How can the Internet deal with increasing congestion?
If you have read this far in the article, you should have a good basic understanding of the current state of the Internet—we hope that most of the questions you have had about the how the Internet works have been answered. Starting here we will move from FAQs and “facts” towards conjectures, FEOs (firmly expressed opinions), and PBIs (partially baked ideas). We first discuss congestion problems. Nearly all usage of the Internet backbones is unpriced at the margin. Organizations pay a fixed fee in exchange for unlimited access up to the maximum throughput of their particular connection. This is a classic problem of the commons. The externality exists because a packet-switched network is a shared-media technology: each extra packet that Sue User sends imposes a cost on all other users because the resources Sue is using are not available to them. This cost can come in form of delay or lost (dropped) packets. Without an incentive to economize on usage, congestion can become quite serio
Nearly all usage of the Internet backbones is unpriced at the margin. Organizations pay a fixed fee in exchange for unlimited access up to the maximum throughput of their particular connection. This is a clas sic problem of the commons. The externality exists because a packet switched network is a shared-media technology: each extra packet that I send imposes a cost on all other users because the resources I am using are not available to them. This cost can come in form of delay or lost (dropped) packets. Without an incentive to economize on usage, congestion can become quite serious. Indeed, the problem is more serious for data networks than for many other congestible resources because of the tremendously wide range of usage rates. On a highway, for example, at a given moment a single user is more or less limited to either putting zero or one cars on the road. In a data network, however, single user at a modern workstation can send a few bytes of e-mail or put a load of hundreds of Mb
