Things fall apart - the Internet cannot hold

Stuart Corner
Monday, 24 November 2008 05:41

Business IT - Networking

Nemertes Research is predicting a major 'stress fracture' of the Internet within four years that will see traffic migrating to private and semi-private networks when quality of service is important.

"Demand pushing against physical and logical limitations is stressing the Internet, says Nemertes, "Internet demand continues to outpace growth in network capacity at the access layer, and IP addresses are quickly depleting."

Its 70 page study, freely available on its website, http://www.nemertes.com/ii08 finds traffic moving off the public Internet onto paid or private overlay networks. "Content providers-such as NBC, which used Limelight Networks to stream the 2008 Olympics-are driving the trend toward a flattening, and shifting of the Internet," says Nemertes research analyst, Ted Ritter.

The work of the IPsphere Forum will greatly facilitate this interconnection of private networks by enabling service parameters to be defined and carried across network boundaries and for differential charging to be applied according to these service parameters.

Telstra is a leading participant in a major trial of the IPsphere Forum framework, as iTWire reported last week http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21763/127/ and is already working on its own "application assured network", a network capable of dynamically dimensioning itself to support any customer application requirement, such as bandwidth, delay, jitter and QoS.

Ritter says the result for users will be improved service quality for favoured content, and predicts that, over time, the performance distinction between 'favoured' and 'general-delivery' content will increase, and that, "ultimately, access bandwidth limitations will hamper deployment of next-generation applications."

"None of this means the Internet will abruptly stop working. Instead, the slowdown will be in the area of innovation," Ritter says.
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