said by Jamal :Thanks cablegeek01. It's interesting that routing and switching are the most expensive in terms of energy consumption. I wonder if that's a fundamental issue in terms of information theory or if it can be solved with more advanced technology.
The question in my mind is the issue of whether or not having everybody asynchronously accessing a few distant clouds is a workable solution. I think that Google has already weighed in on part of that question. In spite of their claim of 1 gb connections for all, they offer TV service which if I'm not mistaken is broadcast and not individually streamed.
I'm trying to predict the future, something that is not doable yet with internet searches. I'm wondering if all apps & data are going to be moving to a few clouds, if they are going to be moving to regional clouds, or if there will still be a use for local office & home data storage, aggregation, and application devices.
Internet topology & ultimately energy usage should have an important impact on this question.
Thanks.
As far as the cloud discussion goes, this is something that MSOs and content providers are discussing in depth.
The rate that bandwidth is being consumed is growing exponentially, and the older internet model of having your content at the core of the network, and sending it to the edge is rapidly shifting.
Many Internet service providers are peering with content delivery networks and caching companies that store content at the network edge so that the loads on the internet backbone aren't as great. (Google Akamai and Netflix CDN. Google is doing the same with YouTube)
Whether this trend will reverse as terabit backbone connections become more common is unknown in most circles.