A decentralized orchestration of moments, make this very last enemy renounce. [Insert extremely clear diagram here.]
What, you didn’t know the Internet was self-destructing? Well it is.
Bufferbloat, my #1 prediction from 2011, is an artifact of cheap memory and bad planning in the Internet Age. In order to keep our porn streaming without interruption we add large memory buffers in applications, network cards or chipsets, routers, more routers, and even more routers until the basic flow control techniques of the TCP protocol are completely overwhelmed. Data glugs through the system like a gas can with no vent. Our solution to date has been to make our pipes (and therefore our glugs) bigger, but in the long run that won’t help. Latency increases and performance declines.
Many Internet users are unaware of bufferbloat because it has been masked by faster computers and bigger pipes and because it sneaked up on us slowly over time. But here’s a test. Think back to your first broadband cable or DSL Internet connection, right after you finally got rid of dial-up. How much faster is your Internet connection today than it was back then? Don’t think in terms of numbers but of subjective performance. It’s not much faster at all, is it? That’s bufferbloat.
