I saw a very interesting speculation on the possible future of the Internet plumbing in an online Zine. Don't have it at hand but may try to find it.
Anyway, the idea went like this: Everyone is focused on the bottleneck of the last mile. It is a bottleneck, but particularly as cable modems and xDSL on phone lines are more widely available, it will quickly become obvious to all that there are other important bottlenecks as well. And in fact that the problem is shifting. The backbones themselves have often become major bottlenecks, as well as the servers of popular sites. In fact they are the bottleneck much more than people realize, and it will get worse and worse, given the speed of adoption of the net.
The proposed solution was as follows. Marry massive disk drive server farms (which have become very cheap and are dropping in price per terabyte very rapidly) at first ISP router sites across the country with satellite point to multipoint transmissions to those same points. (Actually, a tiered level of increasing amounts of disk drive caching was proposed as likely to be most efficient.)
The idea is that each time an ISP gets a request for a page from a customer, it retrieves that page and then caches in its local drive farm. Then everytime it gets another request for the same (unchanged) page, it retrieves it from its own massive cache, rather than sending the request down the backbone. Hense sites like Yahoo which get massive hit volume will be locally cached on ISP nodes throughout the country, and will need only changed page updating, and that only once per change. The theory goes that hits on the net probably follow the 80/20 rule of thumb. 20% of sites account for 80% of traffic. Actually, the top few percentage probably account for a pretty fair percentage of hits.
Add to this the idea of continuous pushing out to the ISP drive farms by satellite the continuosly updated Yahoo stock and news info, etc., plus that of other popular sites.
Geo sats would work great for this I should think.
I thought it was an interesting idea.
Doug |
