TowerOne.com

How did that old Burt Bacharach song go? - “Three wheels on my wagon, and I’m still rolling along”. That’s the Internet today - we are merrily “singing a happy song” on a network built in the 90’s, operated by for-profit organisations, and being used increasingly for large scale multimedia file transfers.

In a recent post I wrote …

A study by Nemertes Research predicts that the U.S. Internet of 2015 will be at least 50 times larger than it was in 2006. Internet growth at these levels will require a dramatic expansion of bandwidth, storage, and traffic management capabilities in core, edge, metro, and access networks. It estimates that these changes will entail a total new investment of some $137 billion in the worldwide Internet infrastructure by 2010. In the U.S., currently lagging Asia, the total new network investments will exceed $100 billion by 2012.

As some telcos already feel the pinch and are beginning to block capacity, or ‘traffic manage’, it is clear that the bolts have already been loosened. Like the initiatives on global warming, its time for us to pull the various Governments, technical communities and Corporations, to pull together and develop a coherent and deliverable strategy that will ensure the wings don’t fall off this great network of networks.

Well Amazon suffered a major network failure today losing it’s S3 storage service, EC2 and SQS. The failure affected a number of high profile services including Twitter. Although it’s the first major failure Amazon have suffered it just goes to show that the cloud computing model assumes a reliable network is in place. Without it the model doesn’t fly (or should I say ‘roll’?).

Anyway seems like it could be a very big wagon we are riding not an aeroplane. Three wheels to go.