IP Communications

Stepping back and taking the Broader View of the world around this world we call CRM:

 

Demand pushing against physical and logical limitations is “stressing the Internet,” according to Nemertes Research’s study titled “Internet Interrupted: Why Architectural Limitations Will Fracture the ‘Net.”

 

The upshot is that Internet demand continues to outpace growth in network capacity at the access layer, and IP addresses are quickly depleting.

 

A follow-up to last year’s report “The Internet Singularity Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web,” – nobody accuses Nemertes of Pollyanna tendencies – the latest study finds demand continues to grow swiftly, driven by more Internet-connected devices and new bandwidth-hungry applications: “Traffic is migrating away from the public core of the Internet and onto private and semiprivate overlay networks,” the study finds.

Earlier this year Nemertes’s executive vice president and senior founding partner Robin Gareiss observed that “it hasn't taken long for unified communications to infiltrate corporate IT planning,” noting that Nemertes' research “shows only 16 percent of companies are doing nothing with unified communications.”

 

“The Internet is shape-shifting,” says Ted Ritter, research analyst with Nemertes Research, commenting on the fact that traffic appears to be moving off the public Internet onto paid or private overlay networks. “Content providers -- such as NBC, which used Limelight Networks (News - Alert) to stream the 2008 Olympics -- are driving the trend toward a flattening, and shifting of the Internet.”

The result for users? Improved service quality for favored content and, over time, the performance distinction between “favored” and “general-delivery” content increasing. But it’s not a Doomsday scenario: “None of this means the Internet will abruptly stop working,” says Ritter. “Instead, the slowdown will be in the area of innovation. Ultimately, access bandwidth limitations will hamper deployment of next-generation applications.”

The study’s take is that the Internet is rapidly running out of addresses to assign to new networks and devices – “85 percent of addresses already are allocated,” it says, although one wonders if the pool of address possibilities has been delimited that allows a calculation of 85 percent occupied. “Address exhaustion will occur before 2012 in the face of the accelerating growth of the number of Internet-enabled devices and of machine-machine communications.”

The report dismisses IPv6, the presumed successor to the current Internet Protocol addressing scheme (IPv4), as “too little too late,” finding that only one percent of IT decision-makers participating in Nemertes benchmark, Advanced Communications Services 2008, are deploying IPv6.