2008: When the Internet slows down to a crawl (again!)

A great article over at the Economist.com reminds me just how fragile our brave new (Internet) world is. Several sources have been lamenting the exponential increase in on-line traffic and the subsequent slow-down of speed this will inevitably result in, but moreover it is not just a matter of sheer numbers of people and devices - but also of the volume of data flowing back and forth. As our appetite for on-line video has taken off big-time and everyone and their grand-mother now setting up sites with streaming video, down-loadable video, pod-casts and playing games hosted on-line it is not surprising that the pipeline is getting jammed.

A big surprise (although in a way I'm not surprised) is the enormous bulk of traffic generated by spam (over 90%!) and as it is only in the interests of us customers, phone companies and other large ISPs haven't really bothered to do anything about this, because it would simply cost too much to fix. Personally I'm grateful for the e-mail quarantine system on my in-box, yet still the occasional spam wiggles its way past the jaws of the spam-stopper - suggesting I follow a link to go watch some ungodly assault on women in various imaginative ways or cheap(! not free!) pirated software from some strangely named individual. This of course presuming I don't have yet another security-alert that my account has been unlawfully accessed by a bank I don't even have an account at, prompting me to send all my security details to some Phisher sitting with his finger poised at the buy-button of his favourite e-commerce/porn site waiting for a ride on my card or indeed some Nigerian wealthy official offering me a cut if I help smuggle money out of the country. Honestly, how stupid do spammers think we really are and no, thanks, I don't need Viagra either - I'm a woman in case you haven't noticed..

Not only is it about the increased bandwidth of data continuously accessed - it's also about those hoards of 'smart' little devices that simply refuse to even talk to you unless they have all connected to the net and checked for updates first. And then there is social networking, suddenly creating a captive audience for all that video you shot at the weekend, not to mention P2P file sharing which of course explicitly relies on you to not only download, but upload too. Don't know about you, but my Internet slows down to a crawl as soon as I attempt to upload anything other than blog posts. So now roll on TV-networks, Hollywood studios and everyone else who have discovered that making money with advertising is far more lucrative than charging people to watch your content - if you have it, they will come and better still - if they are watching, advertisers are paying.

Oh and what else - come the Digital television revolution, meaning that the 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of old-school analog television will become available to be auctioned off to mobile phone companies lusting for the their long range and broadband capabilities. Bring on mobile television and improved Internet browsing from your handset - in fact, hold on to your hat as the new Android operating system launched by Google, make it ever easier for other handset manufacturers to provide the features hankered for by consumers, i.e open access that have none of the restrictions the big carriers impose, like not being able to download games from other makers, browse the Internet freely or make VOIP calls from a Wifi hot-spot. It will suck to be a phone operator soon oh and guess what, all that traffic from your mobile will also be on - you guessed it - the Internet.

Interestingly, the beauty of freedom in the form of open-source is becoming more attractive too, making it harder for us to part with old trusted toasters of computer equipment, given another lease of life with the sleek Gutsy Gibbon adaptation of Linux. So not only can you forgo the latest OS to make a dent in the information superhighway, Nicholas Negroponte of the OLPC initiative has frightened a lot of big-time computer makers into having a go at making cheap equipment themselves, not wanting to lose out on a potential market measured in the hundreds of millions.. oh and I forgot to say - they will all be on-line too, along with all those old bangers you would have resigned to a computer graveyard in the past, but now with user-friendly Linux on them, even they can join in clogging up the arteries of the on-line world - reminding us how it felt having dial-up.