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I’ve been hearing about an Internet crash since the 90s. Of course nothing serious happened, but back then animated gif files were in fashion and “heavy” sites were hardly known. The proliferation of video on the web and plans for IPTV, HD videos and film downloads are now creating a new scare with a new wave of warnings that soon things will halt to a crawl. But how serious can it be?

An article in the New York Times tries to provide all the angles with both optimistic and pessimistic views, but eventually settles with the view that there might be a slowdown but in no way will we have a crash. The answer of course is not easy and unlike storage availability -in which case there is or there isn’t enough capacity, full stop- there is so many factors that need to be taken into account:

• The Internet is nothing like a private telecom network. It is owned by everybody and consists of countless servers, subnetworks and switches that a single organisation cannot be aware of.
• Supply and demand are going hand in hand. So far, when there was a need for extra capacity, the extra necessity was covered by new investment.
• Advanced web pages and applications -especially video- are offered on the basis of a faster backbone and faster access speeds. If those are ahead of their time, they will simply disappear and introduction plus adoption will be postponed till the conditions are right.
• While increases in demand are easily seen, the work done in the background to improve speeds, switches, servers and overall speed in general are completely behind the scenes. Experts argue that annual bandwidth demand increases of 50% can be easily swallowed by the upgrades. However, the increase in demand can only be a guess…
• Video is by far the most demanding application and when HD and film downloads start in mass, the demanded bandwidth will be a multiple of all other applications together.
• New applications, like high quality video-conferencing for example, will add new strain.

From all the above, I have to say that there is a huge factor of flexibility or uncertainty, call it whatever you like. Military planners do well to separate their backbones from the commonly used ones, but of course that does not mean that a huge crash is on the way.

Think of it that way. When you use the web and your download speed does not allow that YouTube video to be watched live what do you do? Chances are that you pause and for a while do something else -check emails perhaps- that slows things down even further, and when the video is ready for watching you repeat the process a few more times but eventually get bored with the unsatisfactory experience and give up. Similarly with Skype. Call quality is too low? Let’s revert to the good old phone line…

In similar fashion, I believe that depending on the quality of the user experience people will decide what they will and will not do via the Internet. For example we will have to determine whether:

• We will watch Internet TV or stick to digital terrestrial and satellite transmissions.
• We will rent DVDs/Blu-ray discs or download films to our PC.
• We will keep our traditional phone lines and for how long.
• We will keep listening to radio -in its digital form- or replace it with Internet radio alltogether.

And the list goes on… In other words I think that the Internet will in no way crash because we will see by trial and error what is possible with it at any time. Sooner or later everything will undoubtedly be over IP, but in the meantime we have other established choices, whose use we are already accustomed with.

Nevertheless, what is and might stay very different from place to place is ease of access, connection speed and the resulting use from these factors. For example I have previously written about the troubles of Greek Internet users. The unreliability and connection problems encountered in Greece are at least five years away from what users experience in the rest of the EU and the US. Let alone specific examples like Japan or Sweden…

So if we are in no danger of an Internet crash, what role does the Internet play in our daily life? This is going to be the subject of a future post in ElectronRun and I would like your ideas and feedback on that.