3 ms·

For reference, the global internet bandwidth has been estimated at just shy of 1 Pbit/s The entire Internet is using the same as 1 million residential 1 gigabi

For reference, the global internet bandwidth has been estimated at just shy of 1 Pbit/s The entire Internet is using the same as 1 million residential 1 gigabit connections could max out? I don't know why, but that sounds far below what I would have expected.

smolder 4y ago
I wonder how that estimate was made. Maybe they are counting it as one transmission when something non-unique is broadcast to many endpoints? Or does every fetch of an asset from a CDN count? Either way, the bulk of the web is structured to put data as close to where it's needed as possible, to keep things quick and uncongested. So, it doesn't surprise me that internet backbones are much thinner than the aggregate of last mile connections.
hinkley 4y ago
I went to a five alarm fire in Seattle once. It started in the late afternoon. Pillar of black smoke into the sky. The fire was still going after sunset. The interesting thing about a five alarm fire is that it turns out that it takes about 10 fire trucks to run 5 hoses. The city water system, like the Internet, is designed to deliver a certain amount of volume per day, and to be able to move a reasonable amount of it to arbitrary locations, but not a large fraction of its total capacity to one spot. A city hydrant can't keep up with multiple fire hoses, even with a pumper truck there to give it enough pressure to go onto the fire. So what you have to do is daisy chain trucks, hooking trucks up to hydrants on separate water mains, or opposite ends of the same loop, then pump that water to another truck that pumps it onto the fire. You can't overbuild capacity without passing those costs on to customers, so you do what you can to keep the system working smoothly and have workarounds for situations where the abstraction leaks, like a once a decade five alarm fire, or an Internet Hug of Death.

smolder 4y ago

I wonder how that estimate was made. Maybe they are counting it as one transmission when something non-unique is broadcast to many endpoints? Or does every fetch of an asset from a CDN count? Either way, the bulk of the web is structured to put data as close to where it's needed as possible, to keep things quick and uncongested. So, it doesn't surprise me that internet backbones are much thinner than the aggregate of last mile connections.

hinkley 4y ago

I went to a five alarm fire in Seattle once. It started in the late afternoon. Pillar of black smoke into the sky. The fire was still going after sunset. The interesting thing about a five alarm fire is that it turns out that it takes about 10 fire trucks to run 5 hoses. The city water system, like the Internet, is designed to deliver a certain amount of volume per day, and to be able to move a reasonable amount of it to arbitrary locations, but not a large fraction of its total capacity to one spot. A city hydrant can't keep up with multiple fire hoses, even with a pumper truck there to give it enough pressure to go onto the fire. So what you have to do is daisy chain trucks, hooking trucks up to hydrants on separate water mains, or opposite ends of the same loop, then pump that water to another truck that pumps it onto the fire. You can't overbuild capacity without passing those costs on to customers, so you do what you can to keep the system working smoothly and have workarounds for situations where the abstraction leaks, like a once a decade five alarm fire, or an Internet Hug of Death.