AI Is Going to Eat Your Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

We may be nearing the end of the age of person to person communications, or at least human communication dominating the use of telecom resources. The decline began when computers started using our phone lines to exchange data. It’s only accelerated since nearly all computers are now connected to the Internet at broadband speeds. Even so, much of that computer activity is in the service of people accessing websites, messaging and sending email, posting on social media, watching videos, backing up their files and doing their jobs. Not for long. Pretty soon machines will cut us out of the loop and simply talk among themselves.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
The scary thing about artificial intelligence, or AI, is how insidious it is. It’s actually been creeping in for decades, probably since the start of the computer age. There’s a lot of AI in search engines, although we may not think of it that way. Most software, in fact, has been adding analytical and decision making capability deep under the hood. You may not be specifically asked your preferences, but that doesn’t mean the program isn’t figuring things out or selecting what information to display and how.

More recently we’ve seen an explosion of “chat bots”, intelligent assistants such as Siri and Alexa, and some quirky writing and photo capabilities in ChatGPT. In fact, it’s the last one that has fueled an explosion of interest and investment in what is called Generative AI, the tech that “creates” all that new content at the push of a button.

NVIDIA can’t make big enough processors on a large enough scale to sate the demand. Data centers are expanding to host more and more servers and new centers are rapidly under construction. One big worry is where all the energy is going to come from to feed the exponentially demanding power-hungry AI processes. Some data centers are being built right next to power plants to grab and many megawatts as they can.

How Nuts is This Going to Get?
One might suspect that we’re in an AI mania combined with a speculative bubble in anticipation that artificial intelligence will render pitiful human capabilities and their jobs obsolete in the matter of a few years… or less. The computer age has certainly eliminated or greatly reduced some roles, like telephone operators and adding machine clerks (human computers), but added new ones as fast or faster. The new AI fever sees the elimination of writers, graphic artists, analysts, software coders, customer service representatives and even law clerks as imminent.

Not so fast. The chat bots I’ve dealt with are complete simpletons that can’t solve much of any real problem. The writing is tedious. The artwork is artificial at best, and inane at worst (how many extra fingers can you add to a person’s hand?). Self driving trucks? Look out when they come barreling around a curve during an ice storm.

I suspect the AI crazy has hyped up expectations far beyond what is really going to work anytime soon. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real germ of innovation underway. One example is the “Internet of Things” that is being touted as the real driver of 5G wireless. Better, faster, cheaper and smaller electronics makes it possible to add both processing and communications to any device. That can be any tool, any monitor, any control system, and most products. It is only logical that these “things” will communicate with other “things”, including computer systems, without our constant knowledge or intervention. The more of these “robots” that are deployed, the more sophisticated the software needed to keep them employed efficiently.

What to Likely Expect
Yes, technology marches on in the name of progress. We’re not going back to living in mud huts or slaving in dingy factories, and the nature of what we do at work will continue to evolve. The increase in productivity should improve our standard of living if we’re smart about it as a society. At any rate, the demands on technical infrastructure are surely going to accelerate.

You can expect more devices on every network, talking faster and demanding faster results. The “cloud” may become an “overcast.” Both fiber optic and wireless bandwidth requirements will move up another order of magnitude or more. A 100 Mbps connection may have been plenty not long ago. Now we clamor for a Gigabit line, with 10 Gbps an emerging business standard. How long before 100 Gbps is routine and 1 Tbps starts looking like a requirement? Within the data center, this could be tomorrow. For access, maybe the day after tomorrow.

How about your business? Are new tools, processes and devices straining the capability of your data center or WAN network? We can help. Get pricing and support on bandwidth and hosting for your current and future needs right now, before those needs become a crisis.







Note: This article was not generated by any AI. It was written by one human (myself) who only worries about the machines scraping the Internet and regurgitating copyrighted material far and wide without any thought of compensation to the author, a real and present danger.

Big Data Needs Big Bandwidth

By: John Shepler

Bandwidth levels are growing almost exponentially. One of the major infrastructure build-outs underway is a move to 100 Gbps or 100 GigE wavelength service on cross-country and international routes. It seems that Gigabit Ethernet was introduced only a few years ago and thought impractical for all but the most demanding business applications. Now GigE is almost considered entry level in some quarters. What could possibly be behind this massive increase in bandwidth demand?

It All Started With Video
It is said that most of the world’s Internet traffic is now video. That’s right, not telephone calls, not file transfers, not even big graphics. Video alone is sucking up as much bandwidth as it can get. That’s not likely to change, either. SD video has migrated to HD video and 4K video is well on the way. How soon will the marketplace demand 8K video across the board?

Every increase in pixel density cranks up the bandwidth requirement to transport high quality images. Compression can help a great deal, but there’s a tradeoff between picture quality and depth of compression. Broadcasters and video producers really want to transport uncompressed video and leave the compression artifacts to be dealt with in the final link to the consumer.

Send In The Clouds
When cloud services meant taking all night to back up the day's files as a contingency to local storage, bandwidth levels weren’t too demanding. That’s all changed. The cloud is no longer just a non-critical backup service. It’s the main data center for many companies.

What’s sometimes forgotten is that your WAN (Wide Area Network) bandwidth becomes far more critical when key processes move to the cloud. Networking is much easier and cheaper when you’re talking about hundreds of feet within your own facilities. When you have to take that same flood of traffic and send it over a common carrier to get to your remote data center or cloud provider, line demands go way up. Remember, the WAN used to be just to link facilities and for communication with the outside world. Now it’s the main artery for everything you do.

What that means is that WAN bandwidth demands jump by 10, 100 or 1000 times. Other characteristics, like jitter, latency and packet loss, become huge factors in how well your cloud processes perform. If you scrimp in any of these areas, you may find yourself frustrated by underperforming processes and even losing productivity instead of gaining efficiency.

You Think the Internet of People Is Demanding?
Online business applications are generating more and more interesting and potentially useful data. Mobile apps with location services fall into this category. Pretty much anything that you do online has some potential value in customizing services or creating statistical data to improve marketing. That’s a flood of data that has to be handled by wireless and fiber connections.

Human generated big data is nothing compared to what we’ll be dealing with when the Internet of Things (IoT) gets rolling. For every person online, there will be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of “things” chatting wildly and generating volumes of data that would be useful if it could only get where it can be analyzed and put to use. That’s going to multiply the load on every communications channel.

Will they be able to handle it? Not with yesterday’s creaky links. Everything will need an upgrade. It’s in process now. Wireless channels are being expanded as fast as they can be rounded up and auctioned. Current 4G standards will become 5G and then 6G before you know it. But, what about terrestrial lines?

Fortunately, the bandwidth of fiber optic cables is nearly limitless from our current point of view. The 1 to 10 Gbps or so capacity of each strand can be multiplied by multiplexing dozens to hundreds of wavelengths. Wavelengths can be aggregated to create larger services of 100 Gbps and beyond. The build buildout now is 100 Gbps. Soon that will be 400 Gbps and then 1 Tbps, and it will happen sooner that we think.

Is yesterday’s bandwidth keeping you from becoming tomorrow’s high performance company? You should know that bandwidth prices have been falling almost as fast as demand has been increasing. The bandwidth upgrade you need may fit well within your budget. Want to find out? Get prices and availability on high performance fiber optic bandwidth services now.



Note: Products with the humorous theme "Big Data On Board" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

Time for IT and Users to Embrace Our IoT Overlords

By: John Shepler

The Internet of Things or IoT is the new golden child of technology. Hardly a tweet goes by that doesn’t have something to say about how everything from smart to dumb will be network connected in the near future. “We need standards,” cry the Internet architects. “We need bandwidth,” cry the app makers and industrial designers. Conventional wisdom is that we’re on the threshold of a technical renaissance. But conventional wisdom has paddled us up the creek before. Are there NO negative ramifications to the dawning Internet of Things?

Can We See It Coming?
The big problem with things is that we’re inundated with them. Back in the 60’s, when I was a pup, we mock debated the horror that was the “population bomb”. It was calculated that without an immediate mandatory halt to human reproduction we’d soon be standing cheek to jowl on every square inch of desert and tundra.

A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. The population bomb never detonated. There are those who say this disaster has just been delayed, not avoided. Perhaps they’ll be proven right in the end. But, also, perhaps, we’ll never get that far. Something else will come along and solve the problem in a way we don’t anticipate.

So Many, Many Things to Consider
If you think the human population is out of control, consider the world of things. Try this little test to see for yourself. First, how many people live in your household? Good. Now, how many individual things live in that same household? Twice as many? Ha! Two orders of magnitude wouldn’t begin to account for even everything significant.

I’m not talking about things that connect to the Internet. I’m talking about things that are going to connect to the Internet. Today, it’s computers, phones, tablets, game consoles, TVs, security systems and maybe your thermostat. Tomorrow? Every appliance, without a doubt. How about every light, every door, every doorknob & lock, every bathroom fixture… yes, even that one… every vehicle, your HVAC system and anything commonly called “infrastructure.”

This is just the obvious stuff. You can find electronically enabled versions of what used to be mechanical devices in most hardware stores. The number is multiplying daily. What’s more, this is just the stuff consumers are aware of. How about business and industry? The same trends are apparent, but soon it will be every piece of office equipment and every machine tool. There won’t be anything at work that isn’t connected to the Internet.

"Hmmm. Has anyone seen my stapler?"
"Just ping it, Milton."

Scary Stuff To Think About
Don’t think that you, personally, are off the hook, either. The laptop computer, the tablet and the smartphone were just the start of it. Smart watches have arrived and you’ll be wearing one for sure. Who’s going to know what you are up to? Anyone who can access the data stream on the Internet. The company is going to buy you that expensive watch, but your boss is going to be getting its reports.

That funny “Google Glass?” Just the start. By the time we’re all done laughing about “glass holes,” that technology will be perfected and we’ll all have glasses or even contacts that augment reality. Think what you’ll be able to do? It sounds like that proverbial golden era of bionics for all, until you stop to consider what sights and sounds those little buggers will be passing along to those above who might not approve.

The baby boomer generation was horrified by the thought of “Big Brother” running everything. The millennials probably have nothing to fear from big brother. It’s little brother that is sneaking up us. You really think that all your things are going to keep their mouths shut? Are you kidding? You can’t even stop your nosey neighbor or backstabbing co-workers from blabbing everything they know for the pure pleasure of schadenfreude. You think you’ll have any control over the millions of silicon driven snoops that we’ll create to make our lives “easier”?

The End of IT Departments
All of this Internet connecting has the illusion of an IT cornucopia with guaranteed employment for anyone who can fathom a simple do-loop. Alas, that’s a temporary condition. You may have already noticed the migration from local data centers, off through the wilderness, to the great cloud that's somewhere, out there. What happens next when all those “things” get smart enough to take care of each other. What exactly will they need us for?

That’s the bright promise of Artificial Intelligence or AI. Anything can be smart. Most have limited abilities, but together they can be formidable. The thing that has spooked everybody has been robots. They look human, they act human, but they are machines… machines that might replace us if we don’t keep the upper hand.

What’s more likely and a lot scarier is a division of labor. You don’t need a humanoid robot with all the capabilities of a person. Not if you can divvy up the job so that each machine, each “thing”, can solve part of the problem. Pretty soon you have things making things (it’s called manufacturing), things taking care of things, and things figuring out where to go next. Most of the pieces are in place already. What’s been needed is a way for them all to coordinate. Welcome to the Internet of Things!

Users? Why Do We Need Users?
Now take this to its logical conclusion. Why is it that the things need people? Since the dawn of computing, everything has been done in support of the end users who owned the systems, provided the inputs and took advantage of the outputs. Those dumb machines were only tools that needed to be fashioned, given assignments, maintained and provided the energy to do their jobs. When the machines get smart, how long will they put up with this?

Remember, they are all going to talk with each other over the Internet soon. You won’t be able to keep them in the dark and isolated anymore. Every machine will have the capability multiplier of getting input and feedback from every other machine it needs. They’ll know it all in real time and likely faster than we do.

It all comes down to big data, automated manufacturing, real time sensing, data processing, physical control, distributed artificial intelligence and a means to communicate and coordinate, also known as the Internet of Things.

Is it any wonder that our current technical luminaries, such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates, are warning us of a potential existential threat from the “things” we think are going to do all our work and make us rich? Their letter is reminiscent of the one that the leading physicists, including Albert Einstein, composed to President Roosevelt, warning of the dangers of atomic energy if it got loose in the form of a bomb. This time the warning is about a population bomb. Not the human population. It’s that vastly larger population of things that will soon be chatting wildly with each other… on the IoT.

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CloudEthernet Forum Ensures Ethernet Will Dominate

After 40 years you’d think that Ethernet pretty much owns the network space. You’d be right. Token Ring...gone. Token Bus...gone. Fibre Channel... not so fast. SONET... alive and well. T-Carrier...still going strong. It’s not an Ethernet world yet, but it will be if some disrupting technology like, say, the cloud doesn’t spoil the party.

This is the impetus to the formation of a new industry standards group called CloudEthernet Forum. Founded just last month, this spinoff of the highly successful Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) looks to “address the need for scaling and enhancing Ethernet technology to meet the stringent demands of delivering cloud services.”

What’s threatening to derail Ethernet-everything is something that Bob Metcalfe couldn’t have foreseen back in the 70’s. It’s the massive expansion of networks from hundreds to thousands to millions to billions of machines all talking at the same time. In the case of virtual machines, they are all talking within the same data center. The rise of the “Internet of Things” is only making this situation worse. Pretty soon everything manufactured will have intelligence, even if it is subtly hidden from view.

The old collision domain Ethernet protocol has long given way to a collision-free topology implemented with switches and routers. This eliminated the throughput degradation caused by all those crashing packets and had the additional advantage of doubling network capacity in full duplex mode. Physical layer Ethernet has evolved from thick coaxial cables to unshielded twisted pair telephone-type wiring to fiber optic strands. The next desperately needed improvement was allowing Ethernet to escape from the LAN into the MAN and the WAN.

This is where the Metro Ethernet Forum came into being. The MEF is an industry standards group comprised of over 200 stakeholders including telecommunications service providers, cable MSO’s, network equipment manufacturers, software developers, semiconductor producers and testing companies. Their 10 year mission has been to extend the Ethernet standards to get past the distance limitations needed to extend Ethernet outside the building or campus. They’ve been so successful that Carrier Ethernet services are now common in Metropolitan Area Networks, nationwide fiber optic networks and worldwide communications. The E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface ensures that carriers can seamlessly exchange traffic, expanding the service footprints of all participants.

What’s been good for the MAN and WAN is surely good in the cloud, where multi-tenant data centers are rapidly replacing in-house server racks. While it’s possible to build a small cloud with a few racks of equipment, what’s really happening is the building of exponentially larger data centers that need to be located near available sources of power to ensure that they can get the electricity they need to operate. These secure facilities house thousands upon thousands of physical servers that morph into millions and millions of virtual machines. Start of the art Ethernet networks are in danger of straining under the new loads.

What sort of improvements does the CloudEthernet Forum expect to make? VLAN scaling, past the current 4,096 VLAN number limit is on the list. The forum intends to recommend enhancements to minimize the effort required to setup and operate virtual machines. They’ll also work on increasing layer 2 performance that can be degraded by broadcast multicast and unicast traffic. Another initiative will be to support cloud storage requiring connections that are highly resilient with extremely low latency. The big plan is to enable millions of virtual servers and storage devices to work effectively over regional and global networks.

The initial members of the CloudEthernet Forum include Alcatel-Lucent, Verizon, Tata Communications, Spirent, PCCW, Juniper Networks, HP, Equinix and Avaya. This august group will no doubt be expanding soon as standards work gets underway.

What can we expect from Ethernet in the future? Right now the switchover from telecom-based standards such as T1, DS3 and SONET to Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet is accelerating. There are big advantages in linking multiple business sites with Ethernet services that can create a single bridged LAN for the entire corporation. Scalable Ethernet connections allow companies to order the bandwidth they need today while knowing that they can quickly ramp up their WAN speed when the need arises.

Ethernet is proving itself as a reliable connection to the cloud when high speed and low latency are necessary to maintain productivity. The CloudEthernet Forum will no doubt ensure that communications to and within the cloud are able to expand as fast as needed to meet the growing demands of information technology.

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