Is your Internet service being throttled down?
An increasing demand for bandwidth has some providers changing the rules.
By Tom Regan | Columnistfrom the June 27, 2007 edition
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When we old-timers were on the Web back in the early 1990s, our Internet needs were relatively small. We were mostly sending text e-mails or looking for text documents on "Gopher," an early search engine. A 14.4 modem connection felt as though we were traveling at light speed. It was all very exciting at the time – of course, back then we also thought Ross Perot was exciting.
But oh, how times have changed. These days, online users want to watch a YouTube video, access e-mail, send instant messages, play online games, and talk on the digital phone – all at the same time.
If you're noticing slowdowns while online, the culprit could be "bandwidth shaping." Most Internet service providers (ISPs) don't like to talk about it, but it's the most recent method to deal with the masses of people who use a lot of bandwidth during peak periods.
Think of bandwidth as water coming out of a faucet. If you run water all the time at full strength, you'll use a lot of it. Now imagine doing that in an area with a limited water supply. The water you use would affect how much everyone else gets. So one day, the water utility installs a special meter to regulate the flow of water into your home. If you use too much water while everyone else in the neighborhood is trying to take a shower, your water flow will be cut back.
It's the same idea for bandwidth shaping. If you use too much, you'll be cut back. Without going into a complicated explanation, currently it's much more of a problem for people with cable connections than digital subscriber line connections. (It has to do with how the "flow" comes into your house and the way it is carried there.)
The problem is not so much that we are crowding the "pipes" that carry Internet traffic – extra capacity was built during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s to handle that. But there are problems with the routers at each end of the pipeline. BBC technology writer Bill Thompson explains it this way: "If we take a backbone link across the Atlantic, there are billions of bits of data arriving every second and it's all got to go to different destinations. The router sits at the end of that very high speed link and decides where each small piece of data has to go. That's not a difficult computational task, but it has to make millions of decisions a second."
Router companies like Cisco have said in the past that they feel confident their products can handle the higher traffic. But even if that's true, other problems can arise: While a lot of the world's Internet traffic does travel on fiber, lots of it doesn't. And those old copper wires can only handle so much demand.
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