The Effect Of The Internet

The birth of the internet can be dated back to 1960’s when packet switching networks were introduced. But it was only after the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in March 1989, that it began to gain momentum with the masses. Nearly 2 decades later, the World Wide Web and the internet have undergone drastic changes and are now common household words. Almost everybody in the modern world is now familiar with these terms.

Internet for Information

The Web today is considered perhaps the biggest source of information on the planet. Millions of people across world use the Web daily to gather information. Nowadays even News and latest happenings in the world are available on the Web. People write their own views on certain topics in “weblogs” and lot of discussions are carried out in the numerous “forums” on the web
Many new “search engines” with different algorithms have sprung up on the web now, these engines are trying to sort all the data on the web and display it to the user according to his needs. Searching for content on the web has never been easier.

Internet for Entertainment

The Internet today is used for more than just finding information. With websites like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Youtube, etc evolving, more and more people now access the internet just for social interaction or “chatting” or sharing their own videos with friends, family or the whole world. As a matter of fact, these websites are gaining more popularity than normal content websites. According to Alexa.com these kind of social networking websites get more visitors than standard information websites. The internet has now become a “Social Network” of computers, which people access to keep in touch and even meet new people.

nternet for communication

Internet today is used for variety of communication methods like, PC to PC call, video calling, video conferencing and cheap computer to landline or cell phone calls, calls via VOIP etc. All these communications via the internet also require the use of servers.

This just goes to show us that the internet is not going to slow down anywhere in the near future. The web is gaining more and more popularity by the day and there can be no denying that.

Effects of the Internet

Millions of people visit millions of websites daily on the net. More and more websites are growing to accommodate and attract more and more people. The total number of websites grew from 106 million in January 2007 to 156 million in December 2007. That’s 50 million websites in one year. That is approximately 100 websites every single minute. The web has grown around 48 % in the last year alone.

All this takes up a lot of resources, mostly in the form of electricity.
A lot of power is consumed by the websites that the user visits.
Let us first understand how the web works.

In order for a website to be made accessible to the users, it needs to be hosted on web servers which provide the users’ browser the necessary data needed to display the website.
Web servers like normal computers consume somewhere between 100-250 watts of electricity per hour. And depending upon the data on the website and the traffic a website receives, there can be a need for more web servers for a website. Google.com has somewhere between 500,000 – 1,000,000 web servers.

Assuming that there are around 1,000,000 web servers today on this planet, and each of these servers consumes around 150 watt of electricity per hour, we get 1314 Gigawatt of electricity consumed per year. This is almost 4 times more than what the state of New York consumes annually.

This leads us to our main Sustainable technology issue. – Power Consumption by the internet.

We could possibly eliminate this problem by the use of solar energy. If web servers and data centres throughout the world were supported by solar power, there would be no issue of power consumption. Let us consider the Pro’s and Con’s of this solution.

Advantages:

• Solar energy is the most abundant form of energy available on this planet.

• Solar energy once set up does not require much maintenance.

• It would completely eradicate the need to use conventional sources of power like coal and other natural resources.

Disadvantages:

• Although it wouldn’t require maintenance it is pretty expensive to set up
• It would take up a lot of space to power millions of web servers.
• Very few people are willing to move to solar energy.
• It would be hard to power all the servers from one or two sources of solar power since the web servers are all scattered in different places.

There are companies out there, who are trying out this solution to see whether it works or not. Affordable Internet Service Online, Inc [AISO] is one such company.

AISO has set up 12 solar panels on their roofs to power their offices, servers and data centres. This system helps reduce the following per year:
• 19,890 pounds of Carbon Dioxide (CO2/GHG)
• 5.9 pounds of Nitrous Oxide (NOX/smog)
• 0.45 pounds of Sulphur Dioxide (SO4/acid rain)
Now these may not look that big, but we must remember that AISO is a small company with very few web servers. If a system like this were to be implemented on a company like Google, which has over half a million web servers, these figures would increase dramatically.

This system could help reduce the use of our natural resources and prevent them from depleting.

In order for a system like this to be implemented on a global scale, a huge capital and public support would be required. Also more research needs to be done in the field of solar energy so that it would be cost effective to the companies as well as to the government.
All the new web servers that are being set are powered by conventional electricity, it just makes one thing clear at the moment the vast majority of the users of the internet are not aware of the long term effects of the power consumption.

Conclusion:

A system like that of Affordable Internet Service Online, Inc would not come cheap. But it would be highly beneficial to the environment and to the people. What AISO has done is remarkable in its own way, and it should be considered as a model for us to save more power and save our environment. More awareness should be brought in the masses to promote solar energy and its uses and effectiveness. Today less than 1 % of our web servers are running on solar power and we should do something about it. We should make sure that our “free” source of information and entertainment always remains “free” and does not penalise our environment or our future generations.

References:

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Live Earth Chooses AISO.Net for Solar-powered Web Site Hosting. (2007) Retrieved November 17, 2007 from the IBM website: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21829.wss
Bluejay, M (n.d) How Much Electricity Do Computers use? (2007) Retrieved November 17, 2007 from: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html
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Windows Hosting Plan, AISO (2007) Retrieved October 20, 2007 from AISO website : http://www.lunarpages.com/solutions.php
AISO Company Profile (2007) Retrieved October 20, 2007 from the AISO website: http://www.aiso.net/company-profile.asp
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Power Consumption Of New York State (2007), retrieved January 10,2008 from the hypertextbook website:http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/PollyHo.shtml