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Overall, does anyone have a feel for how close we might be to a congestion collapse on today's internet? I've been reading about this for a few years now and h

Overall, does anyone have a feel for how close we might be to a congestion collapse on today's internet? I've been reading about this for a few years now and have obvious worries about real solutions not being implemented until after the storm hits. Or is this being overstated? Are there mechanisms in place that would mitigate or prevent large-scale congestion collapses of this kind?

EricBurnett 15y ago
The worldwide internet infrastructure is remarkably fragile. I can think of a few example off the top of my head where it's been abused or broken: 1. China 'borrowing' traffic: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/11/how-china-swallowed-15-of-net-traffic-for-18-minutes.ars http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/11/how-china-swall... 2. Myriad undersea cable cuts slowing / segmenting the internet 3. Juniper routers going down: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/110711-internet-outage-252851.html http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/110711-internet-outage... 4. There was an incident (2 years ago?) where an European ISP broadcast a low-cost route incorrectly and blackholed a large portion of the internet, although I can't find a link right now. With respect to buffers specifically, AT&T's network issues when the iPhone launched were largely self-inflicted by having overly large buffers: http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/10/is-att-wireless-data-congestion-selfinflicted.html http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/10/is-att-wireless-data-c... So yes, widespread issues are certainly possible. The internet is not nearly as resilient as people would like to believe.