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HD Video Could 'Choke the Internet'?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun May 14, 2006 08:10 PM
from the i-like-the-internet-breathing dept.
from the i-like-the-internet-breathing dept.
richdun writes "Yahoo! is carrying an AP story explaining how ISPs are worried large streaming videos could 'choke the Internet.' This is used as a yet another reason for tiered pricing for access to content providers." From the article: "Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive. To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example."
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HD Video Could 'Choke the Internet'?
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What a load (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a load (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
They need to quit over selling pipe! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.gamezero.com/)
Re:They need to quit over selling pipe! (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.kabong.ca/)
Re:They need to quit over selling pipe! (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 13 2005, @03:45PM)
Re:They need to quit over selling pipe! (Score:4, Insightful)
In that case (IPTV being infeasible on normal Broadband) the ISPs / the Media Industry / Microsoft should stop hyping it.
Re:They need to quit over selling pipe! (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/)
What ISPs are selling is latency. Watch the ads: "the page loads / game plays so fast!"
They're not selling bandwidth, even though that's how they inaccurately measure their latency. If they were, then servers would not be an issue.
All of that is moot, however, since there's simple math here:That is, they are selling a service which costs them a certain amount, and they see some percentage usage. They then charge some rate and the delta between those is the profit margin for them. If you are arguing that they should raise the price and eliminate bandwidth concerns, then that's one thing, but if you are suggesting that they keep prices the same, then clearly they have to control one of usage, cost or margin.
Margins in the ISP business right now aren't spectacular, but they're OK. ISPs certainly aren't looking ot LOWER them, so give up on that point. Then you have usage and cost. The cost is negotiated fairly strongly, but ultimately you have the same argument up-stream with backbones as you have between consumers and their ISPs. Then there's uage. Observe the current trend in attempting to manage usage.
If you really want to be charged for a full 1.5, 3, 5 or whatever you have down, you're going to have to expect that prices will skyrocket! If that's what you want, then what's wrong with tiered service?
From where I stand, the whole argument AGAINST tiered service is that the economies of scale in the averaged cost model favor a single tier of consumer service. Then again, I'm a Speakeasy customer now, so I've essentially opted for tiered service anyway by paying more than your average cable Internet user.
Best summary of the problem (SFW) (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.chriscanfield.net/)
What a Wagon load (Score:5, Funny)
Wow! Someone should invent a mass produced and mass marketed plastic disc that holds video and sound.
Re:What a load (Score:4, Interesting)
That being said, it's not THAT expensive to expand backbones. From what I remember when I worked at Nortel, plans were already underway to expand backbones dramatically before the
Re:What a load (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 17 2004, @02:33AM)
What's the big deal here?
I pay a premium for my 3mb connection as compared with my parents getting the basic 256kb connection. There's not that much difference in basic web browsing, but when I'm downloading and uploading databases I am paying for the higher tier. I pay it, not the service providers, they have to pay for their outgoing bandwidth anyway. This isn't something new.
I also run some websites, same deal there. I pay for the bandwidth and speed of my connection so people can get my page quickly and reliably. I pay a portion of the hosting companies fees for their fiber connection. That's the service they provide me, they have many levels.
Everybody is paying for what they use right now.
Google is paying for their bandwidth right?
I am paying for my bandwidth right?
We both have options on our connection speeds to get to each other right?
I can go from dial up, to dsl, to cable, to high speed cable, to paying for a T1 to my home. I have all the options and Google has the same.
Who are we paying if not the people who make up the infrastructure?
I don't doubt that they have been making money off these monthly payments and they can keep on doing it all they want. Just don't put some sort of extortion tax on it to "make sure your data doesn't have an accident and not get there fast" That's mafia crap.
Run fiber, research new data transfer tech, implement it, get paid.
they're doing it now, just stick to that and don't get greedy.
Making P2P More Scalable to keep costs down (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday March 02 2005, @11:08PM)
The arguments about the cost of ISP (or university) upstream feeds for videos or other large files moved around by P2P can be taken care of by making sure the P2P users get most of their data from within the same ISP (or university.) Napster was able to do this early on when it started getting complaints from universities that had big fat LAN connections but relatively small outside connections, but it could do it because it had a relatively centralized database it could use to control neighbor connections, and of course preferring short ping times helped.
BitTorrent doesn't really do that, but it does try to use faster connections when possible. This has somewhat the same effect, though it's much more pronounced for universities than for big ISPs, which have big fat fast pipes that are bigger than they want to pay for. Sounds like there's an obvious market for the telcos to pay Bram to tweak his algorithms some more...
The other scalability tool, which can help for broadcast-style TV, is multicast. Most ISPs could just turn it on if they wanted, but they don't have a good business model for the stuff, much less one that supports peering multicast with other ISPs, and most of the obvious uses look like something that people would pay money for, so you mainly see it inside private networks. Think about the scalability of 10,000 households behind one small-medium telco office watching HDTV at primetime. That's about 9 Mbps per user, which is ok on the line side if you've got the right flavors of DSL, but that's almost 100 Gbps of upstream even though most of the people are watching the same thing. If the telco feeds a multicast down to their office, a Gig Ether can handle about 200 channels and then split it out to the individual subscribers. Sure, the telcos would like to control content so they can charge subscribers more money and compete against the cable TV companies, but a lot of the net neutrality nonsense has been because telco officials are doing the regulatory bonehead thing instead of talking about the real technical issues.
... They already do...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they just asking for more per gig? Or are they asking for money to flow up a chain (from hosts to network operators)?
Re:... They already do...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:... They already do...? (Score:5, Interesting)
While I don't look forward to a tiered system, I have no problem paying for my use of the internet as long as I get what was advertised.
Re:... They already do...? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://paperlined.org/)
Cell phone companies did the same thing with packet data plans... they sold $15 plans for unlimited data, assuming people would only use the cell-phone as the endpoint.
When people started hooking their laptops up to cell phones, first thing they did was kick those people off, but continued to advertise "$15 unlimited!!". After a while, they realized there was demand for it, and thus money to be made, and they started advertising "$15/month unlimited (but no laptops!!), or $60/month unlimited wireless, laptops allowed". Voila, honest pricing, no abuse of the service (whose cost just gets spread to other customers anyway), and now some people can actually get what they want without worrying about losing their service without notice.
If there's too much demand for a company's product, you'd think they'd treat it as a good thing, but that's not always the case...
Re:... They already do...? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://antiwar.com/)
And on what basis do you think the current model is not sustainable? These folks are raking in cash hand over fist on their overpriced, underpowered internet service. They've dipped into the public coffers many times for infrastructure - and much of the infrastructure we paid for was never delivered, btw. If their business model isn't making money, they must need to reduce the amount being laundered into the executives accounts in the bahamas, cause their is no other explanation for it.
Re:You get what you paid for (Score:4, Interesting)
Attacking Net Neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a thinly-veiled shot at net neutrality, actually. The Internet was designed just fine--it's the ISP's business model that is suddenly in danger. You know, the model where they oversell their bandwidth by ridiculous margins. (One of the reasons I use Qwest DSL instead of Cable, actually--my connection is slower on paper, but I always have all of the bandwidth I'm paying for.)
Now the ISPs are trying to play the "if we can't bill the content provider, we'll have to bill you" card. They want to win support for their ploy to double-dip on delivery charges. Outside the U.S., though, we see a number of countries with extremely high bandwidth available at extremely low cost. As it turns out, the same thing happens in the U.S. with municipal broadband... where state governments haven't outlawed it in favor of their campaign donors.
Part of me hopes that some ISPs actually try to tier things out this way. I wonder how long it would take for them to lose all of their customers to a Google page reading, "your ISP is slowing down your connection in attempt to extort more money from you and from us."
Re:Attacking Net Neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://xptical.org/)
When you buy FTTH service from NTT, they have a high-speed and low-speed option. The HS option is twice the price. However, if you look at the systems, both give you 100mbps over single-mode fiber.
What's the difference?
Well, the HS option has 16 customers per DSLAM; the LS option has 32 per.
As US customers become better educated about their line capabilities, expect more ISPs to cater to their needs. But, you better be prepared to pay for it.
Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service.
Re:Attacking Net Neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://xptical.org/)
Sure, it's all 1s and 0s, but those 1s and 0s are arranged into headers and payload. Headers can be analyzed and tagged for prority. All this takes processing power and memory.
It's simple: if you want your VoD to play seamlessly and you want your VoIP to be a clear as a land-line call, you pay more for tagging.
If not, then your 1s and 0s can get lumped in with all the others. Your phone call to mom will be lumped in with my pr0n download.
Re:Attacking Net Neutrality (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://xptical.org/)
Not really applicable here. Moore states that the number of transistors will double every 18 months. He states nothing about processor speed, bandwidth, or utilization.
However, let's both agree that the cost of tech is going down. A T1 today costs a lot less than a T1 10 years ago. I remember paying thousands in install fees and hundreds for monthly fees. Costs are dropping.
But, I think we can also agree that the customer demand is rapidly outstripping capabilities. ISPs are not structured to give every customer 100% utilization 24/7. Yes, they sold "unlimited bandwidth". Yes, they sold "always on". However, a lot of the fine print advised customers agianst 100% utilization. They just can't get upstream bandwidth cheap enough to resell to customers and still make a profit.
>>The amount of labor required to run fiber is roughly the same as the amount required to run twisted pair.
That's complete bullshit. I have installed fiber and copper. I have run "house cable" from comms closets to the customers' desktops. I have also been in manholes running cable between buildings. Fiber takes a lot more time to install. You need a lot of expensive, specialized tools to install it. You have to be a lot more anal about QA after the install.
>>The amount of labor required to add routes is the same no matter how fast or slow the links in question are.
That's BS too. OSPF and EIGRP are nice, but not perfect. You have to have people qualified to analyze the network before you upgrade. They have to examine every possible reason for the lack of performance. And, after install, they have to go back to find and fix the next bottleneck.
It isn't as easy as letting MRTG graphs show overutilized lines. You can't just take a OC-48 at 80% utilization and upgrade it to a OC-192. A lot of times, telcos save money by finding low utilization backdoors into overtaxed areas.
Cisco and Juniper are not cheap. Neither are the certified techs who really know how to herd them cats like a mofo.
>>And material cost doesn't vary much with the speed of the link, either.
Yet another misleading statement. The tools neede to diagnose noise on a voice line (i.e. a lineman's handset) are a lot less expensive than the tools needed to diagnose malformed cells on a OC-192.
Furthermore, the techs qualified to operate these tools get paid a *shitload* of money. It is not uncommon for a tech holding a Acterna TestPad to earn 4x what the lineman earns.
On top of that, the more lines you have, the more techs you need. You also need a lot more sophistication in the NOC to predict, diagnose, and reroute around broken lines. When an OC-192 drops, networks reel trying to automatically reroute. Well-paid NOC staff can identify low-priority customers (read, residential ISPs and cable ISPs) and disconnect them to perserve customers who would actually notice (and, more to the point, demand a chargeback for the outage). Sure, you could trust a computer or routing table to do that, but paid staff can do a much better job.
>>And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be
No residential ISP will start off by hiring a team of CCIEs to install and configure enterprise-class routers. They start off by installing a few DSLAMs and some Cisco 2600s. They link the whole thing together with stickytape, rust, and T1s. Then, as the customer base grows, they start an endless cycle of upgrades.
It'd be nice to have a network designed from the ground up to provide 100mbps FTTD/FTTC/FTTH. Look at Japan and NTT for an example. The problem with that is that there is no room for the "little fish" in that equation. While a lot of Mom&Pop ISPs are gone, their equipment still serves the same customers. The bills just go to AT&T vice Vicki and Kenniths' ISP and resturant.
>>We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest tran
Well, that's just the thing (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday June 21 2004, @04:25PM)
Well, that's just the thing. They're not even trying to do that, they're trying to extort money out of Google and MS instead.
See, it's one of those cases where everyone sold what they can't possibly deliver, and now they're tripping on each other's lies. Everyone promised "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" based on the idea that, nah, you're not actually gonna use it. They figured that, yes, you're gonna see a web site or two, send a couple of emails, maybe even download a MB or two of short pixelated movies, but that on the whole you wouldn't actually _use_ 99.999% of that capacity.
Unfortunately it turns out it's as unsustainable as promising "FREE UNLIMITED ELECTRICITY!!!" and thinking people won't use more of it.
And the problem isn't just one of wishful thinking and creative marketting, but it's always been an outright lie. E.g., there was always some clause hidden in the fine print, or not even there, saying they can kick you out if you use "too much" of that "unlimited" thing you've bought. And for a while it worked to villify those who actually use the unlimited bandwidth they bought, and present them as some predators leeching off the rest of the society, because there were few of them, and everyone else didn't give a rat's arse.
But now it's more and more of them, and there's increasing resistance to buying "FREE UNLIMITED DSL" and then being treated like some kind of heinous criminal if you actually use what you've bought. It worked when those "villains" were some lone nerds running a server at home, but it gets people writing to the relevant authorities when their mom gets mis-treated for spending too much time talking to them on VOIP. Or when they themselves get a nasty letter because little Billy played too much World Of Warcraft. (But more likely, they don't even know why. It just says you've used too much bandwidth.)
No matter how you want to look at it, it's a scam. I'm not even opposed to mettered access as such, but I _am_ opposed to selling something and then villifying the people who use just what they've bought. If they sell something as unlimited, then it damn better be just that. It's like selling monthly bus cards on the explicit claim that you can ride the bus as often as you want to with that card, and then tarring and feathering some retired grandma for riding the bus 6 times a day instead of the 2 times a day your marketroids estimated when they priced that card. It's that sick and dishonest.
And the problem is that now getting out of that losing proposition is a bit of a prisoner's dillema, except the losing move is to confess the truth. Anyone trying to sell a service honestly, a la "ok, guys, it costs X dollars per gigabyte" is losing their customers to those promising "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!"
So now the plan is basically "I know!!! Google has money, right? Let's extort some protection money out of Google instead." The ISPs would now like to have their cake and eat it. They'd like to continue to scream "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" all over the place, but be allowed to extort someone else to pay the bill. That's all.
It's not even that Google's search even costs the ISPs that much bandwidth. FFS, it's a simple text page, with no graphics other than the "Gooooogle" letters. Even the Google ads are actually using _much_ less bandwidth than the more traditional ads, which in the meantime have inflated to be hideously huge animated popups or overlays. And certainly Google isn't responsible for P2P file swaps and P2P VOIP traffic.
But Google has money, and the ISP would like to be legally allowed to extort some money from Google. And for that matter, from everyone else doing any business on the Internet.
And the stupidity of it all is that all those sites already paid per gigabyte to their uplink. Having to pay extra so the
Net Neutrality - Some Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
The Economics:
Myth: Companies should have to pay for the bandwidth they use.
Facts:
Bandwidth is already paid for on both the outgoing and consuming ends, and there are contractual agreements for each network segment the packets pass through on their way from point A to point B. All bandwidth is already paid for. The telcos are proposing to add a THIRD layer of charges onto the Internet, one they can control and manipulate at will and can charge whatever they want for. Even worse, if a packet crosses through 3 networks on its way from from Point A to Point B that would be 3 additional charges. As everyone knows, these charges will be passed directly onto the consumers in one form or another.
Imagine the packet passes through 12 networks to reach you, if any one isn't being paid and blocks or degrades the packet YOU the consumer lose. There is no way to ensure that a packet gets priority unless the company is paying every single possible network that packet might pass through.
Freedom and Censorship:
Since companies would be controlling the flow of information through their networks based on how much they are being paid or any other uncontrolled criteria, they have great incentive to limit, or stop certain bits of information that is in conflict with their new data "Sponsors". Maybe you couldn't read a blog about lawysuits against the telco. Maybe you couldn't reach a news site that contained a story that exposed problems with a company that is paying the telco a lot of money. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
China is a perfect example of a country that does not allow Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality is not only fair, and a key component in net freedom, it is the only model that will support innovation in a balanced way.
Don't give the Telcos a license to rob us all blind and restrict our freedoms.
Strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory Futurama Quote (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.davidbokser.com/)
Bender: Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere...[shudder] and I thought I saw a two.
Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two.
We probably all know this already, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday June 05 2006, @05:03PM)
What the providers really fear is that people will actually start using what they've been told they already have.
They've got giant pipes running into everyone's houses, and business models predicated on the fact that most people don't use them. So they tell everyone 'unlimited bandwidth!' when in fact they cannot provide this.
The tiered-internet thing is just a way to punish the people who actually use the bandwidth they were already sold. And an attempt to enact a tax on those who dare to actually provide data that's interesting enough that lots of their customers want it, all at the same time.
Re:We probably all know this already, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://libtom.org/)
Though to be honest I don't see of the appeal of HD over the net. It's the same bullshit video tape of a monkey falling out of a tree or something, just now it's got 16 times the pixels.
ooooh boy.
Tom
Re:We probably all know this already, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://libtom.org/)
Just because you can apply technology to something doesn't make the story any better. Like right now after braveheart the show "VIP" came on. VIP == teh stupid. It's a product of "me too" ism. If anything, random ondemand TV will just make that worse. Everyone will be a TV producer and the quality of the entertainment and news will suffer more than it already does.
Also the internet is not meant for broadcast. 80 million people watched Friends each week. That's totally asynchronous. The net is not meant to be so heavily lodsided.
Sure maybe when we can all simultaneously sustain 100mbit/sec from our homes to the net it may be practical but right now it's nowhere near practical enough.
Think about it. At $5 per GB a 4Mbit/sec stream costs you $201 per day. Now suppose get a deal and pay only $0.50 per GB. That's still $20.11 per day per stream. At a minimum they would have to charge you $0.84 per hour. Now look at the average digital package at say 60$ [say you have movies] per month. That's roughly $0.083/hr of viewing.
So right now it's nearly ten times more expensive to watch something over the net. Not to mention how it's not entirely a good use of broadcast resources.
Tom
Dear ISP (Score:5, Funny)
Disgustedly yours,
Cash cow 9463450.
Dark fiber overcapacity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dark fiber overcapacity (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.lacklustre.net/)
While I'm sure the networking equipment is not cheap, the cost can't compare to all the red tape and planning that has to be gone through to get the cable there in the first place.
Re:Dark fiber overcapacity (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.wavenger.com/)
Seconded. A member of my family worked on laying fiber for Pac Bell (back when there was such at thing), and the reason they didn't lay nearly as much as they wanted to was just local red tape. Municipalities exert a lot of control over this kind of thing, and not only do they want you to pay to upgrade their city's infrastructure, they want some added perqs too.
And of course, the same kind of red tape occurs when you want to do anything involving multiple city governments. There's no such thing as, "for the good of the county and region" for these people, there's just their own constituents. And if those constituents happen to be affluent rather than poor or middle class, you're going to have a helluva time getting anything through there.
Take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), for example. I've heard (might be a tall tale, now) that it was supposed to not only go from San Francisco to San Jose, but that it was supposed to go up into Marin County as well. It just didn't happen. They stopped in Millbrae, which is about 12 minutes outside of SF. In order to get San Bruno (the next town in the direction of SF) to allow the rails to go on their land and to the airport, they needed to build them a new police station, and this was only after they were at least four years late.
And don't get me started about engineers employed by most cities. My closest friend works for the city of San Bruno, and while he was in the water department, the engineers tried to drill a well after the people in the water department said that there was a 90% chance they'd be drilling straight into a sewer main. What did they hit? A sewer main.
Breaking news... duh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Roads essentially have, or have had, the same issues. These are funded by state/federal taxes and/or toll roads or some other per-use charges. Perhaps a model like this could work for the internet too.
So wait.. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.cad.cx/ | Last Journal: Saturday October 27, @09:56AM)
Either way--and I say this all the time when someone raises the issue of network neutrality--the Internet was designed to route around troubled, undesirable routes; should bandwidth providers choose to raise the cost of their lines, the Internet will simply route around them. It's as simple as that.
Re:So wait.. (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Wednesday January 31 2007, @02:25AM)
Nowadays the telcos control all the backbones and are in a good position to turn this whole thing into a pay-per-view monstrosity. The Bush FCC issued a horrible decision a year or two ago that would basically make this legal, by removing enforcement of the rules regarding net neutrality that have been governing the development of the Internet for decades. (Rules that you are taking for granted in your post.) The Supreme Court affirmed the legality of the FCC decision. What will be the effects? No one knows. The telcos haven't acted on it yet. They have announced ambitious business plans to convert the Internet into something resembling cable TV. But since fucking up the Internet apparently involves a huge capital outlay, they will only do it if they have a guarantee that the net neutrality rules will stay gone. Otherwise they might enounter regulatory resistance as they start to screw it up and millions of people start complaining.
So that's why we have a bill winding through Congress right now that will provide this guarantee to the telcommunications industry, banning the net neutrality rule forever, and leaving them free to fuck with the Internet as it exists without exposure to regulatory risk. It's going to be their little plaything to do with as they wish- the public subsidies that went into it for decades nonwithstanding. That's why you're hearing about this all of a sudden. This isn't something that "can just be routed around"- the way routing is done is about to change.
Back stepping (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://dragonfort.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday December 23 2004, @02:21AM)
when we ran all of those small companies out of business by
undercutting them and promising the world (and providing something much less) we were actually ruining another business model?
They are in year long contracts now with people who had a expectation of a service. Since most isp's haven't constantly been upgrading capacity as their client base grows, there is going to be a huge thunk when people realize
that there has been a lot of pocketing profits. Profits that should have gone
into improving the network.
The thunk is comming
Multicast? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Multicast? (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.psychophagus.net/)
For the same reason we don't have IPv6. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://inoshiro.com/)
The session management protocols of multicast are defined, but there are a few to choose some, and most have some kind of serious drawback associated with them. One of the ones that sticks out in my mind is the one where there's no way to "detect" if a multicast IP is taken, or any more security/authentication than knowing what the address is.
To properly support multicast, we need a session leader, and every router involved in the minimum-cost spanning tree must also know who else is involved. This means the routers have to be able to build the tree, and tear it down as clients join and leave.
Replacing or upgrading routers is hard because a lot of them are fire and forget. They'll place a router in a wall with PoE, and then leave it inside. They'll be on the bottom of the ocean, repeating traffic that goes along a trans-oceanic link. They'll be on top of wireless towers, miles from other people. Most of them were not designed to be remotely upgradable via software, because routers were always meant to be as cheap to produce as possible.
This is also who IPv6 is only really deployed in places where IP space ran out a long time ago (such as Japan). Until it really starts to break, traditional structure will be "good enough" for most people.
Re:Multicast? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.ubercart.org/)
"The IP Multicast model requires a great deal more state inside the network than the IP unicast model of best-effort delivery does, and this has been the cause of some criticism. Also, no mechanism has yet been demonstrated that would allow the IP Multicast model to scale to millions of senders and millions of multicast groups and, thus, it is not yet possible to make fully-general multicast applications practical in the commercial Internet. As of 2003, most efforts at scaling multicast up to large networks have concentrated on the simpler case of single-source multicast, which seems to be more computationally tractable."
Where I work.. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
We already have a tiered system... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://temposs.blogspot.com/)
This "choking the internet" complaint seems to be a cop-out for the laziness of the ISPs toward getting off their butts and really competing to bring a smooth connection to its subscribers.
Re:We already have a tiered system... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://home.eng.iastate.edu/~hawklan/)
This "choking the internet" complaint seems to be a cop-out for the laziness of the ISPs toward getting off their butts and really competing to bring a smooth connection to its subscribers.
Yes, by all means, conduct an ad hominem attack on the ISPs rather than considering that this could possible be a difficult problem. Do you have any concept of how difficult it is to design and engineer a network that can handle all of that data and provide a high level of service to all of the end nodes? Then we have to include the cost of the equipment and maintenance, and factor in the time it takes to actually build the thing.
Consider this scenario... A pair of high-rise apartment buildings go up right next to each other. Each one has 15 apartments per floor and is 15 floors high. This is 225 units per building, and with 2 buildings brings it to 450 units. Now if each unit actually wants 10 Mbps so they can download HD video in a reasonable amount of time, this means that one area needs 2.25 Gbps of bandwidth.
Sure, this is reasonable for a local area network, but this isn't a LAN. Maybe all of the users are hitting the same server, but requesting different files. Since they are different files we can't cache locally, and we need every link (and router and switch), capable of handling that 2.25 Gbps. This is in addition to any other traffic that might be travelling those links or routers. Multiply this by all of the apartment buildings/condos/homes in a small city and you can see the problem.
High-performance networks that can handle all of these things are an active research area because we don't have any good solutions. You can't just magically add another switch to upgrade your service. This is a local solution and doesn't address the entire network, or even the network core. More bandwidth in fiber doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it to the switching/router space. We have a lot of different techniques to help switching, such as optical burst switching, but they are still difficult. For example, in OBS how long do you wait to aggregate the different packets? Too short a time and it isn't efficient enough, too long and the inter-packet delay is too high for real-time audio or video. If you set different time limits based on application type you add the overhead of examining the packets to determine what it is.
So before you accuse the ISPs of being lazy, why don't you come up with a solution that scales globally and doesn't cost a trillion dollars and take 50 years to deploy.
That's why you do local/regional cache (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise, there just isn't a way to do IPTV unless broadcasters (think the guys with antennas) figure out an alternate method.
The backpressure put on the Internet will one day be able to handle it. But until multiple lambda inter-regional distribution networks using SDH or equivalent methods become available, even OC192 becomes a bottleneck.
Think regional cache. Google, RU listening???
Obviously, this makes no sense (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday March 26 2007, @11:53PM)
The real issue is that these big companies will be whispering these ideas to the politicians, who of course have no clue about how the Internet works.
Even non-US citizens should bring this issue up with their government representative and inform about the real facts, and what your views as a voting citizen are. Make insistent phone-calls. Mail well-worded letters.
And something anyone can do instead of talking about the Net Neutrality issue to their fellow nerds, is bring the issue to the non-tech public. Tell the E-mailing Moms and Pops what could happen when they try to download photos their family members have sent, tell the teenagers what could happen to their MySpace access or their Skype connection.
The future of the Internet is at stake, dammit, and no citizen of any country is safe until we have widely recognized, firm laws that make sure the public, global Internet belongs to the people and their free speech!
Despicably Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Google and Joe Webclicker are NOT the telcos' customers! They already pay their ISPs for service. Nobody is getting a free ride.
The market should drive this process! ISPs that want more bandwidth (so they can deliver hi-def video to their customers) will look for the most bandwidth at the lowest price, and the backbones compete to upgrade their networks so that those ISPs sign up with them.
Why won't anyone stand up in Congress and say, "but Mr. Verizon, Mr. AT&T, aren't you just trying to charge twice for the same service?"
Re:Despicably Misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Run for office. If you're in the US, the barriers to entry are surprisingly low.
All these people who bitch about corporate control of government are starting to piss me off. How many city council budget hearings do you attend? Zoning board reviews? School board meetings? How often do you write a letter (you know, ink-on-paper, in an envelope, with a first-class stamp) to any of your elected representatives? How many of your elected representatives can you name?
Not singling you out personally, just a good place to interject this. The process is *way* more open than most /.ers assume, it's just that people are too lazy to do anything at all.
A totally bad faith argument (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.vegan.com/)
On the other side of things, cost per gigabyte of bandwidth has dropped markedly and will continue to fall.
But in the short to mid-term, perhaps a case can be made that consumer demand for bandwidth will reach levels that current subscription fees can't cover. This is a reasonable argument, but there's nothing to this argument that requires these costs be offset by content providers.
Right now I'm getting about a half a MB a second over my cable modem. Maybe it will turn out that there are HD audio applications I really want, that will require greater bandwidth. Fine. I'm the one consuming this bandwidth. So let me shop around and find the cheapest provider of super-broadband.
But there's nothing in this article, and no argument I've yet seen, that gives any clear reason why content providers ought to be the one ponying up to cover these extra bandwidth costs. This whole argument is being made by large incumbent ISPs who are looking to extort content providers. It has nothing to do with charging people for what they consume. Those costs have traditionally be borne by Internet users, and they should continue to be.
If I find out that my ISP is charging content providers a toll to reach me, I'll immediately do everything possible to change ISPs.
On another matter, it's telling that this article quotes nobody who says that this is a bad faith argument. The reporting in this article is either inept or corrupt.
Invalid Complaint (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://ewhac.best.vwh.net/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 18 2001, @10:28PM)
Let's review: The ILECs have been salivating for decades over the idea of becoming "cable companies," and distributing television content over the telephone infrastructure. (They wanted to be able to force customers to go only to their servers, but Judge Harold Greene said, "No, you don't get to control both content and carriage, because you'll abuse that position.") For the past several decades, it has been no secret just how much bandwidth video broadcasting requires, even with compression. It has also been no secret that the broadcasting industry has been moving in fits and starts toward hi-def.
Now here we are on the eve of large-scale HD rollout, and the ILECs are whining that the network backbone may not be able to handle the load. Well, kee-ryst on toast, what the fsck have you been doing the last twenty years? You knew Internet "television" was coming, you knew hi-def was coming, you knew it was going to be a bandwidth hog, you had at least twenty years warning, and you're telling us with a straight face that you didn't prepare for it??
And by the way, who else here is old enough to remember a few years ago when the same ILECs were complaining that all those modem users phoning ISPs were overloading their switches, and wanted to start charging a premium for data calls? My response then was as it is now: Why the hell aren't you building out your network?
Sympathy factor zero, Captain. You either get to work and build out the network like you were supposed to be doing, or stand aside and let the CableCos eat your lunch.
Schwab
Re:It's Serving (Score:4, Insightful)
There seems to be a common misconception that since cable/DSL customers are only paying ~$10/megabit for bandwidth, that that's what the ISPs are paying. That's simply not true.
For ISPs, overselling bandwidth is the ONLY way they can sell it to end-users cheaply. I know there are some people who are paying $50/month for 8Mbps cablemodems. Do you realize that 8Mbps of bandwidth is costing your ISP THOUSANDS (maybe hundreds, if they're in a big city) of dollars?
Bandwidth just isn't as cheap as everyone seems to think it is. So yeah, there is NO WAY an ISP can afford to supply every one of their users the gobs of non-bursty bandwidth necessary to make HDTV downloads on a massive scale work.
Choke the internet? (Score:4, Funny)
Insider Opinnion on the subject (Score:5, Informative)
There is actually a bandwidth glut (Score:5, Interesting)
The capacity of a fiber is easily 10Gb/s per color times 125 colors or 1Tb/s, and a cable is easily 700 fibers, so a total of 1Eb/s. Order of magnitude less for ocean fibers.
*Very* HD is 20Mb/s, so a cable will handle 50 million channels.
Cisco's high end router handles up to 70Tb/s.
Lets take the olympics as a scenario:
You are broadcasting 500 concurrent HD channels at 20Mb/s each channel. This is 10Gb/s.
This fills less than 1% of one fiber in the cable.
Now, Every family member in the house watch their own event, so this is 100Mb/s
The Router handles 70Tb/s, so one router supports 700,000 households. So you need 1 router for Seattle, 1 for London etc.
The only clamp on this whole thing is all the ISP whining about problems and clamping down on bandwidth to try to maximize their revenue.
Like DeBeers and diamonds, it is actually a bandwidth glut, and the ISP's are creating an artificially high price for it by limiting supply.
Re:There is actually a bandwidth glut (Score:4, Funny)
they are probably right (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.theworldwidewebguy.com/)
if you upgrade to internet 2.0 for 39.99 extra per month you'll be able to do it.
Sounds like a protection racket... (Score:5, Funny)
"Say there, Mister Content Provider, that's sure a nice video you tryin' to send. Be a shame if anything was to, you know, happen to it...
Give me a break (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Big Pipe To The House (Score:4, Insightful)
For comparison, Manhattan has 25,800/sq km. Roughly 44 times as densely populated. Yet Manhattan does not have $70/month Gigabit fiber to the home. Why? Is Manhattan is too far from central hubs? Or that an area with a median household income of $47,030 would be unable to support sufficient $70/month connections?
Or is it that the telecom companies are getting fat on selling DSL/cable, and don't want to invest in the bandwidth it would require to support all those people at that speed? Perhaps with some addition pressure from media companies, that don't want consumers to be able to exchage gigabytes of data with ease?
Is there a technical solution? TorrentStreamUDP? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.beggarandbird.com/)
After thinking about it, I realized he was right. Multicasting will never work due to apathy of the ISPs, so it will have to be built into the application. Take a HD stream, and introduce a fixed delay that would be acceptable to consumers -- such as 10 minutes. Begin a swarming protocol like BitTorrent, but with a statistical weighting so that packets near the beginning of the stream earn a higher priority than those near the end (of the 10 minute window.)
In theory (according to some back of the envelope queueing theory calculations), it should be possible to ensure that 97% of the packets are there within 10 minutes with an average swarm size and typical xDSL bandwidth -- and if you're running a lossy protocol based on UDP, it won't matter too much about the occasional artefact occurring in the stream if the client player interpolates well.
The benefits of this approach for media providers is if they use a signing system with closed source client (both for Windows and Linux), then they could introduce non-skippable adverts and limited DRM, whilst also saving hugely on bandwidth by leveraging from BitTorrent's advantages.
I hereby release the above idea into the Public Domain, but retain the right to be credited as its originator (unless someone can demonstrate prior art.)
Build a media proxy solution, then! (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem managed!