Will Ultra-High Definition Break the Internet?

Will Ultra-High Definition Break the Internet?

Have any of you bought one of those ultra-high definition and Internet ready TVs that were unveiled earlier this year? Stupid question, we know you haven’t – but you will, or at least hardware giants like Samsung and LG are banking on you doing so. What happens when you do?

“The amount of data you’d have to stream for ultra-high definition is about 2GB per second. You’re not going to stream that over your current connection,” says Jeffrey Schniller from MIT’s Information Services and Technology Department.

“I GUESS ANYTHING COULD BREAK”

What happens when the technology becomes cheap enough to tempt millions of us to upgrade? Think of the strain all that high quality streaming will place on broadband infrastructure. Is TV going to break the Internet?

“I guess anything could break,” Daniel Stoller, Vice President of Technology Strategy at Time Warner Cable tells The Connectivist. Speaking hypothetically he reckons that today’s infrastructure would struggle if all of TV was suddenly consumed via the web and the web only. He stresses that it’ll take time for cable companies to ensure that they’ll be able to deal with the future’s data guzzling demand for broadband, “but if you were to flip the switch today, there wouldn’t be enough capacity for it. In the end though, our job is to build additional capacity as needed. That’s what we do,” says Stoller.

Just how quickly consumer demand for bandwidth is growing – and therefore how much time cable companies have – varies slightly, depending on who you’re asking. Chris Parente, a communications consultant for technology companies in Virginia, says the latest figures he’s seen estimate that “by 2016 Internet traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes.” Put differently, “that’s roughly a 4 times increase in traffic since 2011.” Marisa Viveros, Vice President at IBM’s cyber security innovation department, says they expect “demand for data services to increase 26 times by 2015.”

“THEY WOULDN’T BELIEVE THAT YOUTUBE COULD EVER HAPPEN”

Those approximations aren’t necessarily contradicting but no matter who you talk to, everyone agrees that demand for Internet will continue to rise – and steeply.

If it seems miraculous that broadband will be able to keep pace with such rapid increases in demand over the next few years, let alone in the coming decades when UHDTVs may be commonplace, then you’ve only to glance back over the Internet’s short history. It’s a story of rapidly growing and improving infrastructure. The way we use the Internet today would have seemed near-impossible just a couple of years ago. “If you were to go back a decade and tell people that the Internet would be fast enough to stream video they wouldn’t believe it. They wouldn’t believe that YouTube could ever happen,” says Schniller.

Schniller says the only way to handle the tidal wave of demand that’s heading the Internet’s way in the coming decades is to upgrade the infrastructure. He says there’s no scientific reason that Internet of tomorrow shouldn’t be capable of streaming ultra-high definition video, it’ll just take time, money and effort. Schniller and other experts expect that upgrades will probably come in time and be sufficient to keep the cogs and wheels of broadband turning.

So the Internet isn’t going to break – unless we bury our heads in the sand. Even if we did a full-on desert submersion, it’s pretty unlikely that the Internet would physically ‘break’ per se. It’s more likely you’d become better acquainted with the spinning rainbow pinwheel of doom as the Internet became nauseatingly and maddeningly slow. “It’d just buffer forever,” says Schniller.

Stoller says there are a number ways cable companies like Time Warner are ensuring America’s Internet will be up to snuff to cope with the future’s data demands.

Firstly, they’re expanding the pipes. That’s straight forward; a wider bandwidth can tolerate more signals at once. They’re literally making more room for the Internet.

Secondly, they’re building more pipes – that’s also easy to understand: more pipes, more room, more signals, more Internet.

Thirdly, there’s the option of changing and evolving the way that we use the pipes to make sure we’re getting the most out of them. That’s ensuring that data jams are kept to a minimum. Compressing files more often; reducing the size of the stuff you’re sending over the pipes and expanding them again when they arrive on your computer. There’s also modulation, which varies the frequencies and amplitudes of signals to allow several of them to travel down the same pipe simultaneously.

Viveros says IBM is looking at ways to squeeze the most out of the networks we already have by using “data analytics to identify usage patterns and changes in work loads.” They’re working out how we use the Internet to anticipate when a specific site might experience especially high traffic so they can direct additional resources to make sure it doesn’t crash – similar to the way England borrows extra electricity from France during half time of an international soccer match, as the nation gets up to boil the kettle in unison.

Cable companies are scattering their eggs evenly; no one basket is burdened too heavily, “we’re pulling on all the levers. That’s one of the industry advantages, we have multi-options,” says Stoller.

Schniller offers another idea into the mix. Right now, if you were to download a podcast or TV show from iTunes, it wouldn’t be beamed directly to your device from Apple’s HQ in California (unless you happened to be close by). It’d come from a library server much closer to you – from one of a network of thousands peppered across the States. These servers contain archived episodes of the Daily Show, True Blood or whatever it was you were downloading. That shortens the distance the data has to travel to reach you and lessens the burden placed on the infrastructure network.  Schniller suggests that a similar network of servers with preloaded UHDTV content dotted over the country could help to shorten the download time and increase the chances of smoothly streaming ultra-high definition content.

At any rate, Schniller doesn’t anticipate us breaking the Internet any time soon – especially if past performance is anything to go by. “The Internet works really well, and when we have problems, it’s usually measured in hours.”