As the spirit of the internet age races ahead — every device connected, any content, anytime, anywhere — the actual flesh and bones of the internet is wheezing under the strain.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Some of the world's top experts got together last week at the Royal Society in London to talk about a very real issue that as yet doesn't have a firm solution: we're soon going to be demanding more data at once than current technology can physically allow.
"You can't get an infinite amount of capacity in a fibre", meeting organiser Andrew Ellis told New Scientist, and the methods we've traditionally used to get around that will soon stop working.
Optical cable systems, through which the internet is accessed, have a physical limit to how fast they can reliably push through data. For decades, researchers have been dialling up the amplification on optical cables to keep up with global demand, but very soon the limit will be hit and any further amplification will just result in unreadable data.
Dr René-Jean Essiambre, who attended the meeting, has undertaken research that indicates the limit will cap out at 100 terabits (about 250 Blu-Ray discs worth) per second. Not surprisingly given talk of 4K streaming and the burgeoning 'internet of things', Essiambre predicts internet demand could exceed that within five years.
This is not the first time rising demand has threatened to cripple the cobbled-together network of servers and cable which we rely on every day but was built on the technological equivalent of mud and bricks in the 1980s.
Fears surfaced as early as 2010 that the web itself could actually run out of room, that is to say the protocol designed to assign addresses could hit its limit. That protocol — called IPv4 — allows for 4.3 billion addresses but, as the number of internet-connected devices skyrocket, that limit will soon be upon us.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the US limit of IPv4 could be hit as soon as a few months from now, with other countries soon to follow, and any new connections made thereafter will have to use IPv6 (approved in 1998, with a limit of 340 undecillion addresses).
At worst, this means people using very old network hardware or software will need to upgrade (more an issue for enterprise-scale networks than the kind we have at home).
But while the solution to the IP address crunch was put in place ages ago and will be fairly painless to institute, the capacity crunch is the result of actual physical limits and will require new developments to overcome (beyond the running of additional cable under the sea, in the ground and along the existing network, a measure that would have a huge impact on internet costs).
Dr Essiambre suggested research be undertaken on new alternative materials for building cables, which could increase the capacity per fibre. Many of the researchers agreed finding a way to develop and manufacture multiple "cores" within a single cable is a likely solution. These new cables would need to be rolled out to replace the old.
Professor Andrew Lord, a researcher at British telco BT who also attended the meeting, said software solutions like advanced content caching could be developed to partly ease the strain or buy more time as well.
Professor Polina Bayvel suggested the idea that we were about to hit the limit of optic cable could be "too pessimistic", and that further research could "unlock" capacity we didn't know was there. This could mean developing a way to interpret signals that had been amplified well above the point we currently believe makes data unreadable.
In a worst case scenario where a solution can't be developed, scaled up and rolled out before demand overtakes capacity, the internet would have to be speed-capped, slowed, or rationed to certain areas at certain times. Professor Lord is confident it won't come to that.
"I've got a lot of faith in the ingenuity of people to keep delivering the goods," he told New Scientist.
