This post was sparked by an article I read about internet bandwidth located here: Profiting from America’s Addiction to Internet Bandwidth . I am not that involved with this particular website but the topic sparked my interest and prompted me to do some thinking.
Bandwidth is not unlimited – it is a resource and like any resource, it has properties and limitations. During this past year, the school I work at installed a campus wide wireless system. The wireless system works very much like most commercial wireless systems you can find nowadays in that it is capable of handling a mass amount of users at any given time. The downside … the infrastructure at the school needed upgrading to handle the increased traffic. One of the components that required upgrading was with our internet connection. In short, our bandwidth was not capable of handling the expected increase in traffic. The principle behind this reasoning is true regardless if you have a home network or are working at a billion dollar corporation. The more users concurrently online the less bandwidth there is per user. Back to that article about America’s addiction to bandwidth, with the emergence of social media, surfing the net on mobile platforms, and the increasing number of users using the internet … there appears to be an opportunity around the corner in developing the technological infrastructure for increased bandwidth.
The inauguration of President Obama demonstrated a very realistic view of the difficulties and need with the above mentioned topic. Since it was an historical occasion our school had an assembly to watch the inauguration. Our first thought was to watch it via the internet on one of the live video streams. Yesterday morning came and we started tuning into the web to find a video feed. We could not find one feed that did not stutter every 15 to 30 seconds. The problem simply was the amount of traffic on those various sites was so high that the infrastructure was unprepared. End result; we went to an alternate plan and did not stream the event to our student body instead we used an alternate technology; built with the television in mind; to watch the ceremony.
Perhaps the event of yesterday can facilitate a move to ramp up the infrastructure and update the technology to handle what is becoming a very common way of life to many around the world. Our infrastructure in this regard seems to be rarely talked about and I found many people somewhat surprised that the video streams on the internet did not work as we’ve come to expect. My hope is that we take this shortcoming and become a little more proactive in our planning rather than being reactive. Normally we do not concentrate on fixing a problem until after we have need of a solution. The problem yesterday was a known issue, it did not appear overnight. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that some things get worked on so we do not have another day of frustration and stuttering video feeds.
Edited 2-22-09: Further information about the inauguration and Online Video can be found at PC Mag.Com. Article by Lance Ulanoff.