"The end of the Internet is coming, it is on the verge of collapse, it will happen before 2023, it is threatened with an explosion." These are some of the headlines circulating worldwide and warning.
Data explosion
Why will all this happen? Because the volume of data has increased excessively. With the advent of smartphones, the development of digital television and the proliferation of videos uploaded daily to YouTube, networks are threatened with "clogging". The amount of data being transferred is so large and increasing so much that its transfer will soon become impossible and the electricity consumption required will not be sufficient.
This wind of panic is not just a simple case of internet users. It came from the prestigious Royal Society of Great Britain, which organized a scientific symposium on May 11 and 12 where researchers focused on the problem of the "capacity crunch" - the internet's capacity crisis.
Demand greater than supply
The researcher who organized the symposium, Andrew Ellis of Aston University in Birmingham, gave many interviews on this topic to the British press.
"Demand is greater than supply. We've been able to do it for years, but we're reaching a point where we can't do it forever," he explained to the Daily Mail. He believes that new materials and innovations in data transfer are not enough to solve some of the technical problems that arise, such as storage capacity, transfer speed, etc.
These predictions by scientists, however, make network technicians smile. "It's a myth that the internet will collapse. We've already heard it a hundred times, but I trust the researchers and technicians, because it's in the interest of the whole world," a network consultant who is well-versed in the issues told Le Monde.
The internet has "died" many times
Indeed, since its birth, the internet has been destined to "die" many times: in 1996, in 2000 with the New Year's bug, later with the arrival of developing countries on the network, or in 2012 with the exponential growth of mobile internet. But each time it has survived.
"From a technical point of view, it is true that demand is increasing and if we do nothing, at some point the system will reach its limits," Stéphane Bortzmeyer, a network engineer and expert in Internet architecture, tells Le Monde.
"But the managers are not sitting idly by and are taking action. So far, they have always succeeded. I see no reason to make pessimistic predictions," he adds.
Towards an electricity shortage?
The other major risk that researchers warn about and fear a capacity crunch is the spectacular demand for electricity from the internet infrastructure. In the case of datacenters, those giant computers where large amounts of data circulating on the web are collected and stored, this risk of energy shortage is a major problem.
With the increase in data exchanged on the internet and the discovery of cloud computing, which consists of storing huge amounts of photos, e-mails, texts, etc. on remote computers, the number of datacenters has multiplied alarmingly.
According to a non-paper by the Paris Region Documentation Institute published in April, some areas of the city were in the “red” in terms of electricity consumption. According to the note, the reason was that demand had increased by 25% due to datacenters. On this subject, Andrew Ellis, in the Daily Mail, was categorical: “We will run out of electricity in about 15 years.”.
Laurent Lefevre, a researcher at the National Institute for Research in Informatics (Inria), who specializes in internet energy consumption, has a different opinion and believes that this prediction "is based on elements of panic.".
"Our work shows that we can reduce internet energy consumption by 1,000 units without compromising service quality. In other words, we can have a network in 2020 that consumes 90% less energy than in 2010, even if demand hits a ceiling," he says.
How will this be done? Energy consumption in devices will be reduced, the system will be decentralized, and the applications with which the devices operate will be modernized.
"This business is already on its way," estimates Laurent Lefevre, citing new methods of cooling data centers as an example. "Yes, networks consume a lot and demand is increasing. But this does not mean the collapse of the internet. On the contrary, the increase in demand will teach us to operate more rationally with regard to electricity," he adds.
Source: iefimerida.gr
