How Reliable is the Internet?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
Look at it, the Fail Whale, the ultimate symbol of crisis on the Internet today. Every time this shows up online, a million Twitter addicted souls cry out in agony as their only means of communication is severed for the duration. Because clearly, when Twitter goes down, which happens a lot, MySpace, Facebook, Email, AIM, and the United States Postal Service go down as well.
I don’t understand why people freak the heck out when they see the Fail Whale, or the much more common “Twitter is over capacity” message. It’s not a big deal, calm down and have a warm drink (Hot Chocolate really calms my nerves, but I almost can’t stand the sugar) and read a good book (I recommend John Hodgman’s “Areas of my Expertise“). While you are doing that, consider all of the people through out different areas of the world, such as Africa, South America, parts of Asia, who don’t have access to Twitter or the Internet at all because it’s either too expensive or the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet.
But this does bring up a good question, is the Internet reliable? We do so much over the Internet, emails, chatting, blogging, podcasting, music downloading, video streaming, you can even solicit sex online (I know, crazy right?). Things that the Internet and the infrastructure it rides on weren’t actually built to do. Most internet traffic goes over phone lines via dial-up and DSL, a network that was designed to carry analog voice only. Now, the crazy thing is that with the advent of Voice over the Internet (or VoIP), we now send voice over the Internet which transmits over phone lines that were meant to carry voice. Of course, that sounds completely ridiculous.
But back to Twitter and their 98% uptime in 2007 (99.9% is considered the average uptime for any online system). Twitter is only text, and they are having issues scaling with their users. How are we supposed to do audio and video if a text service has trouble scaling? How does Ustream provide 1.5 million veiwer hours of live streaming video a month? That’s massive! And all it takes to bring down a system like that is to have just one more viewer than your servers and bandwidth can actually handle. And with a local television station, you don’t go down unless some drunk guy in a pick up truck runs into your transmitting tower. That, or some clumsy intern trips over a power cord in the studio while fetching coffee for the news anchor who acts like he makes as much as Matt Lauer and owns the station as a result.
