Scott McPherson's Web Presence

Has anyone noticed their Internet connection slowing down over the past few days?

Has anyone not noticed the slowness of the Internet, especially at night?

E-commerce retailers are experiencing a huge surge in shoppers this holiday season.  And nowhere is this more evident than in the (in)ability of users to expeditiously shop on their favorite Websites this holiday season.  I can speak directly to this issue.  For example, while shopping for a new television set online, I was thrown off Sears.com several times, and thrown off circuitcity.com almost as many times.  Screen refreshes were agonizingly slow, and I would up shutting off the computer and waiting for a more suitable time to shop.

Welcome to the New Normal on the Internet once a pandemic starts.  As we have discussed before, the New Normal (at least for 8 to 12 weeks at a time) will be socially-distanced parents attempting to work from home, while their kids are toiling away on their XBox 360s hooked up to the net, gaming with 200,000 of their closest online friends.  The cumulative effect of this will be to slow even the highest-speed cable connection to a veritable crawl.

But even a pandemic may not be the trigger to bring the Web to its knees.  A recent USA Today article speaks of the dangers to bandwidth that are just a few years off, even without the threat of a looming pandemic. Here it is:

Video, interactivity could nab Web users by '10

By David Lieberman, USA TODAY

"We're not trying to play Paul Revere and say that the Internet's going to fall," says IIA co-Chairman Larry Irving. "If we make the investments we need, then people will have the Internet experience that they want and deserve."

Nemertes says that the bottleneck will be where Internet traffic goes to the home from cable companies' coaxial cable lines and the copper wires that phone companies use for DSL.

Cable and phone companies provide broadband to 60.2 million homes, accounting for about 94% of the market, according to Leichtman Research Group.

To avoid a slowdown, these companies, and increasingly, wireless services providers in North America, must invest up to $55 billion, Nemertes says. That's almost 70% more than planned.

Much of that is needed for costly running of new high-capacity lines. Verizon is replacing copper lines with fiber optic for its FiOS service, which has 1.3 million Internet subscribers.

Johnson says that cable operators, with 32.6 million broadband customers, also must upgrade. Most of their Internet resources now are devoted to sending data to users — not users sending data. They'll need more capacity for the latter as more people transmit homemade music, photos and videos.

"Two years ago, nobody knew what YouTube was," Johnson says. "Now, it's generating 27 petabytes (27 million gigabytes) of data per month."

Schools, hospitals and businesses could add to the flood as they use the Web for long-distance education, health care services and videoconferencing.

Service providers might not appreciate how fast Web demand is growing, Johnson says: "Comcast doesn't know what's going on in AT&T's network, and vice versa. Researchers are increasingly shut out. So nobody's getting good, global knowledge about the Internet."

One of the best-kept secrets in netland is the existence of LambdaRail, an educational network that makes broadband seem as slow as dialup.  First, some history: What we know today as the Internet was actually built by the US military during the Cold War.  It was a data communications network called ARPANET; a network so resilient that it could survive multiple nuclear strikes.  After the US military surrendered ARPANET to Higher Education, the colleges and universities turned it into what we know today as the Internet (sorry, Al, you didn't do a damn thing to build it).  And then the planet took the Internet over from academia.

Academia never really got over that idea, so they built their own, faster, better net, called LambdaRail.  It travels orders of magnitude faster than the public Internet does.  And it has relatively few users; so few, in fact, that state university systems are now trying to resell LambdaRail bandwidth to anyone who technically qualifies (you have to have some serious jack, plus a smidgen of an educational purpose, so most need not even bother to apply). In my day job, I am seriously considering moving my organization to LR as a way to fuse our disaster recovery network planning with our daily net business model.  If we move to LR, we hypothetically should avoid the wobbles, crunches and squeezes the rest of you peons will face when the pandemic arrives.  HAHAHAHAAAAAAA!

Anyway, this LR stuff may all sound good, but the impact of a pandemic to global commerce, globalization itself, and the just-in-time economy will be sudden and devastating.  The same Internet that carries your Flikr photos and YouTube videos also carries banking information, billions and billions of transactions, and literally trillions of dollars move on it annually.  So the idea that during a pandemic, Johnny's game of Assassin's Creed for the 360, coupled with Mom's need to log in and hit the corporate mainframe via a Web portal cumulatively causing a global financial meltdown is more than just the stuff of fiction.

Booz Allen Hamilton came to this conclusion last June, when they predicted the Internet would collapse in the EU in Day Four of a severe pandemic.  So the lesson is to watch the Internet this holiday season, study how it slows down, then envision this scenario being the New Normal during a pandemic.  Or anytime in 2010, according to Gannett.

Happy shopping.