Warnings of ‘internet overload’

Prophets of doom have a good business, there is always something awful lurking around the corner and as our populations and cultures expand, things like greenhouse gasses, weather, and Web traffic get more complicated. Today’s sandwich board from the BBC has warnings of ‘internet overload’ scrawled on it. Many of us in the business are watching Net Neutrality, with more than passing interest. And if you have been in the business of managing servers, connectivity and telephony for more than a few years, you will know precisely what all this is about. E-mail is an easy example to grasp: The basic mail protocols were designed around shipping small text messages many years ago, and when we started moving rich format mail into more robust clients without building up the base platforms, mailservers started getting really grumpy a few years ago. Well, with today’s rich media content, we’re moving a lot more packets across the Internet today than we were back when Pine and Eudora ruled the pipes and the web was browsed in text with Lynx. “In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails; so it’s clearly very different,” said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems. The ‘Net’s spine was rebuilt mostly in the heady boom-and-bust days back in the 90s and hasn’t gotten an infrastructure boost in a long time. So, as they say, the end is near, but as this article notes… it was near last year, and the year before that, and so on. So when should users and publishers get seriously concerned?