Video Usage Creates Traffic Jam Worries 257
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has an article talking about worries over the increase in video downloads in the last year. Free video hosting and the popularity of iTunes is blamed for this phenomenon." From the article: "This is far from an academic issue. Whether the new companies can deliver on their promises could have a profound effect on how the Internet operates--and it could hit consumers in the pocketbook. Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common. Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams."
Re:We've been here before. (Score:3, Informative)
I'd certainly hope not, seeing that it's estimated that Bit-torrent accounts for about two thirds of all traffic on the internet.
We're in the 21st century FFS! Let's light up some of that dark fiber or whatever, not come up with bullshit excuses for raising prices and lowering QoS. If myself as a high school student can afford to have a gigabit network setup within the house, I don't think it should be that hard for the people that running the internet to up the bandwidth a shade.
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:3, Informative)
>Kind of. There's tricks you can do, for example carousel,
> where you continously send the same file out again and
> again. So people can start listening at any point, receive
> to the end of the file in the current sending, then listen
> for the first half when it's broadcast again.
What? So I should watch the last half of a show to see the ending and THEN watch the first half of it? That is completely pointless.
Not quite. I've worked with some software from Digital Fountain [digitalfountain.com]. Pretty neat stuff. Think about it like this. Take a two hour movie, break it into about forty pieces. Each of those pieces is going to be a multicast group, which is constantly running. Each of those pieces contain data from all portions of the movie, but in slightly different degrees. So, piece #1 would be about 70% from the first three minutes, 15% from the next three minutes, 5% from the next ten minutes, 5% from the next 20 minutes, and 5% from the rest of the movie. Piece #35 might be something more like 70% from the last 30 minutes, 20% from the last hour, and 10% from the first hour. The algorithm to actually split it up is quite a bit more complicated, but that's the general idea. Now, when you start up a movie, you wait about 10 minutes for the buffer to fill. Then it starts playing, from the beginning, and keeps on downloading in the background, filling in the areas you haven't got to yet. In the end, you're going to see the entire film, with just a 10 minute buffer to wait through at the beginning (and it'll probably be filled with advertising or previews of other films, if it's a commercial venture), and it's all multicasted. The hosting company is basically spilling out bandwidth for a single copy of the movie (plus some overhead) constantly, which can then get to any number of users simultaneously. It's very cool technology, and worked extremely well three years ago when I was playing around with it. I can only imagine they've improved on it since then.