Microsoft and Facebook are laying another cable across the Atlantic, to start service next year. Google has partnered with 5 Asian telecommunication companies to lay an 11,600-kilometre, US$300-million fibre-optic cable between Oregon, Japan and Taiwan that started service in June. That is why they are spending billions of dollars to clear the traffic jams and rebuild the Internet on the fly-an effort that is widely considered to be as crucial for the digital revolution as the expansion of computer power. Internet companies are painfully aware that today's network is far from ready for the much-promised future of mobile high-definition video, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, telepresence and interactive 3D virtual-reality gaming. Consumers can already feel those constraints when mobile-phone calls become garbled at busy times, data connections slow to a crawl in crowded convention centres and video streams stall during peak viewing hours. The resulting digital traffic jams threaten to throttle the information-technology revolution. But service levels are much lower on local links, and at the user end it can seem like the electronic equivalent of driving on dirt roads. The copper lines that originally formed the system's core have been replaced by fibre-optic cables carrying trillions of bits per second between massive data centres. But the incident was just one particularly public example of an increasingly urgent problem: with global Internet traffic growing by an estimated 22% per year, the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers' best efforts to supply it.Īlthough huge progress has been made since the 1990s, when early web users had to use dial-up modems and endure 'the world wide wait', the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old telephone system. The channel, HBO, apologized and promised to avoid a repeat. Some 15,000 customers were left to rage at blank screens for more than an hour. On June 19, several hundred thousand US fans of the television drama Game of Thrones went online to watch an eagerly awaited episode-and triggered a partial failure in the channel's streaming service.
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