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OPINION: Ark, anyone?

By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 8/17/2007

Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda

AUG. 17 | EXAFLOOD. NO ONE knows exactly where the term came from, or agrees on exactly what it means. But both the term, and the idea, have gained currency in technology circles since Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute (yes, the “intelligent design” people, but never mind that) wrote an influential article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year called “The Coming Exaflood.”

Swanson was referring to the flood of data threatening to swamp the Internet as we know it as new bandwidth-heavy applications such as Web video grow in popularity. The “exa-” refers to exabyte, as in a billion gigabytes.

Since then, the potential limit of Internet capacity has become a hot topic.

Last week, it got hotter still, as a group of Internet service providers in the U.K. warned the BBC that its planned video download service threatened to overwhelm the capacity of their networks and demanded the broadcaster help defray the cost of adding more bandwidth.

“The Internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite,” Mary Turner, chief executive of the ISP Tiscali UK, told the Financial Times. “If the iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the Internet will get very slow service and will call their ISPs to complain.”

The Wall Street Journal then weighed in again with a report on a pair of studies released by network equipment maker Cisco Systems detailing the growing demands for bandwidth. One report was titled The Exabyte Era.

PEOPLE WITH A lot more technical knowledge than I have disagree on how serious the problem really is. Cisco researchers, for instance, note that while demand for bandwidth is growing, almost exponentially, so too is network operators’ ability to manage and prioritize the flow of traffic across their systems (presumably with the help of Cisco equipment).

But the row between the ISPs and the BBC points to a potential point of friction that even the most sanguine reports suggest could be inevitable.

According to Cisco, Internet video will experience three waves of growth. The first coincides with the appearance of YouTube, which has led to a huge jump in the amount of Internet video traffic.

While the YouTube effect jolted network operators, for the most part, they’ve shaken off the punch.

The next phase, between now and 2011, will be driven by a 10-fold increase in IP-delivered TV content. A third phase, starting after 2011, will be driven by video communication.

It’s the second phase that holds the potential for friction.

MUCH OF THE IPTV traffic, according to Cisco, will be contained within the edges of the edge of the network, that is, within broadband access providers’ local IP networks, and won’t put a huge strain on the Internet backbone networks.

That’s because, unlike YouTube-type traffic, which is meant to be retrievable from anywhere on-demand, prerecorded video can be cached at the edges of the network. It doesn’t need to traverse the Internet core to get to its intended users.

That’s good news for long-haul backbone providers, who will be spared much of the weight of the IPTV wave. But it sets up a potential conflict between broadband access providers and anyone trying to deliver video from outside the local network.

With access providers’ own IPTV services soaking up a growing share of their available bandwidth, other bandwidth-heavy applications, including on-demand IP video content faces a potential traffic jam.

We heard the yelps of the coming road rage last week in the flare up between the BBC and the ISPs.

Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda. Get more of Sweeting's analysis here.

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