Re: Do any of you guys ever stop and really contemplate how amazing this internet technoloy is
<DD class=comment-body>This is amusing. As someone who has worked in corporate data centers for 15 years, and in the telecom business for 10, it seems to me that
very few of your commenters have any idea of the amount of power needed to maintain our current telecom infrastructure.
My current employer, one of the largest telecom companies in the world, recently calculated their total energy footprint. They came up with a number in excess of 3GW[gigawatts].
It's far more than just the servers that deliver web pages. There are the telecom switches, the routers, the repeater stations every 10 Km on the fibre line, the microwave relay stations, the cellphone towers and their associated telecom hardware, the metering, billing and monitoring systems, the backbone interconnects, the customer support systems, the infrastructure for all the employees, the power conditioning and emergency power systems, the storage area networks and disk arrays, and most of all, the cooling systems.
... a CPU that runs at 5 or 10 degrees above the current max is not useful improvement. At an earlier job, I worked in a data center that had some 50 midrange and high-end Unix servers, and 200 or so PCs, 3 telecom switches, and 5 storage arrays totaling 300TB. Quite small by today's standards.
When the A/C broke down, the room went from 60F to 120F in 30 minutes, before we got the emergency ventilation system going.
The amount of energy used by the telecoms systems around the world is simply immense. I'm sure that the internet will be kept online as long as possible, but it really is an unsustainable luxury over the long term.
<DD class=comment-footer>
5/14/09 8:03 PM <DD class=comment-footer> <DD class=comment-footer><DD class=comment-footer><DD class=comment-footer>
Posted by
John Michael Greer
Excerpted from:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/end-of-information-age.html
Very few people realize just how extravagant the intake of resources to maintain the information economy actually is. The energy cost to run a home computer is modest enough that it?s easy to forget, for example, that
the two big server farms that keep Yahoo?s family of web services online use more electricity between them than all the televisions on Earth put together. Multiply that out by the tens of thousands of server farms that keep today?s online economy going, and the hundreds of other energy-intensive activities that go into the internet, and it may start to become clear
how much energy goes into putting these words onto the screen where you?re reading them.
It?s not an accident that the internet came into existence during the last hurrah of the age of cheap energy, the quarter century between 1980 and 2005 when the price of energy dropped to the lowest levels in human history.
Only in a period where energy was quite literally too cheap to bother conserving could so energy-intensive an information network be constructed. The problem here, of course, is that the conditions that made the cheap abundant energy of that quarter century have already come to an end, and
the economics of the internet take on a very different shape as energy becomes scarce and expensive again.
...the internet is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Once the cost of maintaining it in its current form outstrips the income that can be generated by it, it becomes a losing proposition, and cheaper modes of information storage and delivery will begin to replace it in its more marginal uses. Governments will have very good reasons to maintain some form of internet as long as they can, even when it becomes an economic sink ? it?s worth remembering that the internet we now have evolved out of a US government network meant to provide communication capacity in the event of nuclear war ? but this does not mean that everyone in the industrial world will have the same access they do today.
Instead, as energy costs move unsteadily upward and resource needs increasingly get met, or not, on the basis of urgency, expect access costs to rise, government regulation to increase, internet commerce to be subject to increasing taxation, and rural areas and poor neighborhoods to lose internet service altogether.
There may well still be an internet a quarter century from now, but it will likely cost much more, reach far fewer people, and have only a limited resemblance to the free-for-all that exists today. Newspapers, radio, and television all moved from a growth phase of wild diversity and limited regulation to a mature phase of vast monopolies with tightly controlled content; even in the absence of energy limits, the internet would be likely to follow the same trajectory, and the rising costs imposed by the end of cheap energy bid fair to shift that process into overdrive.
...When today?s data centers are crumbling ruins long since stripped of valuable salvage, and all the data once stored there has evaporated into whatever realm magnetic patterns go to when they die, the thinking that led politicians to gut viable library systems on the assumption that the internet will take up the slack will look remarkably stupid. Still, the habits of thought instilled by the age of cheap abundant energy are hard to shake off, and from within them, such mistakes are hard to avoid.
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