In the beginning, the Internet was designed for exchanging scientific data. Over the years it has morphed into an all you can eat buffet of multimedia entertainment. Flat rate pricing has spoiled Internet users while they downloaded millions of mp3s and made celebrities of Youtube stars. But each year, Internet traffic has increased as more and more people turn to the Internet for streaming audio and video. This high bandwidth traffic has created slowdowns on networks and has caused Internet service providers to look for ways to limit higher data use in an attempt to contain costs and maintain speed for lighter Internet users.
ISPs have started to control traffic to high bandwidth sites and have also started to impose monthly download limits to ease data congestions. The ISPs with the most to lose in all of the congestion is cable Internet companies like Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. Cable serves about 500 customers per line. Each cable provides a maximum download speed of 40megabits per second, which is shared by each user on the line. With just four household downloading at full speed, the connection can quickly become saturated, causing slowdowns for the majority of the customers.
“Fundamentally, the cable companies have come at this from kind of a disadvantage. One greedy person on that network knocks the whole neighborhood offline,” said Rob Malan, chief technology officer of Arbor Networks, which provides traffic-management equipment.
To increase speed, cable companies can devote additional cables to data and they can “split the node” and reduce the number of customers per cable. New modem technology that is being rolled out this year can increase cable download capacity to 160 megabits per second, but implementing these solutions can prove financially damaging for companies that are struggling to maintain a profit level.
DSL also suffers from data bottlenecks, but because the slowdowns are deeper in the system, it is easier for companies such as AT & T and Verizon to add capacity without incurring significant costs. Cable and phone companies have been selling more connections than they have the capacity for for years. For example, it is still technically impossible for the telephone networks to han a phone call by everyone with a phone at the same time. Internet connections work the same way, cable companies have gambled that each user has different time usage patterns and each cable can “feed” data to a larger number if people if they all sue the web at different times.
Even as the cable and DSL providers struggle with how to answer demand and contain costs, Internet use keeps rising. You tube, which ebuted in 2005, accounts for 10 percent of all Internet traffic. Streaming video like YouTube and videos available for instant download for promotional purposes have all contributed to the data bottleneck.
Tags: cable, dsl, internet speed, isp, multimedia, youtube
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