Following our own series of articles and reports on the topic, Cisco continues to do interesting work estimating the impact of video on Internet traffic. With the release of two detailed newreports, updating last year's "Exabyte Era" paper, they've now created a "Visual Networking Index."
Cisco's Internet traffic growth projections for the next several years continue to be somewhat lower than ours. But since their initial report last August, they have raised their projected compound annual growth rate from 43% to 46%. Cisco thus believes world IP traffic will approach half a zettabyte (or 500 exabytes) by 2012.
My own projections yield a compound annual growth rate for U.S. IP traffic of around 58% through 2015. This slightly higher growth rate would produce a U.S. Internet twice as large in 2015 compared to Cisco's projections. Last winter George Gilder and I estimated that world IP traffic will pass the zettabyte (1,000 exabytes) level in 2012 or 2013.
For just one example of the new applications that will drive IP traffic growth, look at yesterday's announcement by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Partnering with my friend, the young graphics pioneer Jules Urbach, AMD previewed its "Cinema 2.0" project, which combines the best of cutting edge technology and thinking from video games, movies, graphics processors, and computer generated imaging to create new kinds of interactive real-life real-time 3D virtual worlds, all powered not by supercomputers but simple video cards that you find in PCs and Macs, or from servers in the "cloud."
A photorealistic 3D robot and city scene rendered in real-time. (AMD; BusinessWire)
The huge increases in bandwidth and robust traffic management needed to deliver these new high-end real-time services continue to show why net neutrality regulation and other artificial limitations on traffic management are complete non-starters from a technical perspective.
Gordon Crovitz once again caught my attention this morning with his column on why we still crave face-to-face interaction in the twittering new world of digital deal-making and dating. Writing from the "D: All Things Digital" conference in Carlsbad, California, Crovitz quotes several conference veterans on why we still travel to meet people:
Esther Dyson of EDventures, one of the conference attendees, was a pioneer of tech industry conferences such as PC Forum. Asked why even techies flock to conferences, she said that they "want to hear the unofficial story, rather than the sanitized press releases and corporate blogs that they get online." Andrew Zolli, who helps run the Pop!Tech conference, says that these kinds of conferences "are best viewed as 'rituals' in which a self-selected group of people reaffirms their 'tribal identity' through the very act of participation."
This morning in New York the Internet Innovation Alliance hosted two discussions on the Exaflood. Here's video of the first discussion in which I took part, along with Paul Mankiewich, CTO of Alcatel-Lucent; Prof. Andy Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota; and Nick Rockwell, CTO of MTV Networks.
On the second panel were Ciena CEO Gary Smith; Johna Till Johnson of Nemertes Research; Michael Kleeman of UC San Diego; and Craig Moffett of Sanford Bernstein.
Here's another Exaflood-related video I just found. It's of a Telecom TV interview I did in Paris in late February.
Two events of interest to followers of Internet technologies and trends:
First I'll be speaking at an Internet Innovation Alliance event called The Exaflood: Finding Solutions in New York City this Thursday.
Next week we'll move north a few hundred miles to Lake George, NY, for the 12th annual Gilder/Forbes Telecosm conference, also titled "The Exaflood," where I'll be speaking on Internet traffic trends and also on the global economy.
Video calling, we've said, will be a large component of the Internet data traffic surge we call the exaflood. After a decade or two of false starts, consumer video chats began in large volume over the last year or so -- by mid-2007 Microsoft Video Calling was generating 4 petabytes per month of data traffic, equal to the entire Net of 1997. Now business video conferencing is taking off as well, with telepresence systems from Cisco and HP just coming online.
only about 1,000 of the 176,000 videoconferencing systems sold world-wide in 2007 were telepresence systems, estimates market researcher TeleSpan Publishing Corp. But unit sales of the high-end systems were up five-fold from the 200 sold in 2006, and the number should triple to 3,000 in 2008, TeleSpan estimates.
Two brief exaflood items from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the Milken Conference.
(1) Users of Google's YouTube are uploading 10 hours of video to the site every minute. That's 14,400 hours worth of new video uploads each day.
(2) By 2019, your average iPod (or other personal digital device) will have enough capacity for 85 years worth of video. Start watching when you're born. Maybe you'll see the final credits in old-age.
Often a good source of technology news, The Economisthas it all wrong on the "exaflood" and new traffic management regulations now under consideration at the FCC. Most likely, the august magazine is just being lazy when it relays this erroneous message:
Once again, alarmists are issuing dire warnings about the internet collapsing under the weight of its traffic. But that’s nothing new: they’ve been doing so since the 1990s.
Bob Metcalfe, who invented the Ethernet protocol for local area networks, once claimed that the internet was about to be overwhelmed by e-mail traffic. That was in 1996. A year later, Dr Metcalfe not only admitted the error of his doomsday prediction, but literally ate his own words—grinding his speech from a year before with liquid in a blender and quaffing the lot to cheers from his audience.
The latest panic started with a scare-mongering story in the Wall Street Journal last year, which concerned the rise of internet video and the inability of the network to handle it, especially at network edges where the internet enters the home. The author talked of the “coming exaflood”, referring to the exabytes (ie, billions of gigabytes) of HD video users would soon be downloading.
Others in the industry have continued to fan the flames, with cable companies like Comcast wafting the hardest.
It's true Bob Metcalfe did worry of an "Internet collapse" in the mid-90s. But I -- as the author of that supposedly "scare-mongering" Wall Street Journal article -- have never suggested any such thing.
In a supplemental blog post about the "policy dimension" of the video surge, he mentions our recent "Unleashing the 'Exaflood'" article:
The broadband policy debate will unfold over many months, but it seems to me there is at least one perspective-enhancing principle to keep in mind, which you won’t necessarily hear from the lobbyists for the warring sides. That is, this is in good part a business negotiation being conducted in a policy arena. Who pays for the needed investment in broadband infrastructure, and who stands to profit?
On one side stand the telecommunications carriers and cable companies, supported by free-market economists and some industry analysts. They say it is the telecom and cable companies that will have to make the crucial investments to deliver faster broadband into households, so they need the freedom to price their service as they see fit. They want to be able to charge the biggest users — from a file-sharing teenager to the big Web companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay — for how much bandwidth they consume. It is a position with articulate exponents.
I think Lohr is right. This is "a business negotiation being conducted in a policy arena." Which is really too bad. Business negotiations should be conducted among the private parties. A "negotiation" conducted with the heavy hand of government just waiting to tip the scales is no negotiation at all. In a large sense, once the side calling for regulation gets the issue into the regulatory arena, they've already won. It's an example of the constant struggle between capitalism and government. Any "compromise" that emerges, even if the regulatory advocates don't get all they want, is still certain to have more than the optimal amount of regulation.
That's why it's so important for the FCC to remain principled and just keep its hands off the Net.
The IDC research shows that the digital universe—information that is either created, captured, or replicated in digital form — was 281 exabytes in 2007. In 2011, the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 1,800 exabytes, or 10 times that produced in 2006. The compound annual growth rate between now and 2011 is expected to be almost 60%. The size of the digital universe in 2007 (and 2006) is bigger by 10% than we calculated last year, and the growth is slightly higher. This is a factor of faster-than-expected growth in higher resolution digital cameras, surveillance cameras — especially in places like China and major urban centers — and digital TVs and of improved methodology for estimating replication.
It's official: There's too much information. . . .
We’ve hit information overload: The amount of data people create now exceeds the amount of space available to store them.
People sent emails, took digital pictures, processed credit cards and generally did things that collectively created 281 exabytes of data by the end 2007, according to the research company IDC.
We also laughed when we read this:
(“Exabyte” sounds made up, but it’s a real term meaning 1,000,000,000,000 megabytes.)
Who knew?
Also from the BizTech blog today: IBM is intensifying its cloud computing efforts. It's bypassing corporate IT departments and going right to the business units, in effect cutting out the inefficient and entrenched middle man, but not the middle man you'd think.
Rod Smith, an IBM vice president, says he’s starting to sell his “mashup” software, which makes it possible to combine data from multiple systems, directly to workers. . . .
. . . on a sliding scale where the traditional approach of setting up sales meetings with the head of IT is a “1” and the Google model is a “10,” Smith says his group is now a “7.”
Bottom line: The network is the computer. And we need more bandwidth.
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