On Tuesday January 20, 2009 at approximately 12:00 noon President-elect Barack Obama will take the Oath of Office to become the 44th President of the United States of America.The swearing in ceremony will be immediately followed by the inaugural address. It has been estimated by predictify.com that between 2 and 3 million people will attend the inauguration. Countless millions more will watch on television and video feeds streaming on the Internet.
For example, here is just a short list of places online to view the inauguration:
First the major networks. NBC will stream via MSNBC. CBS will show live Inauguration video here. ABC news will likley stream the events from its special inaguration section of its news site.
Now the rest. CSPAN has online coverage, Fox news and Hulu will stream the events as well. Facebook and CNN have a feed. Current will be Twittering the Inauguration. Then there are all the major worldwide newspapers that are certain to have video feeds: the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, you can also add many other International media websites.
There is no doubt that history will be made on several fronts. However, there is speculation that the Internet may not be up to the challenge of the intensity of the usage tied to this single (short) event.
According to published reports, the CNN-Facebook live video stream was built to support more than 1 million simultaneous viewers. Facebook, Twitter, Hulu and Photobucket are all separately adding servers to increase bandwidth. So what exactly will happen when an enormous fraction of the world’s Internet population hit the World Wide Web at precisely the same time and read, view, upload and stream multiple packets en masse? No one really knows for sure.
John Johnson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying, ”Any network is like a giant highway system. We’ve added thousands and thousands of new lanes for the inauguration. But millions and millions of cars can still cause a traffic jam if they try to move in the same place at the same time.”
Ultimately, each of the streams, texts, or photos are the responsibility of a hosting provider and reside on servers at the data centers of hosting providers. Here are the opinions of two hosting experts on what might happen.
”There are two systems for streaming content to end users,” stated Daniel Foster, co-founder and technical expert at business web hosting firm 34SP.com. ”The first of these is unicast, where each user viewing the content has a connection to the server sending the content. Sending to 2 people requires double the bandwidth of a single user to be available. Sending to a million people requires a million times as much. Clearly this is not a very scalable situation! The solution to this problem is multicast streaming. In multicast, a single copy of the data is sent as far along the network as possible, and the router at the point where the data separates will send a copy of the data to each user. This results in far less data being transmitted across the trunks of the internet which do have a limited, though very high, capacity.”
Navisite Managed Dedicated Hosting expert William Toll gave his take on the inaugural events and the Internet, ”The Internet is remarkably resilient. Between big events and malicious activity (DDoS attacks etc.), for the most part I believe there will not be any wide-spread Internet wide issues during this widely anticipated event. With several Web properties preparing for the traffic with extra servers, CDN services and load balancing, I believe most Web sites promising coverage will be available – if not slightly degraded. It’s also important to note that YouTube and other video sites are now able to distribute this content at anytime. In a way the Internet is the new Tivo. We can time shift our participation in history.”
So we’ll see how history plays out – both in terms of the speeches and activities of the inauguration, and how the Internet infrastructure and hosting companies handle this epic event.
This content was written by Derek Vaughan exclusively for the Host Discussion Blog.
