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Video killing the Internet star?

Posted in Internet on February 20, 2008 at 6:32 pm

Imagine the old metaphor of the Internet being like a motorway with packets of data carrying web pages like little motor cars. Then came IP telephony and these little cars have to contend with caravans. Then came social media and the cars and caravans had to content with lorries. But wait, what’s this? Digital video is on the horizon and we are trying to run trains down the same motorway. Congestion? Tailbacks? One day we may well look back at the heady days of good old congestion and tailbacks when we are all stopped in the road waiting to move another 100 yards - even those nice guarantee Quality of Service passes your car may be displaying in the window may not help anymore. Let’s just hope those motor cyclists carrying Internet radio can get through to us.

Everyone is crawling along and the slip roads are full of new little cars trying to get onto the motorway and the interchange routers are crammed full of traffic following their sat-navs deciding which way to best reach their final destination. In the real world of course we can hop onto the paid toll road and circumvent many of these delays but we have some time to wait until they appear in the land of the Internet – and would you pay for them anyway?

You may hear about the last mile - unless you live in a new build (or techno heaven where fibre is king). The last mile for many probably consists of some old piece of wire that runs from the local phone exchange to your house. This wire had aspirations but in my humble opinion they peaked roughly when bonded 56K modems and ISDN/2 appeared. All sorts of tricks and techniques are used these days to try and make the best use of this piece of cable. Living on the cusp of the nearest exchange I really feel the impact of the last mile. In fact I prefer to think of it as the first mile - as some days I would be happy to get that far. Once I am past the first mile I then have to try and get on that slip road but wait … another train is coming. I tried to apply for Internet TV via BT (BT Vision) but was told my Internet connection wasn’t good enough – oh well I would only be adding to the tailback.

A quick search on the Internet shows that there is much doom and gloom regarding some eventual “collapse of the Internet” so I aim to be positive. I don’t think the Internet will collapse under the weight of traffic – or rather I hope it won’t as I can barely remember life before the Internet and I’m not sure I could bare life without it. I mean in those days people had to actually talk to each other face to face, they had to go out in person and drive to places for entertainment and from time to time get stuck in tailbacks on the motorway on a bank holiday.

I wrote about an interesting site for testing your broadband speed in a previous post on my other Blog: Test your Broadband speed