Road rage on the information superhighway
In 1911 London traffic went at 8 miles per hour. In 2011 it still goes at 8 miles per hour. True, we may have well-surfaced roads, sophisticated traffic control and significantly faster cars but, at the end of the day, we’re not getting anywhere fast. In fact, the only thing that’s changed is that we expect to get there faster, so we get all the more angry when we get held up.
So I started to think about how the Internet, the great information superhighway, is exactly the same. For as long as I can remember, it’s been about speed: how fast can I get to my destination? In the early days it was just grateful to have a car. Sure it was slow to get around but, to be honest, there weren’t very many places for me to go so I was pretty content. Traffic was light, but my ride couldn’t have gone any faster if I wanted it to.
Fast-forward ten years and I’m driving a digital Aston Martin. In fact, most of my friends are driving Aston Martins too. The government has committed to spending millions on making the roads wider and utopia, they say, is around the corner: super-fast lanes that everyone can drive down whenever they want wherever they are and wherever they’re going.
But it’s a big fat lie.
Everyone knows that no matter how wide you make the roads (bandwidth), they’ll always be full and the more people that want access to one particular road, the slower the traffic becomes (contention ratio). It’s true that if we didn’t broaden them, then we wouldn’t be able to take any more cars anyway, even if we wanted to. As more people flock to the cities of the Internet, without expanding out the network, rush-hour traffic would only get slower for longer, ending up in one god-awful jam that stretches for miles and lasts for days, like Beijing’s 9-day tailback in summer 2010.
In fact, the more people promise me faster and faster speeds, the more likely I am to lash out at someone, or mow down an innocent pedestrian when the stress gets too much (some poor Starbucks customer at the moment).
What’s the solution? What about a congestion tax. It didn’t work for London, which, in 2003, imposed a charge on vehicles entering the city centre during peak hours and, within months, reverted to its customary 8 miles per hour as people got used to paying.
What about toll roads? Great for those willing to stump up the cash, tempted by the prospect of being able to drive as fast as you like on big empty roads, but not so much for the rest of us and not really scalable. If all the roads were toll roads, then we’d all end up paying and we’d have the same problem.
Priority lanes for cars which run on a certain type of fuel, or car-sharers or ambulances, or police cars or something – that is, prioritise certain types of traffic which fulfill certain conditions? Hmm… that could work, so say those who are arguing against ‘net neutrality’. But, given that this is a global network were talking about, how will we ever agree on what to prioritise and who has the authority to police it? What about corrupt officials who decide to flout the system? Or mafias that work out how to hack the network and can bump you up the queue for a fee (I’m looking at you, broadband providers).
Ok, i’ve probably exhausted that metaphor, but the point remains: we may get told that next generation fibre networks, LTE, 4G or whatever will be the golden bullet that solves all our capacity woes, but the truth is that as soon as there’s greater bandwidth we’re just going to fill it with HD films, live TV streaming and video chat. The future may look bright, but the sorry truth is that it’s going to be just as congested as it is now.
