Is it time to scrap the Internet and start over?
With millions of people watching shows and movies online, service providers may become so overwhelmed that the Internet may seem outmoded.
from the October 25, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Online streaming has a lot of perks. The episodes are on-demand, so you don't have to worry about missing your favorite show. You watch them while they download, so you don't have to wait an hour for the whole file to finish transferring.
But unlike shows downloaded from Apple's iTunes store, any hiccup in Internet service can leave characters hanging in mid-sentence – or drag action scenes to a crawl.
"This is an important time because it's just before video is about to become a big problem," says Roberts, who is now chairman and founder of Anagran in Redwood City, Calif. Last month, this Internet hardware firm unveiled a new "flow router" that he says can better manage today's Web traffic. Instead of treating every one and zero as the same, the Anagran router gives priority to important data – perhaps streaming video – over smaller, less-urgent files such as e-mail.
Searching for ways to work around today's Web, British technology company CacheLogic proposes a hybrid system that would allow videos to flow into your computer from different sources. First, a video distributor would store multiple copies of a file on computers around the world, so that wherever the viewer is, the video doesn't have to travel far. This practice is already well adopted by large distributors. But CacheLogic wants to supplement this method by drawing from computers that have already watched the video, adding a legal peer-to-peer file-sharing element to the mix.
But bigger changes have to occur before computers can truly rival televisions. In particular, greater investment to deliver video to the masses. For example, 19 million Americans watched the season première of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" on TV this year. If all of those viewers had seen the program on the Internet in HD quality instead, it would require 4.5 terabytes of Internet capacity each second. That's triple the amount used on the entire Internet, CacheLogic reports.
While HD quality program files are massive, the problem delivering them to customers via the Web is not necessarily available bandwidth, says Len Bosack, cofounder of Cisco Systems and now chairman of his own start-up, XKL, in Redmond, Wash. Before the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, companies rushed to roll out millions of miles of fiber-optic cable all over the country. Plenty of that capacity remains dormant, he says.
Last month, XKL released a way for businesses to bypass telephone companies and tap directly into those cables, each consisting of about 200 strands of glass bound together.
"There's enough bandwidth in one [pair of glass strands] to allow the entire adult population of Los Angeles to talk to the entire adult population of New York," says Mr. Bosack, who himself was talking over an Internet phone connection. "That's just a piece of one cable. So what do you want to do with the rest of the capacity?"
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