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UK: Internet and energy
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    The Internet is already consuming at least 8 per cent of Britain's power output, equivalent to the output of three nuclear power stations, and demand is soaring.

    It is growing so fast, currently at an exponential rate, that, in theory, it could be using all the UK power generation by 2035

    Internet access may soon need to be rationed or restricted because the UK’s power supply and communications network cannot cope with consumers’ appetite for online video

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11580307/Internet-rationing-needed-as-UK-cannot-keep-up-with-demand.html

  • 8 Replies sorted by
  • wordsofpeacewordsofpeace

    good first post on this article... - New servers are now judged not on raw computing power, but computing power per unit electrical power. More service for less power - especially less cooling power - s the agenda. - paralleling fibres works perfectly well. I have no idea what BT are waffling on about. - a given fibre link is perfectly capable of being upgraded by advance modulation to give more bandwidth - streaming real time videos using multicasting would save huge amounts of bandwidth - caching proxies in telephone exchnges would dramatically reduce bandwidth needed. - average Uk power is 30GW so 8% of that is 2.4GW, there are no 800MW nuclear power stations in the UK. most 1rte 1.2GW. They could actually have better saiud that the internet - if it does consume that much power - is equivalent to the average power output of all the windmills in the UK and offshore.

    The whole thing sounds like another scare story to get more government (taxpayer) money

    So I sent Prof Ellis an email asking him to answer these points.....

  • catcat

    I'm about to start a project in a photonics dept and this was mentioned to me some months ago. There are the losses due to re-ampliflication needed in using fibre optics, and obviously they're trying to squeeze as much data as possible down the pipes via multiple phases/twists/frequencies etc. I was told that currently the Internet backbone for the UK is approx 8% and like moores law it is and has been growing exponentially mostly down to video streaming mobile phones he etc, and that extrapolating this gives that energy use by 20whatever So, either a paradime shift is needed in technology or rationing, or a fuck load more energy. That's what exponential growth means, it gets out of hand really quickly! We might be in the golden age of technology after which... Who knows!

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    image

    Most efficient way is to fully ban online video streaming and data centers based video. :-)

    dog_14.jpg
    800 x 443 - 73K
  • karlkarl

    These "interpolations into the future" are always a little crazy. Quite obviously, electricity costs money. So there's a self-limiting effect to the growth of energy consumption for the "InterNet" purpose.

    And the "hunger for bandwidth to distribute videos" could be addressed by the not-so-new idea of broadcasting data - a harddisk mounted in a consumer device capable of holding the 1000 "most viewed videos of this week" in very good quality can be bought for < 100 €, and filling it from a broadcasted data stream is not a technical challenge. I think we'll see such methods being used in the future.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Broadcast idea has huge issues, as mobile data companies are getting frequencies around the world and want to get most of broadcast ones also (if possible). As mobile data rates make business much much more profitable.

  • RikerRiker

    Ban 4K! :)

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @Riker

    Best idea from energy standpoint is to use torrent like technology, so each and every popular movie or video will be located in near local network on already existing computer (and not in data center).

  • catcat

    Of course things will be dreamed up to alleviate the issue some, but it does raise the question of whether the nature of the Internet will change if data becomes regionalised and intercontinental traffic becomes premium. When I was told this the professor squad they didn't really want to make this too public as they didn't want to create a panic, I was surprised when a month or so later it was in the papers! I think I puts another level to energy provision in view of climate change, if usage grows at such a rate while countries try and decarbonise their infrastructure, unless they are planning for this extra demand things could get even stickier! Most plans I've heard are about the need to reduce usage by energy efficiency in housing, this could be more than offset by tech needs, especially as more of the poorest countries get more Internet access. I have no idea whether project loons footprint is more efficient, solar maybe?

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