> From: Fred Baker [mailto:fred@xxxxxxxxx] > I read in the paper this morning that the "Web" is running > out of bandwidth. The article quoted Metcalf and others and > their predictions of the death of the Internet, and noted > that Bob finally blenderized his columns in front of an > audience. My company figured in the article. So did the > advent of video content, which requires significantly more > bandwidth and significantly lower loss rates than more > traditional voice services or TCP-based applications. Had the > author had a clue, s/he would have said something about the > Internet once again changing its fundamental service, from > enabling terminal service, to moving files using FTP and > Network News, to moving smaller files using SMTP and HTTP, to > basic audio services, to peer- to-peer file sharing, and now > to video. Not that the old goes away right away, but we add > on and the old becomes less important. I think the author has it 180 degrees wrong. The Internet is not running out of bandwidth, it is the improvement in bandwidth that is the driver here, the Internet is now within reach of supporting full definition video. The market demand for high definition is growing. So demand outstrips supply for a short while. The same thing happened in the early days of the Web, when embedded images were first plonked into Mosaic the Internet bandwidth was not sufficient to support them. The whole of CERN was sitting off a pipe thinner than some non-IETFers have running into their house (yes I know some folk have an OC 192 into their house, I remember when having a personal T1 was considered having won the bandwidth wars). At the end of the day we can probably be confident that a saturation point for Internet bandwidth as far as user applications goes will come when we have enough bandwidth to saturate each of the five human senses. There might well be other uses beyond that of course but there will definitely be some breakpoint there. The bigger challenge is how we put this bandwidth in the hands of a billion plus users without having collosal abuse issues. If the Internet pipe into your home has enough bandwidth to support live high definition video you have the ability to send one heck of a lot of spam. The changes I see are not fundamental, Fred is entirely correct in pointing out that we have always had certain types of complexity in the core. The differences are subtler, of degree, of balance. The scales that tipped one way in 1980 tip in a different direction today. Clark expected this of course, that is why the core message of the E2E paper might be summed up by J.J.Watson's mantra: Think! _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf