Parental Advisory: Large numbers and mind-boggling statistics to follow.
“Will the Internet ever get full?”
That question, coming from a Grade 7 student, is my favorite “CBC Good Question” to date.
In case you aren’t familiar with the program, listeners of the local CBC radio show phone in tough questions and experts take a crack at them. I was tagged to be the expert on that particular show, and of course I answered the question by replying: “Yes and no.”
The Internet is very much a growing organism. Whenever a new user logs on, it gets that much bigger. At the very least, there is one more keyboard interacting with websites all over the world. If you add a server, and host a website, you actually expand the number of places that other Internet users can visit.
The search engine Google currently indexes 1,610,476,000 web pages. This means you could spend over 50 years (by my calculation) viewing each of them at the rate one per second and not see them all. And of course, more would be appearing every second. So in that sense, the Internet won’t get full because it keeps getting more capacity.
On the other hand, there are only so many atoms in the universe, and the Internet lives in the physical world, so by definition it has to have a limit. The good news is that long before we reach the physical limitations of storage and communications technology, our brains will burst trying to hold all the information.
Nevertheless, our friends at Intel and Microsoft and Oracle have been planning way, way ahead. They’re working with 64-bit addressing which allows access to 16 exabytes of data. What’s an exabyte? A billion gigabytes.
In other words 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes of information.
One estimate says that there are 12 exabytes of information in the entire world today, so current computers have room to spare, even if we tried to pull it all together in one place. Fortunately, the Internet takes a distributed approach to storing information, which in the long run is what will save it from imploding on itself.
Of course, the Internet didn’t look too great on the morning on Sept. 11 as people tried to get to the same few websites (cnn.com, msnbc.com, etc.), and of course they couldn’t.
The brutal fact is that Internet servers (like the phone system) have a finite, and more or less fixed, capacity.
Technically, every time you pick up the phone, it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not you will get a dial tone. This is because there are a lot fewer dial tones available than phones to pick up. The phone company, like the folks at cnn.com, is playing the odds, betting that we won’t all want their attention at the same time.
Of course, when something catastrophic happens, the cracks in the system show up. Phones stop working and websites don’t answer.
Some people have reported that their favorite news websites are still slow in responding, weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center.
This is because the terrorism crisis, and the ensuing military action, has heightened people’s desire for instant information.
Remember that most of the original drama unfolded while North Americans were going to work, or already there.
Since more people have computers than TVs in their offices, if you’re going to pick up the latest intelligence at work it’s probably going to be from a website.
There’s another reason why the Internet seems to have slipped into slow motion. Many TV sites such as cnn.com, cbc.ca, and ctv.com offer streaming audio and video clips on their websites. There are even live webcams pointed at the Pentagon and the (former) World Trade Centre.
You’ll need a reasonably fast computer and Internet connection to view online video, but more and more people are using it. Multimedia clips are the classic bandwidth hogs. It takes thousands of times more Internet capacity to transport a minute of video than a page of text data. But our quest for up-to-date information has been so strong that many of us will endure to get the latest poop.
Will the Internet slowdown be permanent? Again, the answer is no and yes. Media companies can go out and buy more servers, or re-allocate existing equipment from other functions, and they will, if it makes business sense. (Most run these sites at a loss, either for the PR value or to get extra advertising revenue.)
With more capacity out there, more and more people will turn to online news sources and expect full-motion, full-screen video with 3-D sound effects. The new capacity will probably just get soaked up in the growing demand.
If the Vietnam War was the first to come into our living rooms on television, Operation Infinite Justice will be the first to arrive on our computers, complete with sound and pictures worthy of a video game. Let’s just remind ourselves, and our children, that there are real people involved here . . . and this is not MechWarrior 4.
Web Watch:
www.cbc.ca
www.ctvnews.com
www.cnn.com
