Quote:
Originally Posted by Aedes  Won't data transfer still be limited at the level of the computer - net (or grid) connection and the speed of the servers and computers? Changing the infrastructure of the 'grid' will not add speed except for those with the computing power to accommodate it. |
Indeed it does, the internet cables that run through the sea have immense throughput and are often optical (Fiber optic cables) which means it are only light pulses indicating a 1 or 0. The immense throughput is being handled at both sides by immense data centers (Even for a small country like the Netherlands we've got 2 of them!). Then the bandwidth is distributed over the whole country (or parts of it), which then is again distributed over regions and finally the cable goes to your local distribution points in your neighborhood, then the small amount of bandwidth left over is shared over your whole neighborhood, and maybe if you have multiple computers even redistributed within your house.
As you see the signal weakens incredibly, it still is enough to get a download and upload speed around 10MB a second with the most expensive contracts (the speed you are allowed to use has been put into your modem you received from your ISP) but it's far less than the thousands of gigabytes going trough "back bones" of the internet.
This new technology is great but the problem is costs; we can replace the cables (note that fiber optical cables can cost from $500 million to $2 billion) in the sea by this new technology but it will only increase the throughput from point A to B while we need to get to point F, with C (state), D (region), E (neighborhood) and finally F (your home). For this new technology to work we will need to change all or old hardware with new hardware, which will be economically impossible.
The internet is extremely important, and if the internet (globally) fails the world economic market will crash within a day. The internet was never designed to be a mass used network sharing video's and other things; it was purely for simple military use which only consisted of information being exchanged in pure text form.
I (and many others) believe the internet will fail within several years (I within 4 to 10 years) because it is running out of IP (unique ID's) addresses so it allows for new nodes (computers) to be connected, we solved this by giving private addresses and some mathematical tricks to use every IP possible. We have IPv6 (which introduced numbers; instead of having an ip of 192.168.0.1 you have ujy8:72jj:72hj:829j) but it is far from being implemented on a worldwide scale to solve or need for addresses.
Another problem is that we are running out of bandwidth; more and more people use the internet and download (whether legal or illegal a download of 600Mb stays a download of 600Mb) and our "back bones" need to be expanded rapidly to accommodate the need for bandwidth otherwise the cables will become overloaded and will fail.
The problem we face is that changing the internet's backbone is practically impossible since it allows for no downtime, and also the need for changing everything worldwide. The cost for this are enormous let's say a thousand times the American National Debt to come close to the amount of money needed to be invested.
04-08-2008, 01:20 AM
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