YouTube and other online video sites may lead to an eventual Internet die off.
Ever-increasing amounts of uploaded video content will strain the Internet beyond its capacity by 2010, warned Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 in London earlier this month.
About eight hours of footage is uploaded onto YouTube every minute, Cicconi said at the conference and quoted in an article on CNET.com.
Even social networks may partially to blame.
Video represents 33 percent of everything shared on Facebook, said Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, LLC, a New Hampshire information consulting firm.
Mehmet Can Vuran, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said it's not the structure of the Internet that's causing the problem - it's how people access it.
Internet service providers, businesses that act as gateways for users to get online, have a tendency to form bottlenecks as more and more users go through them to access the Internet. To counter constraints on bandwidth, other methods connecting to the Internet need to be found, Can Vuran said.
"The Internet is like a big highway," Can Vuran said. "Right now, there's one entrance and one exit for (many) people. This leads to congestion. In real life, if the usual route is congested, you take a different route."
One such different route, Can Vuran proposed, is wireless Internet access.
Every wireless signal fits somewhere on the wireless spectrum, with television broadcasts operating on a different frequency than cell phones, etc. However, though the spectrum is heavily regulated, much of it isn't being used, Can Vuran said.
Can Vuran is researching cognitive radio networks at UNL and hopes his work will make wireless access easier for users across the country and therefore relieve some of the "congestion." Cognitive radio is a form of wireless communication in which a network alters its transmission or reception parameters to avoid interference with other users.
"A cognitive radio network senses the wireless spectrum and sees which portions are being used," Can Vuran said. "When it finds a section not being used, it can change on the fly."
The idea is to hop from section to section as need be, without hampering the signals normally operating on that frequency.
"If a licensed user starts to use (the section), we switch to a different part of the spectrum," Can Vuran said. "There's lots of spectrum available."
adamtempleton@dailynebraskan.com
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