Telecoms regulator Ofcom this week published its position paper on ‘next generation networks’, launching what it hopes will be two months of intensive public consultation on ‘Web 2.0’s infrastructure requirements.

“Every single company, small or large, has an interest in this,” Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards told the launch presentation. His intended audience is anyone who has ever wondered how much time they lose waiting for slow-loading web pages to materialise – or how much business they lose when a customer-facing site crashes too often or ‘hangs’ for too long.

The looming overload
Fears about internet congestion have been amplified this year by the rapid growth in online social networking and internet telephony, both of which make heavy capacity demands that can measurably slow down a company’s network during the business day. But far bigger bandwidth demands are looming, as new forms of commerce and entertainment move onto the net.

In particular, when audiovisual transmission goes more fully online, even the small screen gets very big. Whereas today’s small ‘viral video’ clips require a fraction of a gigabyte (GB), a full-length movie will require up to 10GB. This can rise to several hundred GB once the picture is made high-definition (HD), as is already becoming standard as viewers upgrade to rapidly cheapening cheap, flat screens.

This expanded leisure traffic threatens to slow down the commercial flow of data - which is also set to rise as businesses step up their use of the internet for internal communication with mobile workers and outsourced data centres, as well as for customer communication and transaction. The growth of capacity demand will also accelerate as more firms move their telephony, conferencing and multimedia corporate communication onto the net.

The ‘net’ outgrows the ‘inter’
Ofcom’s proposals mostly relate to ‘access networks’ – the final-mile connections that link businesses and households to the national and international network. This is where private providers – Virgin Media, BT, and broadband providers who work through BT’s network – have invested heavily in recent years, with 99% of UK addresses now within reach of broadband and over half of households already upgraded to it. The advertised speeds of these connections have also been rising rapidly, up threefold to 4.8 megabytes per second since the start of 2006 according to Ofcom, even though subscribers complain of realised speeds falling far below this as more of them are crammed onto each line.

The rapid rollout of broadband for business and residential users, backed up by wireless transmission within buildings and wi-max coverage in public spaces, results from the opportunity network builders have seen for generating quick payback through the internet and audiovisual services they can provide through the expanded channel. Ofcom can also view it as vindication for its use of competition and regulation to drive down user costs while giving providers enough of a return to keep investing. As a result, earlier fears of data congestion at the entry and exit routes to the internet have eased. “There’s no longer a last mile bottleneck,” says Brad Rinklin, vice-president of marketing for content accelerator Akamai.

Instead, problems have shifted to the ‘middle mile’, the central core of the internet, in which network providers have less incentive to invest because they make no profit on the traffic passing through it. Growth in the first and last mile has encouraged new traffic which often hits capacity constraints in the intervening space. Here, the problem is that providers can only charge cost-price for traffic, so have little incentive to carry more of it or make it move faster. Investment is especially restricted, and capacity constrained, at the points where one network links to another.

The risk to neutrality
Capacity constraints raise the risk of internet commerce and communication choking on its own success. Users also see a threat to the ‘neutrality’ of the net if network providers react to constraints by starting to ration access, or filter the content passing through it, especially if this allows them to prioritise their own entertainment-based services ahead of the commercial services other companies are trying to offer through the net.

Broadband carriers are now arguing, complains Google’s ‘chief internet evangelist’ Vint Cerf, “that their Internet Protocol video services will require substantial bandwidth that otherwise would be used by internet applications. They also have decided to look to application providers such as Google to help pay for the expense in providing broadband networks.”

Addressing the US Senate commerce committee in February, Cerf warned that “allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the internet such a success.” But the risk of having to pay a ‘congestion charge’ for the channels they use, or having to wait while network providers prioritise their own transmissions, is now seen as real by companies whose business models are based around the net.

Congestion problems
‘Netrepreneurs’ liken the problem to the traffic congestion that developed when industrial and retail distribution first shifted onto the roads – and argue that being asked to pay extra for networks’ expansion of the middle mile would be like asking General Motors, or WalMart, to pay for the roads their vehicles use.

Most countries averted the need for such road charges by expanding the network at public expense, an option neither finance ministers nor users find attractive with regard to the internet. But with network providers lacking an incentive to invest in the ‘middle mile’ and service providers refusing to pay extra for it, promoting private investment at the internet’s core remains problematic.

While Ofcom’s proposals acknowledge that “usage changes will place an increasing strain on the underlying communications infrastructure on which broadband is built,” they focus on maintaining competition and investment incentives in access provision, saying little about the congestion at the core that could result from successful expansion of traffic at the periphery.

Decentralised solutions
One solution, already being widely used, is to route the traffic through the expanding peripheral network so as not to place additional demand on the core. Rinklin, at Akamai, likens this to solving urban traffic congestion by getting workers in the suburbs to telecommute – and says this is what his company’s software, widely used by major internet-based companies, is already achieving.

“There are fundamental economic reasons why the middle mile, and connections between networks, lag behind the dramatic growth in first- and last-mile connections, But by being highly distributional we can by-pass the bottlenecks,” says Robert Blumofe, Akamai’s vice-president of networks and operations. He maintains that the internet would already have ground to a halt had major website operators not signed up with the Massachusetts-based company, which transfers popular content to servers located near to end-users, keeping traffic within the local network and avoiding the extra cost and packet loss entailed in travelling across others.

Speed limits, roadblocks, toll charges and nightmare diversions could soon be standing in the way of bold e-commerce plans if the looming congestion problem isn’t tackled. Ofcom’s proposals outline how the edge of the network can be kept competitive despite a growing concentration of access providers. But it acknowledges that “a significant investment, and a fundamental change, for the whole telecoms industry” will be needed to cope with the coming e-migration of television and cinema onto a network already filling up with commercial data traffic.

If your company and customers are budgeting on continued cheap, fast internet access, you’d better hope that those distributed solutions will continue to work.