theTechnophile

Like most people, I have always considered that Internet capacity would automatically expand to cope with any growth in use. But is this really the case? A recent post on Slashdot got me thinking.

Internet bandwidth

The problem is one of bandwidth, or the volume of data passing through the network at any one time. This appears in a couple of different forms:

1. A bandwidth usage cap, usually presented by ISPs as a monthly figure.
2. The data transfer rate given as the number of bits, packets of information, transferred each second.

Monthly allowances can easily be converted, by dividing the bandwidth cap figure by the number of seconds in a month, to give the average monthly data transfer rate. Figures for a few typical internet applications are shown below.

Table 1: Typical monthly average data transfer rates for internet applications

The transfer rates in Table 1 are very low when compared to a typically advertised broadband services at 1, 2 and even 8 Mbps and most corporate networks will capable of at least 100 Mbps.

What do you actually use?

Most users don’t carefully spread their use over the month and cause usage spikes when actually doing something like downloading a large file, watching video online or playing online games.

In response to new bandwidth heavy applications, check out the Web or magazines, you’ll find ISPs advertising new services with ever increasing transfer rates. This is great, but most connections aren’t capable of attaining the advertised rates.

Take my home broadband connection, I have no complaints over its reliability and it runs at a little under 1 Mbps. I find this to be adequate for my normal use and it can even cope with two of use surfing at the same time. BT think that they can squeeze 3 Mbps out of my line, but in this case the upgrading to the new 8 Mbps service on offer is pointless.

Is the limiting factor the copper wires to my house, at the exchange or at another point in the network entirely? I don’t know, but I’d be prepared to bet it isn’t the Internet backbone and online TV isn’t going to catch on in this household until it’s sorted out.

Being in contention

When using an internet connection you find that you are sharing its bandwidth with a number of other users. This is the contention ratio for that connection. Often you won’t all be using the connection at the same time and intensity, so you’ll be relatively unaware of each other.

Consequently the actions of individual users isn’t the prime concern, but rather their usage pattern on mass. For example, the mass adoption of telecommuting mooted as an emergency response in the wake of a flu pandemic is likely to result in a synchronised spike in network load. Many, I suspect rightly, expect that much of the Internet may grind to a halt, but not that it will collapse completely.

In contention terms, we’re all going to hit the connection bandwidth hard at the same time and the chances are we’ll each only come out with a small piece. Still it may be better than nothing, but as someone who has recently being using dial-up again I’m not so sure!

In the case of such emergencies, QoS features in routers already prioritise network traffic to maintain bandwidth access to more critical applications. It is possible to see that this can be applied to the Internet as a whole and may well be already.

It’s not just about the wires

The most vulnerable part of the system is likely to be the servers expected to deal with this huge increase in traffic.

Unless massive over capacity has been specified, faced with this situation the best outcome would be that most users would simply be unable to establish a connection with their destination server. The worst would be the same as a DoS attack, causing the server to crash.

Is the rapid mass adoption of remote working practices a viable response to pandemic scale infections even if you ignore the network limitations? For the majority I expect not.

Focus on the steady-state

So when pondering the strangulation of the Internet these emergency scenarios are a side-show. The main point is whether the regular adoption of higher bandwidth services can be supported by its infrastructure. In the case of streaming TV via the Internet, Google thinks not. The Internet wasn’t designed to stream this type of information in real time.

But that’s only video streaming, what about all the other web applications for which the Internet is better suited?

The term of the moment is Web 2.0; basically the adoption of a more social approach to building web content. Much of this is text, relatively compact images and the occasional audio file thrown in. None of this should cause significant trouble to the established networks as long as they keep pace with any growth in Internet uptake.

But will it do that? Who is responsible for the investment? It may be that bandwidth becomes more valuable in the future, like carbon dioxide perhaps, but there’s scope for greater efficiency in existing applications, such as:

• Cleaner, more standards compliant code.
• Image file formats with improved compression performance.
• Better use of data compression at the web server.
• More semantic code allowing machines to efficiently retrieve information.
• Reduce the volume of web crawling required to assembly search engine indexes.
• Get serious about reducing the amount of spam clogging the network. This includes junk email and comment spam on blogs and forums.

I suspect that these measures combined with others, identified by people much brighter than myself, would have a significant impact on our current bandwidth use. Could this issue be the Climate Change or tomorrow? We already have bandwidth trading after all.

I’m finding increasing interest in the possibilities raised by mobile communications and devices. A survey by Informa Telecoms and Media estimated that there would be over 3 billion mobile phone subscribers throughout the world by the end of 2007. The fastest growing markets are in India, China, Africa and Latin America where slightly older fashioned phones are extremely popular.

Old they may be, but being capable of accessing the Internet has been a basic feature of Western mobile phones for sometime, so these older phones should be able to manage it. Lets face it, when I first regularly started surfing the Web I was using a 75MHz Pentium. Almost any phone sports a far higher specification than that venerable machine. Indeed, if you ignore graphics, most modern phones have a performance close to that seen in desktops only a few years ago.

Even if most of that audience doesn’t subscribe to a package that provides data transfer, and I don’t yet, that’s still a very large potential audience. It started me wondering whether the mobile phone, handheld, smartphone or whatever you want to call the device could become the principle way of accessing the Web in the future.

The personal computer.

As I said above, these devices already have the performance edge on what I considered to be my PC a relatively short time ago… albeit in real everyday world terms. They are capable of running a wide range of applications up to and including Microsoft Windows and Office. Combined with some data services available today rivalling the speed provided by mainstream boardband, let alone dial-up networking, and you’ve got a powerful computing tool.

So why aren’t I using one?

Because there are a few hurdles to jump first.

1. The price for data transfer and internet access charged by major networks is far too high, but the indications are that it’s going to fall soon.
2. User interaction is limited by a couple of features:
   • User input is difficult with a phone keyboard, especially if your old like me.
   • Small screens limit the amount of data that can usefully be displayed.

Navigation and user interaction can be simplified and using web standards for website design, improving accessibility on a small screen and useless keyboard.

The download size of mobile websites can be minimised to reduce use of your expensive bandwidth and improve speed. Is this just like the old days of the Web or what?

Ultimately, I think that the mobile Web will be built on web applications customised for mobile devices. The functionality and presentation of these applications could be optimised for mobile users, but more importantly they will be designed to specific jobs for a mobile audience.

For example: Ever used Google Maps to get directions before going on a trip? In the future I bet it will integrate with your phone’s GPS function to guide you there whilst finding you the phone number to let them know your on your way.

Guess what I’ve been doing lately.

That’s right, it’s the new theme!

I think the title says it all really. I’ve completed the first phase of the new look for theTechnophile, I say the first phase because when is a website ever really finished. It is now very loosely based on the Wordpress default, hence some of the element names remain the same, but I’ve changed the whole structure to what I believe is known as a liquid layout.

The basic idea was to be able to maintain the look and feel of the site whilst using all of the available screen real estate. This is accomplished through the use of positioning in the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). My two main element blocks, the header and mainbody, are positioned relative to each other. The column elements, sidebar and content, within the mainbody block maintain an absolute position from their respective sides. It took a bit of getting my head round since my CSS turned out to be quite rusty and I found HTML Dog to be a useful reference.

Another key feature of liquid layout is that it copes much more smoothly with changes in the default browser font size, thus improving accessibility. Finally, it allows you to put the important content elements much nearer the top of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents than in conventional designs. This way the content appears at the top of your screen if CSS are turned off or not supported.

Why does Internet Explorer have to be different?

I’d forgotten just what a pain Internet Explorer (IE) can be. You see I use Mozilla Firefox, Safari and occasionally Opera browsers and even when I kept all of these happy IE had to object. I found this fantastic new graphics application called Inkscape and used it to generate the logo for the site as a semi-transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file. Seriously, if you like playing with graphics you should give Inkscape a go, especially since it’s open source. The other browsers are fine with this, but IE was not interested. The positioning worked fine on the others, but IE? The text size rendering looked great, but on IE… yes, you guessed it! Still I think I managed to find a solution that keeps all these browsers relatively content with a little help from Position is Everything, identifying a number of interesting bugs.

Still I did have to concede that the lack of transparent PNG support on IE was a solid boundary. So, a little PHP script to introduce extra CSS code allowed me to take advantage of their cascading nature. The result? A more IE friendly, if not so pretty, presentation without transparent graphics. If your using IE to read this, I’m really sorry but it looks genuinely better in other browsers, try it.

What’s next?

First I need to let the new look settle in for a while. Then I would like to introduce a bit of script to allow the user to choose which side they want the menu sidebar. This shouldn’t be too difficult due to the layout technique being used, but then again it could be a case of famous last words.

I may try writing an article to spell out what I did in much more detail. I’d like to be sure I understand it before that though! I have another website which needs a lot more work doing on it and which could be the appropriate place for the above article once completed. This is going to task my Java skills… gulp!

There seems to be a great deal of controversy surrounding the label ‘Web 2.0′. For myself, I’ve only recently noticed that such a thing exists. Personally I’ve been too busy playing with all the new services available on the web these days. You know the ones… for example Wikipedia, del.icio.us, flickr and blogging of course. Then I read Tim O’Reillys article entitled “What Is Web 2.0″ and discovered that I’d probably been participating in Web 2.0 after all!

Is it any good?

My partner, Clare, opened a free account with flickr to accompany her new found interest in photography. This gives me a chance to play around with interesting software and camera gear under the cover of it being ‘her hobby’. I’ve been using this site for a while to find good quality free images and I’ve always been impressed. The images are grouped and tagged to make searching fun and easy. Now I’ve tried uploading images with Clare, it was also apparent how simple Flickr makes this process during uploading. This results in an attractive, user friendly site with powerful search capability.

More recently I’ve opened an account with del.icio.us and I don’t quite understand why I didn’t do it before. Firstly, it allows me to gather useful bookmarks so that I can access them from any computer. I can also keep them private for my use only or open them up to anyone interested. Searching del.icio.us, I’ve already found a few interesting new sites the like of which I’ve been looking for specifically for some time using Google. It would appear that the tagging people use in their bookmarks might have been more specific than Google. Additionally, the huge number of directory sites that inevitably turn up during a Google search never get bookmarked.

I’m also trialling NetNewsWire for the Mac to manage my Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary according to O’Reilly, (RSS) news feeds. Up until now I’ve relied on Safari to do this job and it has been adequate, but I think I’m getting into this enough to justify a more powerful toy… I mean tool. So far I’m reasonably impressed and may continue to use it after my free month. What particularly appealed today was using the del.icio.us and flickr news feeds via NetNewsWire. This has effectively given me a photo album and bookmark file inside my newsreader. NetNewsWire has a pretty good web browser too, so I hardly need anything else!

What’s in a name?

Maybe I’m a little simple, but I’m impressed with how easy these new tools make accessing and sharing information with whom so ever I wish, as long as they have an internet connection. From earlier posts you might be aware that this information sharing idea definitely rings my bell. And that appears to be the nub of the Web 2.0 label, the sharing not the bell ringing! It isn’t about amazing new technology or a reconstruction of the internet we’ve come to know and love. It is about a change in thinking and a new approach to the use of what is already well established. It isn’t a replacement for the Web, but an significant extension. For the most part the label, as is usually the case with any label, is purely arbitrary.

Data, data everywhere.

The availability and manipulation of information is a key factor in the development of society. The modern era has seen significant advances, with technologies such as printing, radio and television providing access to ever increasing amounts of data. The mass adoption of the internet has increased the rate at which data can be disseminated. However, the proliferation of information sources has also made separating the wheat from the chaff increasingly difficult. Apart from the obvious trouble with knowing who to trust, huge quantities of data make it much harder to find what you want. We all use search engines and know that finding what you really want is not as easy as might be assumed.

And the future?

The future is likely to see even greater levels of information integration using the internet as a robust media. The boundary between desktop and web applications is already blurred and I suspect that this trend will continue. Web applications will become less about presenting information and the desktop itself will become increasingly integrated with the web. The kind of service-oriented architectures (SOA) used on the web today will become increasingly common. Our personal computing may take place on a relatively low powered machine leveraging the services provided on much more powerful distributed servers of the type already common on the internet. These machines may store our data remotely and securely, whilst others provide access to databases around the globe.

“Results 1 - 10 of about 424,000,000 for whatever you wanted”.

Unless there are advances in the way we handle all these data, there’ll be a lot of browsing to do. One path is the spread of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that has so far given us RSS and Atom feeds, without which a blog wouldn’t be a blog. XML is similar to the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that has been behind websites for years, but it also provides the ability to define custom tags. These can be used to describe the type of data contained between the opening and closing tags. In this manner a single text document can provide information about data and the structure of these data. This is what takes us closer to the goal of having a document that can be read by humans and machines alike. Widespread adoption would give rise to the Semantic Web.

Great where does that get us?

Once data can be fully understood be machines as well as us humans, we can delegate the task of filtering all those hits to our machines. Why not? Not only are they far quicker at this sort of thing, but they don’t get bored doing it! Well… not yet they don’t, but what if we have to use artificial intelligence in order to enable these machines to understand the meaning of that for which they are searching? And you thought you argued with your computer now!