access it and i know some people still use it.

[libertas83]

The Internet needs to be considered a part of the public infrastructure like roads, power, water, and phone. The internet does follow into telecommunications but it is not being treated with the same importance as bringing power and water to homes. I still want it to be done in the private sector but with more drive from the governments to push it to everyone. It should be a mandate just like the Manifest Destiny was in the US so long ago. Someone needs to lead the change for the people.

[technojunkie]

I was recently made aware of this while reading a magazine. If this were to be true, I can't imagine having to cope with slower connectivity.

[what]

Another reason for countries to lay down fibre/er optic cables sooner rather than later.

[Boeing 787]

100 megabits symmetrical for the entire USA by 2010 should have been proposed in 2000 if we had a government that worked for us.

[Mordkanin]

100 megabits symmetrical for the entire USA by 2010 should have been proposed in 2000 if we had a government that worked for us.

100Mb by 2010? That would be amazing. But we won't even be close. My ISP just started offering 2048/2048 for $70/month. That's 8 megabits a second....a far cry from 100.

[Mordkanin]

I mean, of course, 16 megatbits a second, but I can no longer edit the post.

[DELTETHISACCOUNT]

100 megabits symmetrical for the entire USA by 2010 should have been proposed in 2000 if we had a government that worked for us.

Too bad it's ran by a whackjob.

[Cormier6083]

Ugh... most of these sites are so tacky. Look at Coke Rewards, for God's sake.

[PermaSt0ne]

yea we put more content into the webpages, but the newer technology that comes out also streamlines the content. new protocols and programming languages help things get smaller and faster. and as Harreh pointed out, compression as well

countries are starting to lay down fiber optics on a massive scale as well, instead of just to a couple of neighborhoods

but if the "great slowdown" does ever happen, that'll only push countires and company's to bring everything up to date with state of the art equipment. so we win either way :)