Who’s going to build the ark for the exaflood?
In The Economist’s recent technology quarterly, one of the articles presented differing opinions on whether the world’s networks are prepared to handle the coming “exaflood” of data (an exabyte is one billion gigabytes). Currently, global Internet traffic ranges from five to eight exabytes a month. Nemertes and other research organizations are predicting the demise of the Internet as the deluge of data brings it grinding to a halt.
Though there are certainly reasons to be skeptical of such dire predictions, the opposing viewpoints presented in the article did not fill me with confidence since they relied solely on statistics of video usage growth to date to demonstrate that everything is going to be fine. It’s been a few years since trending was sufficient to predict future growth patterns.
Certainly, video is the biggest bandwidth consumer today but its use is still relatively simple, restricted predominantly to personal computers. As more devices become IP-enabled (e.g., smartphones, home appliances, automobiles, etc.) and when FTTx fulfills its promise, enabling carriers to become the infrastructure for television and other ultra-bandwidth services, today’s bandwidth usage will pale in comparison. And if data increasingly travels at the edge as opposed to the core (e.g., due to P2P), carriers better have FTTx in place or the exaflood will most certainly be a threat.
Of course, this is all at the global level and as in most things, we must think globally but act locally. Individual carriers have to conduct their own threat assessments to determine whether they are exaflood-prepared. Noah may have had divine insight into the coming flood but you’ll have to do your own weather forecasting.
