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Comment Re:Design Issue (Score 1) 60

First off, it seems unlikely as the phone will either be a corporate device, including BYOD, or a personal device. In the first case the traffic will have to flow across the network (including the firewall)

What stops a BYOD from using multipath? It will have to use the 4G connection when it isn't on the corporate wifi, so what keeps it from using both?

Comment Re: Alternative explanation (Score 1) 398

The reason why routers are so underpowered is that nobody uses multicast. If there was a strong demand for multicast I'm sure that the manufacturers would increase the capacity of their hardware.

If you build it and it costs less than 6 figures USD, you will drown in customers. It would not be used primarily for multicast at first, it would be used to get BGP working better, but every major ISP would want your router.

Using P2P does not lower the total load on the network, it just spreads it out more evenly.

Correctly done P2P sends traffic through the best route, typically from someone on the same ISP as the recipient and preferably from the same neighbourhood. That lowers total load a lot. Most current P2P networks do not particularly worry about optimal routing; they are much more constrained by traffic shaping or (often artificially) limited last-mile upstream capacity. It would be fairly easy to give priority to low-latency peers.

Besides, P2P can solve the problem of subscribers not watching at exactly the same time. Multicast breaks as soon as someone presses pause.

Comment Re: Alternative explanation (Score 1) 398

Multicast is not a viable technology for truly large scale deployments (more than a few hundred thousand hosts perhaps). Routers and switches do not have the required resources to maintain multicast routing/switching tables for millions of multicast sessions.

The correct way to solve the problem is to push it to the end nodes. They have much more CPU power and memory than routers and switches. The technology to do so has existed for a long time: P2P.

Comment Re:Alternative explanation (Score 4, Informative) 398

Thats how the internet is paid for. The sending provider pays the receiving provider for the bandwidth, and this is the only rational way it can be.

No. That is not how it works. The truth is that the smaller provider pays the larger provider, no matter which direction the traffic flows. Some companies, like Netflix, are nice enough to not use their size as an excuse to charge people -- they offer free peering at internet exchanges. Other companies are maximally greedy.

Comment Re:Why ODF? (Score 1) 164

ASCII is a subset of UTF-8-encoded Unicode. If you do not use anything beyond ASCII in your document, the unzipped file will only contain ASCII. If you put Korean characters into your document (and you do not have to change font to do so, if you are using a decent font), the unzipped file will contain non-ASCII characters. In both cases, the file will be a valid UTF-8-encoded Unicode XML document.

Submission + - Verizon's Accidental Mea Culpa (level3.com)

Barryke writes: Verizon has blamed Netflix for the streaming slowdowns their customers have been seeing. It seems the Verizon ">blog post defending this has backfired in a spectacular way: The chief has clearly admitted that Verizon has capacity to spare, and is deliberately constraining capacity from network providers. The Level3 blog posted in reply to Verizon show a diagram visualising underpowered interconnect problem, and offer a free upgrade for Verizon hardware: the interconnect network cables and ports to plug them in. "(..) these cards are very cheap, a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it." It seems there isn't much more to say, although i am very curious to the response of the ISP about this straight forward accusation of throttling paying users.

Submission + - Alcatel-Lucent's XG-FAST Pushes 10,000Mbps over Copper Phone Lines

Mark.JUK writes: The Bell Labs R&D division of telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent has today claimed to set a new world record after they successfully pushed "ultra-broadband" speeds of 10,000 Megabits per second (Mbps) down a traditional copper telephone line using XG-FAST technology, which is an extension of G.fast (ITU G.9700).

G.fast is a hybrid-fibre technology, which is designed to deliver Internet speeds of up to 1000Mbps over shorter runs of copper cable (up to around 250 meters via 106MHz+ of radio spectrum). The idea is that a fibre optic cable is taken closer to homes and then G.fast works to deliver the last few metres of service, which saves money because the operator doesn't have to big up your garden to lay new cables.

By comparison XG-FAST works in a similar way but via an even shorter run of copper and using frequencies of up to 500MHz. For example, XG-FAST delivered its top speed of 10,000Mbps by bonding two copper lines together over just 30 metres of cable. But this might be a problem for commercial operators, which will want to maximise profits by using more copper to reach more homes and not less.

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