IETF Mulls Standard For Multimedia Messaging 145
ennuiner writes: "NetworkWorld is running a story this week about the IETF's efforts to help create a universal standard for multimedia messaging. According to the article, a new protocol is needed because the volume of mp3 traffic on AOL could reach the point "to either swamp out the rest of the Internet or to require major engineering.""
First thing messaging protocol should get rid of: (Score:1, Funny)
The Solution is quite simple... (Score:4, Funny)
The net to a halt..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone downloads this King fu flash video...
User A goes to download it, and he is the first ISP-X user to download it, it now resides in ISP-X's multimedia cache. When User B goes to grab it, he is redirected to the cached.
similar to a DNS system, where changes filter down.
Now for the privacy concern, could this be limited to multimedia, how secure would these caches be? Can someone browse them?
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:2)
That said, I'm sure a good chunk of the multimedia traffic would, in fact, be people passing around the latest hot recording.
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:2)
Fix the 'x' million identical HTTP transglobal connections every hour for the Hotmail homepage for one.
Distributed on-demand cacheing would be my first step. Scrapping a pull-based transport mechanism like HTTP would be the next. Freenet is a nice first step.
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:1)
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations, you've just invented USENET!
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Completely different system.
More Precisely... (Score:2, Insightful)
files as they get sent, files matching the same name/size/crc value
get sent down to smaller cache hubs. Larger isps could host these
cache hubs, the incentive for them would be less bandwidth external to
the network.
>Congratulations, you've just invented USENET!
The original poster, wo1verin3, also mentioned a need for privacy, so
for the complete solution, he would probably have to invent
Freenet.
Let me elaborate. There are basically two kinds of content that
people might want to throw around the net using IM's. The first is
original content from that user, like voice phone data or the MPEG of
the family get-together. (Or for the pr0n industry, people who are
acting in a way that might cause a family, getting together.) The
second kind of content is copied content that likely has a wider
audience than just the people on one person's IM buddy list.
For pretty much everyone, the amount of original content that they
create is an order of magnitude less than the amount of content that
they are interested in viewing. However, to accomodate the
person-to-person phone calls and such, whatever weird schemes the IETF
puts together regarding avoiding UDP packets and what not will be
required. But such content will not be the major part of the traffic
load, and if you read the article carefully, it's not the part of the
traffic load that any of the people actually from the IETF are quoted
in the article as worrying about.
The real problem is content that is intended for a general audience,
but efficient distribution of such information in an anonymous manner
is readily available by simply sending references into Freenet rather
than the actual content data itself. The sending IM peer can verify
that the data is available in Freenet, upload it if necessary, and
then send the Freenet ID text to the receiving IM peer, which can
download the data through a path that has been minimized to the extent
that people "close" to the receiver have previously downloaded that
data. (cf. freenetproject.org)
Now, I'm not exactly on the IETF suggestion-in-box-list, but to me
it's strange that all of these bright people, many likely employess of
AOL-TimeWarner and other large computer and media firms, haven't
figured that Freenet or Freenet-style distribution is a simple
solution to the problem... Of course, I'm being sarcastic, as we
shouldn't be surprised if organizations with the obvious corrolorated
political agendas are reluctant to note that extensive promotion,
product integration, and use of Freenet will help to resolve this
difficulty.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Fifty for the contest winners on their couches with remotes...
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:The net to a halt..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Legal implications for caching a copyrighted material? I try to download the new Backside boys track and I pull it from my ISP instead of a user on music city...is the ISP liable for spreading that work?
The Story - UnSlashdotted (Score:3, Redundant)
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World, 01/14/02
The Internet engineering community has run into a significant technical hurdle in the development of an industry standard to support instant messages with multimedia attachments, such as audio or video clips.
If leading instant messaging service providers such as AOL and Microsoft offer multimedia instant messaging services to their millions of users, Internet communications could ground to a halt. Service providers now support only text-based instant messages.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which identified the multimedia instant messaging problem, is soliciting potential fixes from its participants and plans to debate these fixes at its meeting in March.
IETF leaders say protocols being developed to support text-based instant messaging won't handle multimedia instant messaging attachments. They say a new communications protocol is needed to transport those files. This new protocol must provide congestion-control mechanisms to prevent instant messaging users from overwhelming the Internet's backbone with MP3 music files, photos or voice clips.
"There would be a potential for an AOL usage [of multimedia instant messaging] to either swamp out the rest of the Internet or to require major engineering to stop what we call a congestion collapse, where you cannot send new traffic into the network," says Allison Mankin, co-chair of the IETF's transport area. "This is a big enough problem to need urgent attention."
Demand for multimedia instant messaging is expected to be strong. Text-based instant messaging is popular on the Internet and private, corporate intranets. With multimedia instant messaging, users could send attachments along with chat sessions.
"Our researchers would love to have voice chat integrated with instant messaging, mainly to kill the international long-distance calls," says Ross McKenzie, director of IS at Johns Hopkins University. "Our dean has a research center in Nepal. I know that if I offered that service, he'd be on it tomorrow."
Johns Hopkins began offering regular instant messaging services to 4,000 faculty and staff members in August. Today, instant messaging is the most popular application on the university's Web portal, with more than 1,500 users racking up 60,000 minutes of instant messaging messages per month.
"If we offered [instant messaging] attachments, our faculty would be exchanging chapters out of books. But what they'd really like is voice," McKenzie says. "Our researchers want ad hoc, integrated voice and chat. They want it in Katmandu, at home, at Starbucks or wherever."
Today's instant messaging services use what's called a paging mode, where the signaling information that initiates the chat session is carried along with the text of the chat session using a single protocol.
After four years of effort, the IETF is finalizing a protocol dubbed SIMPLE [ietf.org] (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) that will let the paging mode work across different instant messaging service providers' offerings. Once deployed, SIMPLE will let AOL users exchange text-based instant messages with users of rival instant messaging services from Microsoft, Yahoo and others. Both AOL and Microsoft have vowed to support SIMPLE.
SIMPLE uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to initiate an instant message and to transport it on a hop-by-hop basis across the Internet. While SIMPLE can handle short, text-based messages of up to 1,000 characters, IETF participants have discovered that it cannot carry attachments to instant messaging sessions. This is because of an inherent problem in SIP, which runs on TCP or User Datagram Protocol (UDP). While TCP features built-in congestion controls, UDP does not.
So UDP should not be used for sending large files. And SIP can't be adjusted to eliminate the possibility that large files would be sent over UDP. That scenario would be catastrophic, Mankin says. "Imagine the after-school surge, with millions of teenagers online and sending MP3s to each other," she says. "We're talking about volumes of traffic that may be half of the backbone."
Mankin says even if AOL were to offer multimedia instant messaging attachments only to its own users, that could still cause congestion problems across the Internet if this issue isn't resolved.
"We can't tell AOL what to do, but they use all the major backbone providers," she says. "If UDP could be used by their [multimedia instant messaging] service, that would be a serious problem."
The IETF is working on a solution that will use SIMPLE to initiate multimedia instant messaging sessions but will rely on a different protocol with built-in congestion control to transport attachments. So far, the IETF has identified several options for that transport protocol, which will use what's called a session mode rather than a paging mode.
The co-chairs of the IETF's SIMPLE working group are asking participants to submit additional proposals for the session-mode transport protocol this month. The group hopes to select one of the proposals by June.
Jon Peterson, co-chair of the SIMPLE working group and a senior technical industry liaison with NeuStar, says the new transport protocol will scale better to carry large volumes of instant messages and multimedia attachments.
"If the No. 1 and No. 2 [instant messaging] providers were going to interconnect, this would be really useful to handle the high volumes of messages," he says.
Meanwhile, government regulators could prevent AOL - the largest instant messaging service provider - from offering multimedia instant messaging services until this technical glitch is resolved. To get approval for its merger with Time Warner, AOL agreed to delay the release of multimedia instant messaging services until it opens its instant messaging system to rival services.
AOL failed to return multiple calls seeking clarification of its multimedia instant messaging plans. But AOL vowed last summer to use SIMPLE to provide interoperability with other instant messaging service providers.
The rest of the instant messaging industry is expected to adopt SIMPLE too, with Microsoft already shipping SIP support in the latest release of its MSN Messenger software.
In related news, the SIMPLE working group. plans to submit documents that detail how the paging mode works to the IETF leadership for approval in the next few weeks. A draft standard could be approved by March.
The multimedia instant messaging hurdle "is not a show stopper" for SIMPLE, says Robert Sparks, co-chair of the IETF's SIMPLE working group and a senior software architect with Dynamicsoft. "It's new functionality that a lot of people really, really want. But the [SIMPLE] method is sufficient to replicate the [instant messaging] services we have right now."
How about H.323? (Score:1)
it's already there
It's called MIME (Score:4, Insightful)
It's called FTP (Score:5, Interesting)
Along that route, why clog up everyone's email servers with MP3's, when you can just upload it to a FTP server you and your friend have common access to?
Besides, lots of email systems are already set up to filter out large attachments.
After all, when transferring files, it only seems logical to use the File Transfer Protocol.
Re:It's called FTP (Score:1, Interesting)
No, it's called WebDAV (Score:2, Interesting)
It's hard to imagine anything easier and more transparent than that.
Re:It's called FTP -actually DCC (Score:1, Insightful)
DCC makes more sense. Consumers of ISPs have pretty much been all told not to run publicly accessible FTP servers, and ISPs setting up this service for monthly subscribers to upload the MP3 directories is not going to happen so what's left is peer to peer client-client connections a la IRC mp3 channels. This is pretty much how tranfers between AIM chat clients work now I bet.
The relevant issue is more proabably: how to accelerate transfer by cacheing - without becoming legally liable.
Re:It's called FTP (Score:2, Interesting)
By the way, do you know that FTP sends plain text password over the net?
Re:It's called FTP (Score:4, Insightful)
- require expensive high-capacity FTP file servers with giant pipes to the backbone, run either as a public service or as part of a specific ISP offering
- expose said giant servers' operators to (RI|MP)AA-led prosecution and lawsuits given all the ripped media that would be stored there
- cause the transferred files to take nonoptimal routes between the sharing users. IP is already designed to find a best path; what's the sense in forcing a detour?
So, yes, by all means, use FTP. But do it by putting ftpd on each user's machine, most likely wrapped inside the IM client. And rather than 'attaching' the file to the message itself, tweak the UI so that sending the file looks like attaching, but really triggers an ftp upload. It's not like it's going to get there any faster as a message attachment. The client can asynchronously alert the receiver when the upload is complete.What's the problem with this design? What requirement am I missing?
Re:It's called FTP (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Too difficult (Score:2)
The "desktop" idea has already been yelled and screamed at as a bad idea. And simply, a FTP server is going to be way too hard to use.
OK, I have it easy. I mount my web site as a folder on my local machine, and to "upload" a file I just "Save as ..." in the GIMP and POW! It's published on my web site within seconds. But even that is a little bit difficult
So if you think people, AOL users even, are going to be using FTP ... na, forget it.
FTP daemons are as buggy as hell. Read Bugtraq - all the FTP daemons you can write to have exploits, and the only secure one I know [cr.yp.to] has no upload facility.
Windows XP has the right idea with clicking "publish to the web" or whatever nonsense they've built into the folders. But it is still too difficult.
Re:It's called MIME (Score:1)
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Re:It's called MIME (Score:1)
I saw some argument going up about emails being delivered straight away in some cases, but sometimes taking days. Someone pointed out that 10 years ago you would never have got the speed of delivery you get now. Everyone promptly pointed out we're in the 21st century, the 'Internet Revolution' and we should have the ability to do reasonably simple things like this. Same applies here.
Yes, people should be able to send files, and yes, internet traffic *is going to increase* over the next few years. Pepole will want, and demand more, especially with broadband links going up left right and center. The backbone MUST be able to support this.
Yes it costs, and maybe the increased costs that I'm sure will be passed on to the customers may slow down things for a bit, but most people can see that the future is going to be a much faster, repsonsive and more importantly, *useful*, Internet for all of us. It's just a case of when.
Oh and one more thing, I believe hotmail is limited to 1 or 2mb per account. Most teenagers use hotmail. That's why they don't email mp3s (or one of the reasons).
Re:It's called MIME (Score:1)
Quick and Easy Solution: Get Rid of AOL. (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Quick and Easy Solution: Get Rid of AOL. (Score:1)
Seriously, what are you 12? 13?
Screen names? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Screen names? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Screen names? (Score:1)
The AIM / MSN systems will not communicate with each other, they will just use the same file transfer method if this works out.
Re:Screen names? (Score:1)
So if there's a "kradkkool" on aim, and a "kradkkool" on msn, they'd appear externally as "kradkkool@aim" and "kradkkool@msn", respectively.
Better solution.... (Score:2, Funny)
Then I guess all those high-paid type people that sit on standards comittees would have to find something else just as worthless to fill the big gap in their schedule.
Just because it is impressive at face value... (Score:2)
"Both AOL and Microsoft have vowed to support SIMPLE."
Wouldn't that be a surprise?
Enough with the sarcasm. Am I wrong in the understanding that when I instant message (IM) with someone, that our IM clients have knowledge of each other's IP addresses once they are resolved for the first time? What's so bad about sending files broken out as packets to another IP address?
Re:Just because it is impressive at face value... (Score:2)
The article talks about the sheer amount, or volume of data being transferred.
You aren't just taking up bandwidth on your system, and the recievers system by sending a file. Your information must be routed and uses resources from many other computers to reach it's destination.
On the net, the quickest path between a and b is not a straight line.
Re:Just because it is impressive at face value... (Score:1)
Well, a huge proportion of users would be behind a firewall or NAT or something, and wouldn't be able to have a port open for incoming connections. If that applies to both sender and receiver, neither of them are able to accept a direct connection from the other party. Then the connection from A to B would have to go through some IM-server middleman, and the packets would most probably go on a less than optimum path.
NAT users have an inferior internet connection. And yet, to try to please all these people, protocols do a lot of costly and unneccessary workarounds.
Re:Just because it is impressive at face value... (Score:4, Informative)
UDP is intended for things like realtime audio. If a packet gets dropped, the receiver doesn't want that packet anyway. (I.e., If packet 3 gets dropped, the receiver will play packets 1, 2, nothing, 4, 5). For file transfer, you want every packet, so that you get the whole thing eventually. If you use UDP (and, in particular, if everyone uses UDP), you'll get a lot of resends in a non-optimal pattern.
So the problem isn't in sending files as packets, it's in sending the packets in an inefficient way. Essentially, they're worried that it will be done like NFS instead of like FTP.
Why is this a problem but not VoIP (Score:1)
article... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:article... (Score:2)
Re:article... (Score:1)
Hang on... let me get this straight... (Score:3, Insightful)
So they are going to try and market products with "we know it doesn't transfer mp3s as fast as our competitors but it's more community friendly"
Whilst congestion friendly protocols - like how real drops packets if you cant stream fast enough - are great for some purposes they just aren't going to cut it here.
Who's going to use an instant messenger product that sacrafices performance for the greater good.
Napster was the killer app for broadband users, it's just a shame that it also killed broadband networks - not that the users cared.
Re:Hang on... let me get this straight... (Score:1)
Re:Hang on... let me get this straight... (Score:2)
Furthermore, the people who will probably most like congestion control are the end users. Most people have a really slow connection at the lasthop, and all of their traffic has to go through that link. So if they're running multimedia IM full-blast, any time someone sends them an MP3, their web surfing will slow to a crawl.
Re:Hang on... let me get this straight... (Score:1)
(By AOL I'm talking about AIM, I'm proud to have no experience with the AOL client)
Re:Hang on... let me get this straight... (Score:1)
It can be a bit like traffic flow in a city...not entering an intersection when my exit is not clear might slow me down a little, but if I block the intersection and cause gridlock it will cause a lot more. So if there happens to be a policeman observing, hw might penalise me if I do the impolite thing.
IP solution to traffic congestion...car crushers at all major intersections!
WHAT?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Worried about overwhealming the backbone with mp3s?? How exactly is this going to happen? Napster at the height of its craze caused some college campus network admins to wring their hands a bit, but the internet backbone didn't seem to have any serious problems as a result.
The article sounds like the technologies they're discussing are things that will hit in the future, when they've already been pretty prominant for the last few years.
Want to integrate voice chat? Don't netmeeting and other similar programs provide this capability already? Yet for some reason, the backbone is still intact.
The way the authors of that article sound, they seem to imply that everyone has broadband service and the backbone is this one single connection that will "run out" if we don't cut back on all this multimedia trading!!!!
If the transfer rates increase, then the upstream providers will increase to compensate. The backbone won't crash as a result of this. They will expand as needed. And if the kids start trading mp3's in such enormous volume that it would grind the backbone to a halt, the individual
ISP's who rely on overbooking their bandwidth to keep costs low will have no choice but to raise the rates to their more bandwidth heavy customers.. thereby solving the problem.
Don't worry people. Its not the end of the world.
-Restil
Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:3, Informative)
Of course "Its not the end of the world" The end of the article even said that it wasn't a "showstopper" for SIMPLE. But it is a genuine problem.
Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:1)
The title is too frightening for a relatively simple article.
Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Bandwidth is NOT a fossil fuel that can be used once and then it's gone. It's created when people build and install computers and pipes according to a logical plan. Of course, that's oversimplifying it - bandwidth is actually created by the application of lots of money and cooperation - at one time, the government's money and universities' money - now increasingly corporate money. Bulk bandwidth where I come from (.au) is almost completely owned by telcos.
Growing multimedia demand isn't causing bandwidth problems - the lack of purposeful infrastructure scaling (supply) to suit the Net's current capabilities and societal requirements (demand) are manipulated for profit first and foremost.
Artificial scarcity is the oldest trick in the (economic) book - I'm sure you're familiar with the De Beers diamond story.
We don't need workarounds to solve these problems. Short of outright economic reform, we need widespread connection sharing, the empowerment of local-level ISPs to network and form their own infrastructure and peer-to-peer to become the norm, especially for heavy things like LOTR trailers, Counter-Strike releases and such.
Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:2)
It's kinda similar. Bandwidth exists at only a nanosecond in time in which it can be used, and then it is gone. If your T1 sits idle for 12 hours, you can't use that bandwidth when it is maxed out 2 days later - unless you have a company with creative billing
Re:WHAT?!?! (Score:2)
Article not about MP3's (Score:1)
Can't anyone read anymore?
Re:Article not about MP3's (Score:1)
What? You mean, actually read the article? Come on, this is Slashdot!
Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Maybe I'm too Old School... (Score:4, Insightful)
I still prefer pine for email, trn for usenet, gnut for gnutella, and ncftp for ftp. I get annoyed when people email me attachements -- I'd prefer a URL.
The thought of everyone and their dog wisking voice and video at me kinda bugs me. Whatever happened to the "talk" command?
I'm only 29 and I'm starting to feel like that "condescending unix computer user" in Dilbert. :)
Re:Maybe I'm too Old School... (Score:1)
Re:Maybe I'm too Old School... (Score:1)
Man, I'm feeling old.
Re:Maybe I'm too Old School... (Score:1)
As for: Whatever happened to the "talk" command?
Talk is where I turn when ICQ fails. And LICQ has been having it issues lately, with large UINs and what not, so talk has come in very handy indeed.
[OT] Napster vs IRC (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe you were born knowing everything about IRC, but the rest of us had to learn it, and it was a pain at times.
With Napster, you load an app, type in the name of the song you want to hear, and download away! You don't have to invest time in finding a pirate mp3 channel and learning how to deal with all the different variants of file-serving bots. You don't have to suck up to 14 year old w4r3z d00dz to get what you want. You don't have to deal with the playground politics of the IRCops and the script-kiddie users.
Face it, using the big IRC networks has become like trying to hold a conversation in the middle of a grade school king-of-the-hill match. Trading mp3s is like trying to conduct a drug deal in the middle of the same melee. It can be done, but it's a pain, and napster offered an easier way.
UDP is what they are concerned about. (Score:5, Insightful)
Later on you read about various existing technologies that use UDP, and this is what the IETF is concerned about. Traditionally voice and real time video require low latency transmission where order and reliability is not as critical as latency. These applications use UDP specifically for this purpose, and this is why the IETF is concerned.
They are deathly afraid that AOL or MSN or some other giant will release a chat client that supports voice or video using a UDP transport, without congestion control, and that all these millions of users spewing UDP packets into the net will cause a congestion meltdown.
The probability of this happening is about zero. Any network programmer worth half a grain of salt would know about the problems inherent in using UDP, and for general MP3 file sharing, etc, they would integrate a TCP based transport (AIMster already does this, as do many others. Think
So this article is really much ado about nothing. No one is going to use UDP to transfer mp3's, and no one is going to integrate reltime voice/video into an IM application without working out the congestion control details.
I think this is more of a publicity stunt than anything else...
Re:UDP is what they are concerned about. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Ah, but you assume AOL or Microsoft has a network programmer worth half a grain of salt.
Re:UDP is what they are concerned about. (Score:1, Informative)
You would probably be amused by the SIP specification, then [ietf.org], which is what SIMPLE is based on.
Re:UDP is what they are concerned about. (Score:3, Insightful)
> problems inherent in using UDP, and for general MP3 file sharing, etc,
> they would integrate a TCP based transport
I think their fears are legitimate. Consider that a decent network
programmer will demand a much higher salary than a crack monkey with a
copy of Network Programming for Dummies. Right now, there's probably
a startup out there that does UDB-based IM with a really
pretty client written by that crack monkey. All it takes is for
one of the big boys to buy them and incorporate it into their service,
and you know the suits aren't going to care what the service does to
the competitor's part of the Internet.
This is exactly the same sort of thinking that brought us pollution and spam.
Re:UDP is what they are concerned about. (Score:2)
Perhaps more importantly, within days - or quite likely hours - of any such braindead application being deployed, any network engineer worth half a grain of salt will figure out to deal with it. Ports (either logical UDP port numbers or physical phone-line ports) will be throttled or blocked PDQ. Ingress points will deny UDP entirely if they have to. As others have pointed out, there are plenty of network programmers not worth half a grain of salt, but a few strategically placed people with half a clue apiece can prevent the former group from doing any serious damage.
Re:UDP is what they are concerned about. (Score:2)
Doesn't IPv6 take care all of this? (Score:1)
I'll be Glad when they git this fixed..... (Score:1)
Wanna go downtown...
To see my gal....
Wanna sing her a song...
and show her my
MBone (Score:1)
Re:MBone (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MBone (Score:1)
The MBone FAQ can be found here [columbia.edu]. The page is a bit old but the information is pretty much correct.
Re-designing IP is more trouble than it is worth. First off, it would require deployment everywhere. So either 1) you upgrade every router, computer, etc. along the paths that need to use it or 2) you end up doing tunneling across IP anyway. Second, it works (or at least mostly works
The core problem is just that you have to make everybody play nice in the network which is what the IETF is trying to do. At the same time, you don't need the overhead of TCP (sending/resending lost/late packets). There has already been quite a bit of work on making UDP-based protocols that are TCP-friendly. The problem here is just choosing what attributes to use and what the messages going back and forth should be.
Don't forget that anyone can participate in the IETF working groups. All you have to do is subscribe to the mailing list of the SIP working group [ietf.org] and you can add to the discussion.
These problems are already solved. (Score:2)
Better solution - maybe... (Score:1)
If/when the receiver wants the message, they would download it, but only if/when they wanted it.
Spam would be less of an issue, at least it wouldn't take up your hard drive space. (unless you were fooled into clicking on it)
Another benefit would be perfect receipts, the sender could determine who actually downloaded the message.
Maybe a new mail protocol that could mix in some P2P technology. It could help for multiple recipients of the same content, once they successfully downloaded the content, they too can serve portions of it to the other potential receivers.
The main issues (Score:5, Interesting)
- Online chat in it's various forms is popular.
- Folks are starting to use chat clients to send files to eachother.
- Chat is moving from text to audio or audio/video.
All of these features have been around for quite awhile, integrated and not. However they're now getting rolled into all-in-one applications that are popular. Also a critical number of folks have fast connections and are now comfortable going to the computer to send/recieve/interact.Big news? No. Entirely forseeable evolution is more like it.
Things like IRC already enables a lot a lot of these features, and so do the various video-whackoff online applications and big-scale internet telephony has been the promised for a few years now. But those are all small potatos compared to the market penetration of AOL IM / ICQ / MS Communicator / Yahoo Messenger. With these now offering these feature traffic is going up, up in a big way.
No need to download a specialized program, install it, and figure out which of your friends has the same or compatible ones. The big IM programs are pretty much ubiquitious in the mass market, heck they come pre-installed on many new computers. Co-workers, classmates, relatives, friends across the street or in distant parts of the world are going to be likely to have the software, all installed automagically as they upgrade their tried-'n-true chat programs.
So we're now back to the issue of cross-communication: How to get the AOLians to talk to the MSNers with the ICQites with the Yahoolies. A solution has been promised for text messages but now after all these years it's arriving just in time to be irrelevant, perhaps simply being the building block for a more versitile system.
So what are the big technical hurdles? Again, three:
- Directory Services: How to find and connect to folks.
- Interoperability: How to negotiate settings & protocols between various clients.
- Traffic Management: What to do with all of these packets streaming from the previously almost-all downloading users who now want to send streams of highspeed data upstream, LOTS of it (think teenagers on the phone!.)
So why is this an issue for NetworkWorld and not Teenbeat? Because directory services means some sort of servers, interoperability means protocols and that surging volume of low-latency traffic going upstream is going to upset the pricing and service model most broadband is built on.Again, none of this is new, it's just the matter of scale. Currently in most environments the 5% of folks who are considered "Top Talkers" account for over 50% of all traffic. What happens when half of the users become "Top Talkers"?
If you're selling webcams and mikes and soundcards and sticky applications that folks spend hours on and want lots of services from then it's all golden. However if you're an exec in the already shaky ISP market this is like seeing the first few seconds of an avalanche and knowing those that the avalanch has effectively started...
Re:The main issues (Score:1)
All the candidate protocols for multimedia Internet instant messaging require some kind of proxy or ALG in every NAT device. Everyone hates NAT-- especially the IAB-- but a ridiculous number of people are relying on the facilities that NAT provides (home networks on residential IP service, and address realm independency). The current favorite, i.e. SIMPLE, seems much less NAT-friendly to me than the others.
Coincidence, or conspiracy? If you're one of those executives in "the already shaky ISP market," then you probably hate NAT for completely different reasons than the IAB. Any multimedia instant messaging protocol that drives up the cost of purchasing, provisioning and managing a subscriber's NAT device might just give you the sort of leverage over home networking that you've been pining away for since the breakup of the Monopoly.
Of course, I could just need to switch to decaf...
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Re:The main issues (Score:1)
Bernstein has some great proposals... (Score:1)
Get IM at least first.. (Score:3, Insightful)
How is ANY standard they are going to put forth going to be worth a DIME if they cannot even agree on a solution for basic TEXT messaging?
Why? Is this bloatware or evolution? (Score:2)
I'm not going to type up a large dissertation about the this topic; I simply want bring this question to the forefront of your mind. Why is it necessary to wrap up so many different protocols with different goals into a single, all-encompassing protocol? What is the benefit of such an endeavor? What is wrong with simply passing URI's, which are text-encodeable, between IM's to start up separate connection processes?
Or if one must really have a generic way of specifying things, use a generic protocol designator:
The response might look something like:
Why must we encapsulate everything? It's starting to sound like such a protocol would rendure existing firewall QOS and traffic management strategies useless. If you can encapsulate all of your traffic through one IM client, you effectively have a firewall/router-piercing tool.
I really don't see other advantages to this that are practicle or prudent.
Re:Why? Is this bloatware or evolution? (Score:2)
Comments missing the point? (Score:2)
Re:Comments missing the point? (Score:1)
Yup, we need this alright.
umm? (Score:1)
Its called a Telephone! use it!just dont call me;) (Score:1)
Easy way to fix this problem... (Score:1)
Cisco[config]> int ser0/0
Cisco[config]> shutdown
Replace ser0/0 with whatever type of link AOL might have to the router should it not be some type of serial link.
Boom, no more bandwidth problems.
how (Score:2)
Re:how (Score:1)
Yes but IM makes it so easy that the usage would increase dramatically.
Ok, heres the fix (Score:1)
*runs over to the AOL internet uplink*
******SNIP*****
Problem solved.
It's not like AOLers contribute anything useful to the internet anyways
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ok, heres the fix (Score:2)
Plus, like Microsoft, they provide a focal point for geeks everywhere to unleash their fury. Without that, the internet would implode as millions of geeks' heads exploded in frustration.
Not that they would miss us.
aim (Score:1)
SIP is for signalling, not payload (Score:1)
SIP is for signalling only. Media info is included as SDP, which is independant of SIP.
Just because the signalling takes place via UDP has nothing to do with how the media is transferred. Perhaps new media types need to be added to SDP which would have the flow control mechanism.
SIP is still the way to go for the signalling part.
Big problem (Score:2)
Then the IETF should definitely not get involved.
easy answer.... (Score:4, Funny)
Mandibles in your ass (Score:2)
Re:ich bin berliner (Score:1)
means "I Agree With This Post", which happens to be the posters name
Re:Problem with IM standard (Score:1)
Reminiscent of UNIX just 10 years ago. From Glyn Moody's Rebel Code:
"Each of these Unix vendors said they
wanted to do a 'let's unify'-and then the
next statement was, 'OK, you dump yours,
and we'll use mine.'"
I don't really see this happening; in the past most of IETF's standards have been well adopted.
****
Re:AOL swamping the internet? Naaah... (Score:1)
AOL was the _LAST_ one to support HTML mail and had their users using their own custom markup tags for
Netscape can read HTML mail just fine Thank You So Very Much. After all it is just, uh, HTML. . .
Re:AOL swamping the internet? Naaah... (Score:1)