Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers

Anonymous Coward writes "Robert X Cringely is postulating today that as bandwidth applications grow, the data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data. Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams, which is never going to impress the TV network exec used to audiences in the millions. Cringely choruses that secure P2P is the solution to delivering not only high quality video but also to audiences that scale in the millions. BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently, so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?"

Re:Change the paradigm

[afidel]

Yep, but there has to be a serious profit motive for the network providers because they will have to do a LOT of work to get multicast working reliably across their entire network.

What happened to all the...

[Osrin]

... multicast and proxy technology that we have spent the last 10+ years working on to solve this problem?

Figures

[Kawahee]

"Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams"

Assuming Akamai has only 10,000 servers, that's 15 streams per server. C'mon now, we're not that stupid.

Akamai embellishment

[artemis67]

The Akamai figures are the embellishment of the submitter... Cringely doesn't mention Akamai anywhere in the article.

P2P is not "under control"

[Opportunist]

And thus I don't really think they will switch to this model. Simply put: Their "servers" would not be under their control. If we were to provide them with "servers", we could at least partly control what is shown.

Of course we would not get a say what we distribute. But that's not the point. You cannot rely on a P2P Server to provide real time content. Suddenly it's gone, because I switch the box off. Even if you have a few fallback "servers" on the list it's nothing you can build a reliable service on. And people do get angry if their favorite soap suddenly skips right after the words "I kept silent 'til now, but now I have to say it. I am..."

Not to mention the danger of tampering with the content. Yes, they will encrypt it, yes, they will make it near impossible to inject anything, but there is still the danger that in the middle of a Disney Movie you suddenly get to see ... use your imagination.

Re:What happened to the MBONE?

[akumria]

IPv4 multicast across the Internet will never happen.

The reason is the complexity involved in deployment (multiple protocols, MBGP, MSDP, etc.) and that you have the 'third-party problem'. Basically both transmitters and receivers have to rely on a third-party for a redezvous-point.

Scalable Internet wide multicast deployment *might* happen with IPv6 because some of the issues have been solved (using, for example, embedable rendevous points - negating the need the 3rd parties). However if you look at how ISPs are architectured with xDSL networks, there isn't any incentive to provide multicast at the tail end.