This article comes from the public number brain polar body (ID: unity007), author Tibetan Fox, Aifanerjing Authorized release.
After the epidemic in Europe is serious, it is gratifying that the masses finally started to consciously “squat at home”, but the operators began to worry again.
Because of the increased demand for surfing, the European Internet has experienced severe congestion.
Although Telefonica, Orange, Vodafone, Masmovil, and Euskaltel have stated that they are strengthening their networks, they are still unable to carry “high tide” traffic, which has led to the government ’s urgent action. Come forward and require online game companies and video websites to take measures to limit the bandwidth consumption for entertainment.
Google YouTube announced that it will play videos in standard definition (standard definition, SD, 480p) by default next month; Netflix has also reduced video bitrate or picture quality on Facebook and Instagram. Disney’s streaming business, Disney +, is officially launched in seven European countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Spain. It is also expected to adjust sharpness to reduce overall bandwidth usage by about 25%.
The surge in demand for telecommuting has also increased Microsoft’s server pressure, and urgently imposed restrictions on more commercial components. This includes reducing the frequency of file checking and synchronization, default download settings for content attachments, sharpness of video playback, and online preview of images.
It is also facing the “data tsunami”. When Internet services in Europe are desperately “throttling”, Chinese operators and Internet companies are desperately “open source”. Tens of millions of children have collective online lessons, 80 million cloud supervisors Vulcan Mountain, Thunder God Mountain, multiple videos on the streaming platform are free for Internet users to watch, and mobile games have ushered in a new peak …
Friends who know the Internet may say that this is all due to “bandwidth expansion.” So the question is, is it really a simple matter to expand capacity?
Behind the rising tide of data, two attitudes of China and Europe
If you ask European operators, they will definitely think you think too much.
It must be acknowledged that the spike in European traffic has indeed surged significantly. Since the outbreak of the new crown virus in Italy, Facebook says its app usage time has increased by 70%. Facebook Live and Instagram views are also increasing.
YouTube traffic has surged even more, so Google said in a statement: “In this unprecedented situation, we will continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the world to do our best to minimize the impact on the web. Pressure. “
You know, video (including AR / VR) and social network applications occupy the top two mobile traffic.
But to say that the network is paralyzed and can’t carry it, it really makes netizens confused.
Because it is also a home office study, it has been downloaded 1.1 billion times in less than a month. Tencent’s class starts in 10 seconds, not to mention the remote conference can also beautify automatically. The live broadcast is uninterrupted for 24 hours … Chinese operators And Internet companies, why didn’t you call everyone to “watch less HD” and “click less online”? ?
The answer is that China’s network expansion is moving too quickly.
Whether it is the infrastructure sky group or the Internet lineup, the action is shocking. For example, in order to allow elementary and middle school students to “suspend and suspend classes, and continue teaching,” during the epidemic, many provinces and cities have begun construction of non-stop base stations.
A total of 9 4G / 5G base stations have been built for communication operation enterprises in Guizhou Province, with a total installed capacity of 147.21 million broadband users, and 44 dedicated lines have been opened for the school. The three major operators in Liaoning also urgently expanded the Internet bandwidth of 710G, newly built more than 1,300 5G base stations, more than 600 4G signal enhancement points, and added 310 cloud platform servers …
The BAT representatives who have resisted 100 million-level traffic are also extremely efficient. Dingding newly deployed more than 10,000 cloud servers in 2 hours, setting a new record of rapid expansion on Alibaba Cloud; Tencent started the “decisive battle for 48 hours” on January 26, and programmers started Began to build classroom applications, the average daily capacity expansion of Tencent conference cloud host is close to 15,000 … such news is endless.
Plus a huge data center. According to the statistics of the data center white paper, the number of data center cabinets in China has increased, reaching 2.1 million in 2018, a year-on-year increase of about 26%, which is significantly higher than the number of 108 million cabinets in 2015.
Some newly-built data centers, such as Ali’s Heyuan Data Center, have officially provided services to the public during this epidemic, and more than 300,000 servers can be put into use. Under such collective mobilization, it is natural to provide a sufficiently spacious capacity pool for the network Hongfeng.
Seeing this, many students presumably want to call European operators and connected companies to “copy jobs.” And slow! Expansion is not something you want to expand.
More than technology: Expansion is not easy
Of course, this is not to say that Europe does not have the capacity to expand. To cope with such a large-scale traffic, the test is of course the information technology capability of a region, and it will also be affected by socio-cultural, economic and other influences.
First, server networking is key.
We know that different regions often adopt different structural designs for network construction.
Some are hierarchical networks, with several nodes as the core layer, and the core layers are directly connected to each other in a mesh. This network structure is simple and easy to maintain. For example, if a certain street network fails, maintenance is sufficient. The core bandwidth can also be reused, which can save a lot of costs. Of course, this also has higher requirements for the performance of the core backbone network equipment. Once the core node fails, the entire network will suffer directly.
In some places, a flat network structure is adopted. For some regions with rich transmission resources and high traffic, the flat direct connection network has good robustness, small delay, and strong carrying capacity. It’s just that the structure is relatively complicated and the construction cost is relatively high. Therefore, large international Internet operators tend to adopt flat networks to reduce Internet costs and improve efficiency.
Obviously, with the rapid growth of the network scale, the network structure, optical devices, and hardware performance will affect the difficulty and cost of traffic expansion. It is an inevitable choice to optimize the network according to local conditions and conditions. This is also the primary reason why China and Europe have different steps in the expansion timeline.
Second, the infrastructure has decided to expand.
Insufficient bandwidth, and infrastructure to make up, is an inevitable choice in remote areas that lack high-performance network coverage. For example, the China Tower quickly set up a network after the news about children climbing in mountains to find the Internet on social media.
It can be said that the comprehensive coverage of online traffic and applications is also a leak detection and filling of China’s network infrastructure.
Compared to this, the digitalization process in Europe is earlier. As early as May 2010, the European Union had formulated a European Digital Agenda (DAE), which plans to allow EU households to enjoy broadband of not less than 30Mbps by 2020.
By 2016, this standard will be upgraded to at least 100Mbps, and space for upgrading to 1Gbps is reserved. All schools, universities, research institutions, transportation centers, hospitals, government agencies, technology companies, etc. must reach the 1Gbps level.
In addition, there is a “WiFi4EU” plan that will allow every city and village in the EU to enjoy free Wi-Fi services by 2020.
In this case, adding additional basic hardware investment is obviously overreacting.
In addition, the IDC industry lays potential.