The most advanced commercial networks are now on 4G, which was introduced in the late 2000s to provide smartphones with broadband speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, and is now spreading fast. As of last year, the majority of mobile-phone users in Western Europe were on 3G networks, which were launched in the late 1990s to allow for more sophisticated digital services such as Internet access. But second-generation (2G) networks, which added digital services such as texting in the early 1990s, still account for 75% of mobile subscriptions in Africa and the Middle East, and are only now being phased out elsewhere. First-generation mobile-phone networks, introduced in the 1980s, used analogue signals and are long gone. Data traffic from mobile devices is increasing by an estimated 53% per year-most of which will end up going through mobile-phone towers, or 'base stations', whose coverage is already spotty, and whose bandwidth has to be shared by thousands of users. Today, providers can often meet rising demand simply by starting to use some of this dark fibre.īut such hard-wired connections don't help with the host of mobile phones, fitness trackers, virtual-reality headsets and other gadgets now coming online. Many areas in Europe and North America are already full of 'dark fibre': networks of optical fibres that were laid down by over-optimistic investors during the Internet bubble that finally burst in 2000, and never used. The fifth generationįor the time being, at least, one part of the expansion problem is comparatively easy to solve. Researchers and engineers are also trying several other fixes, from speeding up mobile networks to turbo-charging the servers that relay data around the world. Laying new high-speed cable is just one improvement. “Those companies are making that fundamental investment to support their businesses,” says Erik Kreifeldt, a submarine-cable expert at telecommunications market-research firm TeleGeography in Washington DC. Microsoft and Facebook are laying another cable across the Atlantic, to start service next year. Google has partnered with 5 Asian telecommunication companies to lay an 11,600-kilometre, US$300-million fibre-optic cable between Oregon, Japan and Taiwan that started service in June. That is why they are spending billions of dollars to clear the traffic jams and rebuild the Internet on the fly-an effort that is widely considered to be as crucial for the digital revolution as the expansion of computer power. Internet companies are painfully aware that today's network is far from ready for the much-promised future of mobile high-definition video, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, telepresence and interactive 3D virtual-reality gaming. Consumers can already feel those constraints when mobile-phone calls become garbled at busy times, data connections slow to a crawl in crowded convention centres and video streams stall during peak viewing hours. The resulting digital traffic jams threaten to throttle the information-technology revolution. But service levels are much lower on local links, and at the user end it can seem like the electronic equivalent of driving on dirt roads. The copper lines that originally formed the system's core have been replaced by fibre-optic cables carrying trillions of bits per second between massive data centres. But the incident was just one particularly public example of an increasingly urgent problem: with global Internet traffic growing by an estimated 22% per year, the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers' best efforts to supply it.Īlthough huge progress has been made since the 1990s, when early web users had to use dial-up modems and endure 'the world wide wait', the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old telephone system. The channel, HBO, apologized and promised to avoid a repeat. Some 15,000 customers were left to rage at blank screens for more than an hour. On June 19, several hundred thousand US fans of the television drama Game of Thrones went online to watch an eagerly awaited episode-and triggered a partial failure in the channel's streaming service.
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