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Ethernet Over Assorted Materials
saridder writes: "Cisco has demonstrated their latest last mile technology,
and not only can you now have 10 MB Ethernet over Cat3, Cat2, Cat1, try lamp
power cord, battery jumper terminals, barbed wire, etc. This may have solved the last mile problem, and at 10 MB, it blows DSL out of the water."
I hope that this technology can help me get away from @Home er, ATT...
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Does this mean we're getting closer to bein able to wire mp3s lightning fast on a tin can system? :D
I think it is just short of a mile, thus the technology is nothing more than hype. It is the last 20 miles that need to be addressed not the last 5000 ft.
Got Code?
Is it just me, or did anyone else think "huge bare ass" when they saw "Hugh Barrass" in this article?
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
The problem is money. Nobody wants to spend the dollars necessary to hook us all up with data cable. That's why all the hullabalo about cable ISPs and DSL--they both utilize an existing physical connection.
In other words, the answer will not come from Cisco, it will come from somebody with deep pockets. And the only pockets deep enough in this case belong to the federal government.
324006
Hey, I just went out and bought a spool of barbed wire, only to discover that Cisco hasn't yet developed Ethernet-over-barbed-wire technology.
I guess I'll just have to reattach the alligator clips for my Ethernet-over-city-sewer connection.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
"By offering Ethernet-like speeds over regular phone wire, at reaches up to 5,000 feet, and co-existing with phone traffic, LRE brings rich, advanced services such as next generation video-on-demand to places it has not gone before."
So, once again, 90% of the population is too far from the CO for this to bring broadband into the home.
The problem isn't the last mile, contrary to the buzzwords... the problem is getting the pipe to run many, many miles to actual end users' homes.
Cisco spokesperson "Hugh Barrass"? Yeah, wait for the Ethernet-over-Jell-O(tm) Puddin' Pops protocol called "IP Freely"...
Carousel is a lie!
Sure, it's faster than DSL, but it's only good to 5000 feet - the last MILE for sure. Great in buildings, dorms, hospitals, etc. For us poor slobs that are 18,000+ feet of copper away from their CO, we're still stuck with lame alternatives. When are we going to see something that solves the DISTANCE problem, not the SPEED one?
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." -- Tom Lehrer
A simple google search would prove that assumption wrong.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It actually works pretty well. We use it on a large government facility that has some really old wiring in buildings that we don't have fiber runs into.
Has anyone heard the Cisco story about ethernet over barbed wire? Our salesrep tells a story about a facility in Kuwait (I think) that was having a terrible time keeping a link up between two buildings. The locals kept stealing the cable they were using for the valuable copper. They ended up getting ethernet to run over a piece of barbed wire running between the buildings. The error rate was high, and the sustainable throughput was abismal, but with TCP's error correction they were able to get a useful connection through.
I don't know how true that really is, might be a Cisco myth told to impress customers or something.
Casca
That article seemed mostly a puff piece, and fairly short on technical detail (anyone do any digging?). Not that I doubt Cisco's ability to discover methods of doing this, but it also seems a pr piece for investors maybe?
Anyway, it seems like a good idea, however, is there another block here that can be achieved by a company (ie the bells last mile influence on dsl)? Broadband to the masses ideas seem to come and go with the wind lately, and most seem never to pan out.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
If you follow the link to Cisco's site, there is a link on the right for the video presentation.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
...or BWoE. I suspect there would be a number of spikes in the connection.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
It doesn't matter if you can have Ethernet-over-sprinkler-pipes if your Ethernet equipment doesn't have someway to interface with the sprinkler pipes.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This kind of stunt has been used to show of the latest technology many different times. At one trade show novell used a fish tank to transfer token ring signals around on their network. Rusty barbed wire has been used many times. I personally know people who have used electric fences to transfer modem signals over a distance of miles to reach the barn.
This is all smoke and mirrors. What you do not realize is that the cross section of all of these materials is large. That is the real problem of data transfer when you break it down. It is the number of electrons that can be pushed over a data source without the cross section of the wire breaking down (over heating and glowing red is usually the indicator of this). What Cisco does not say in this article is if we can still use the phone lines for what they are intended for, phones, once we use this technology. this is not really an advantage if I have to rewire the building anyways so I can still make phone calls. Might as well have put in the regular cat 5 then making the advantage of this pointless.
The final last mile problem has a third part not adjusted by this technology. this is the ancient switches that this must travel through. The thing that has stopped the broadband revolution is the time and effort necesary to switch over all of the network to be able to use this tech. Phone companies are slow to roll these things out. When I worked for an ISP we once had to wait 6 months to install a dial-up location as the local telco had Lost their back hoe and did not want to rent one. How you loose a back hoe I will never know. SO don't hold your breath, this revolution is still born.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
Well, maybe with a name like Hugh Barrass, he's got a lot to prove. Hopefully, he's proved it well, since 'last mile' solutions are also often 'peer to peer' solutions. If you can run 10 megabit over bailing wire, what's to stop you from buying a cheapass router and joining the 'real' internet.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Okay. So, yeah, we might finally have a reasonable technology to solve the "last mile" problem.
:)
But where the *hell* is all this bandwidth going to come from? I mean, server bandwidth is expensive. I know a few people who donate Debian mirrors, and it costs them a pretty penny, that's for sure.
I mean, I'd still want to have this; if for nothing more than great community networks. (Community as in physical locality)
But this won't solve all our problems, it will probably bring us new ones.
Not that we still shouldn't do it
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I do not believe Cisco does, or ever has, positioned LRE as a "last-mile" technology. LRE is more about leveraging existing cabling infrastucture in a multi-unit facilities such as hotels and hospitals.
Cisco's LRE product offering requires two pieces:
1. An LRE-capable switch at the head-end (such as a 2900XL LRE), which terminates the LRE and has a standard Ethernet handoff to your normal data equipment. In an intergrated voice/data setup (where you're reusing existing voice cabling to carry voice AND data) you would then use their LRE 48 POTS Splitter at the head-end and hand off to the PBX before bringing everything in to the 2900XL LRE.
2. Cisco 575 CPE, which uplinks to the head-end and splits off the voice and the data. Very similar to Cisco's 600 series.
Sound like DSL? It essentially is, just on a smaller scale (3500XL/2900XL LRE costs a whole hell of a lot less then a carrier-class DSLAM). In fact, scanning over the Cisco 575 CPE Overview, Cisco declares the technology to be "based on VDSL".
Draw your own conclusions, but I have never heard this positioned as a last-mile replacement. The article never seems to hint at it either, but simply reiterate their marketing the product line for multi-tenant facilities.
1. 10 Mb over standard telephone cabling is a solution to the last mile problem. I don't believe you need to use a CO for a POP for LRE. You could create your own, or put them on telephone poles, like cable companies do. You still save billions in wiring costs. Furthermore, there are TONS of businesses within a 1 mile radius in downtown financial districts, office parks, high rises, etc. It's better than T1.
2. It covers any place that has wires, not just hotels. Homes have cat3 or cat1, so it will work there too.
3. My original headline was Ethernet over barbed Wire. Every time I submit a story, Slashdot changes my titles.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Ethernet over duct tape?
Whatever you cannot build in a quick and dirty way with duct tape is worthless to me.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Hats off to Cisco's engineers for putting this into hardware - with the emerging IEEE standard, hopefully there will be others.
The nice 10 MHz square waves going over an unshielded wire are going to make a whole lot of harmonics (and products) all up and down the radio spectrum. Depending on the power you'd need to push your signal down a mile of barbed wire (and with a transmitting antenna a mile long), I'm pretty sure you'd run afoul of any number of FCC regs. Plus, it would probably just irritate the cows :-).
That is all.
... technology to use your old phone lines as fast link layer for IP, they start to sell you Voice Over IP solutions so that you can use your phone again.
(Yes, I know that they claim you can continue to use the same line for speach communication, and I hope that they don't implement this using Voice Over IP.)
My favorite is still CPIP (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol; RFC-1149).
Unfortunately, the problem with dropped packets is not nearly as bad as the problem with droppings.
About a year ago they announced that they had developed a wireless, non-line of sight, 35 mile range, 45 Mbit thing. What the hell happened to that? Short of the press release, I haven't seen anything else on it.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Yeah, and his daughter Emma doesn't like to be seen in public with him because of his funny name. q:]
(ok, think about it a bit before you mod me down)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
"the industry's first end-to-end product line for delivering 5-15 Mbps performance over existing Category 1/2/3 wiring."
/. dudes.
It's bits. Please get that front page fixed
By the way, 10Mbps doesn't blow DSL out of the water, it just blows the current implementations of DSL out of the water. There are standards in place for DSL up to 54Mbps (or even higher, I haven't been keeping current).
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Thats 10Mb(it), not 10MB(yte). DSL is capable of this speed too. Like DSL, its pretty good at running over crap cable, but quality varies with the wiring.
This is a different (fault-tolerant) modulation format for ethernet frames. DSL is a different (fault-tolerant) modulation format for ATM frames.
I think this is interesting, because ethernet doesn't have as many things to mess up, like, for instance, matching the VCI and VPI up on both ends. On the other side of the coin, though, you don't get the subnet seperation and traffic shaping that ATM offers natively. In terms of moving packets from point A to point B, the technologies seem roughly equivelant to me.
Also remember, DSL is capable of 10MBit, and I don't know how much HFC cable is capable of, but if you ever see an ISP deploying this, don't expect them to give you the full capabilities of the wire - broadband ISPs never do (all of the ones I've tried cap bandwidth higher up in the network regardless of what the technology is capable of).
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
I hate to sound like I'm marketing it, but what about DSDN? It's true that it doesn't run over existing technologies, but for 10 Mbps Internet access it's considerably cheaper than the current alternatives (such as direct fibre-optic lines) and is supposed to cost about as much for the end user as their cable or DSL ISP already does.
It's already in use in Denver as well as a section of Utah, and it's supposed to be very fast in practice - not just theory. The Denver ISP has a site at wideopenwest.com and the company that designed the technology is at switchpoint.com. Switchpoint is the one testing it in Utah as far as I know.
I also know that Slashdot has mentioned this tech before, but it bears repeating this for others; we'll never get past sub-standard cable and phoneline solutions if people don't demand alternatives.
We are using LRE technology to connect approximately 50 buildings via cat 1 and cat 3 underground phone cable. LRE requires only a signle pair, and can share a pair with a voice line, just like DSL.
Out to 3000 feet 15 megabits is normal, between 3000 and 5000 only 5 megabits is typical, but it depends on the quality of the cable.
This technology is based on VDSL and works using the same principals, but runs at a higher data rate, limiting the distance. Also, LRE transports Ethernet frames directly, without any ATM protocol overhead, unlike most of the other DSL solutions. This greatly reduces costs.
The Cisco 575 LRE device is much like the low-end Cisco 600 series DSL routers in appearance, but has no active layer 3 capabilities. Basically, the remote 575 port appears to the 2924LRE as if it were a local port, allowing trunking and vlan assignments as supported by the 2900 series switch.
If you could order a number of "alarm pairs(dry copper)" from your local telco, between a friendly ISP and your houses, and the distance was less than 5000 ft., this would be a pretty economical solution. Otherwise, it's not of much use for the average homeowner.
-Falcor
It was only 1Mb/s, but it could communicate over ANYTHING. Would not take too much to bump the speed up with todays technology.
This isn't new or suprising. This technology has been around for years. God, I remember using ARCNET to communicate thru barbed wire back in 1995 (as a test to prove it could).
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Someone needs to convert pound-test to bandwidth, and there you go.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
While this technology is cool, I think they should have put more money into R&D on RFC1149.
For those unfamiliar with RFC1149, here are the details: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
Its probably a bit slower than barbed wire, but damn it... its more fun!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Does anyone know which company they bought to obtain this technology?
The IEEE 802.3ah Ethernet in the First Mile Task Force Web site has stuff on various first-mile-Ethernet proposals; I don't think they've chosen any of the proposals (LRE, or any of the others) as the Official 802.3ah Standard yet.
When I read the article, I didn't see anything about lamp cord , barbed wire, etc. All they mentioned was cat1~3 -- in which case the primary advantage to the technology is that you can now wire most old buldings to 10megabit without having to run more copper through the walls (often without anything even approaching conduit in them.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Where will the bandwidth come from?
Me.
If I had a 10MB connection to my house, I'd mirror shit just to mirror it. I'd download kernels and patches, and tell the maintainers to put me on the list of mirrors. And I wouldn't be alone.
That's one of the reasons that P2P networks work so well. There are so many nodes to get the information from.
Server bandwidth is expensive because it is a scarce commodity. How much do you pay per month for the 100MB connection between your workstation and your server? If you (conveniently) don't count the cost of the infrastructure, the price is zero. Factor in the cost of the infrastructure, and amortize it over the life of the equipment and that number is still ridiculously low. ($70 for two NICs, $80 for a half-decent switch (optional), say it's only good for a year. That's $12.50 a month!)
Server bandwidth is expensive because servers are concentrated into little high traffic nodes. Spread the traffic out (ala freenet, gnutella, morpheus, etc.) and costs drop dramatically. Make bandwidth a commodity, and you will start paying commodity prices.
I had to get a 10mbps coax cable down a brick wall into the room below, but coax cable was too thick and the metal BNC connectors were too bulky. I ended up using audio cable that would normally link a stereo to it's speakers. Ping times were still 10 ms. I guess provided that the transfer medium has similiar properties of resistivity, etc, many metal replacements and objects used in infrastructure can be used to transmit data.
Actually..
Where _does_ bandwidth come from ?
I get bandwidth from my isp, they get it from 2 or three places... and it goes "up the line" until you get networks that are simply moving traffic that doesn't belong to them..
Does UUNet create bandwidth ? Does sprint ? Why dont they create a bunch more ?
Where is the top of the food chain of bandwidth ?
Obviously, its in their interest to keep charging ridiculous fees.
Why doesn't someone else "make more bandwidth" ?
I pay $65/mo for 128/768 DSL with static ip. I think thats because tahts what I'm willing to pay, not because theres any cost structure supporting that price.
There is no peice of technology that I can think of that doesn't become trivial amortized over even a year. Yet T1 and DS3 line charges are still astronomical. Why ?
ISP's overselling bandwidth implies that they cant afford more upstream, implying that upstream bandwidth is expensive, which I've seen plenty of evidence of. Why is this upstream b/w so damn much money ?
Sorry for the incoherency. I just don't understand the cost structure for broadband.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Network bandwidth I'm sorry to say does not aggregate when you add nodes to it. You having a 10mbit line to a CO doesn't mean the internet's got an extra 10mbit of bandwidth flying around. That means you've got a 10mbit link to a CO which is sharing a connection to a bigger switch.If anything you've decreased everyone else's available bandwidth. If everyone hooked to your CO decides they want to be a Debian mirror you're all going to have to split the bandwidth available to the CO which is most likely alot less than the combined bandwidth of all of your 10mbit links. Server bandwidth isn't a scarce commodity, you just need to be willing to pay for it because somebody else is paying for it and selling it to you.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Back about 4 years ago,
my room-mate discovered that 4 conductor telephone wire was like 2 ¢ / foot when CAT5 was selling for more like 50 ¢ / foot.
He networked our house for like four bucks.
The RJ45 ends were difficult to crimp to the cable
because the cable is so much smaller.
His solution:
Wrap electrical tape around the cable to increase its diameter.
Keep in mind that a 10 base T network only needs 4 of the 8 conductors, but you'll need 8 conductors for 100 Base T.
I do not remember having any bad connections via the cheap cable, but I wouldn't reccommend it unless you're on a college sided budget. Cat5 is cheap.
Seems like 10mbs[1] over thin air is going to be a cheaper last mile solution than any wired system.
[1] Or 54mbps.
Deleted
"Hey, I just got a cable modem; it's so much faster than anything else I've ever used!"
"Oh yeah?! I've got a barbed wire Ethernet line!"
"A what?!"
"A barbed-wire Ethernet line. Haven't you heard of that?"
"Umm... No, I can't say I have."
"Oh... ACME Networks installed it for me last month. It cost a fortune, because there are no barbed wire fences around where I live, so they had to upgrade their entire barbed wire infrastructure; they billed me for like 20 miles of barbed wire fencing."
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I saw the demo for this last year, its pretty lame. If you can, grab the demo kit from the marketing slime and try it with regular 10bT ethernet and it still works.
They have built a big wooden frame, about 1.2 metres on a side. Across the front of it they have a number of strips of cloth, held in place with velcro. The spiel starts about putting a signal down cat5 cable, and how expensive that can be. The rep pulls off the top strip of cloth, revealing some cat5 running between two RJ45 plugs, at the top is a connection to a LRE switch, and coming out of the bottom still hidden by 4 or 5 more strips of cloth is another RJ45 going to another LRE switch with a signal light. The rep makes a point to plug and unplug the cat5 to show the signal lights going on and off.
Then the pitch starts talking about cheaper cable, and then he pulls off the next strip, showing cat3 phone cable. The jumper from the cat5 RJ45 goes into the RJ45 for the cat3, and the jumper on the other side goes down to the next level which is still hidden.
Soon the pitch talks about pushing signal over anything, and the sales rep pulls off the next cloth, revealing two strips of lamp cord. And finally the bottom strip reveals four strands of barbed wire between 4 insulator posts, with RJ45 connectors at either end. BFD.
The final result is that the LRE signal is running over a bunch of impedence mismatched wires for a total distance of about 5 metres. If the rep is doing this canned demo in a conference room and there is 10bT available, try running a regular 10bT signal through this frame, it will probably still work.
They may also have a 200-250 metre spool of twisted pair phone wire with RJ45s at either end. That is impressive, since 10bT will have lots of error at such a distance, but LongReachEthernet will back down to about 2 Mbps and still function.
And this isn't a direct plug replacement for ethernet, LRE requires both dedicated blades in their switches for distribution, and very expensive receiving units for the far end. They are targetting places with old wiring going to a wiring closet, they can't actually compete with DSL at this time. But there is always a question about using these switches for neighborhood distibution when a telco has a small remote switch serving customers at the end of a fibre loop. The rep will not make any committment to that.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
This will be good for creating an instant network within a building with older infrastructure. Sort of like Phoneline networking, but a bit faster, and apparently with lower standards as to the actual type of wire (See barbed wire, new meaning to electric fence) Could also be useful if combined with dsl. Now the dsl modem/router/Cisco box/filter is located at the point where the phonelines enter your home/office/courrugated box, then the signal is split over all of the phonelines without needing more filters or a pre-existing network for non-internet needs. Great package for the phone companies. Not really a major advance for "last-mile" needs, but it helps for those who don't want to invest in additional networking equipment or rewire their home.
I though that the entire Excite@Home thing proved that the first mile of service was quickly becoming the most expensive one.
Work needs to be done to reduce the price of traffic over the internet backbones.
Hell ATT@Home had a potential 40mbp/s line running to my house (heck, one time I got 2MBp/s. Yes thats MegaBits per second) but eventualy the price of providing that much bandwidth to their users cause the current scenario of bandwidth now being capped.
What good would a 10mbp/s line do me when I am capped at 1.5mbp/s?
::sighs::
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
DOH DOH DOH DOH DOH!!!
MegaBYTES per second MegaBYTES.
I once got a 2MegaBYTES per second download.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I do this for a living, so I know. At the top of the food chain is the SONET/SDH telecommunications network. That works at between OC12 (660 Mbit/s) and OC768 (40+Gb/s) rates, and go typical distances of a hundred kilometers (upto a thousand). And these rates can be done many times on difference frequencies of light (DWDM) on a single fibers; and you can have multiple fibers between offices as well.
At present, 6.4 Terabits can be shifted on a single fiber, although I don't think that has been deployed in any serious way, ~100Gb/s or so are much more common. If you need more bandwidth, add another wavelength (cost: a millionish); or if the fiber is full (rare right now, but will happen more and more often in a few years or a decade), then you need to lay new fibers- that costs 100s of millions; but we are talking significant bandwidth from that- you don't lay 1 fiber you lay 50 or so and keep most of them for expansion or sell them to other telecoms companies to pay for your layout.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Now what I'm waiting for is ethernet-over-railroad-track. I mean, sheeit, that stuff already covers whole continents, no backhoe is going to go through it and it's durned hard to steal. And, at least in the US, there's lots of it that's going underutilized. This could be the recycling innovation of the year.
;-)
The moral dilemma is this: do I spend a fortune getting someone to bring a rough-terrain lowloader hundreds or possibly thousands of km out into the scrub to pick up my worn-out bulldozer, or do I lose it and have the insurance company (whose investigators are *not* about to spend hours on a jet, more hours on a prop-driven buzzbox and more hours - possibly days - in a rented 4WD just to get to the general area) replace it with a new one?
You might think that following the tracks would be an easy answer, but if the 'dozer's been busy in the area, and if the company takes its time reporting the incident, things ain't so simple. In a day, a 'dozer might be 100 or more km away, representing over 300,000 sq km to search for it in.
Moral justice is sometimes done, however, when a strap comes off or a big rock or tree turns the 'dozer so that it either comes back to camp or goes the wrong way and crosses a road or a fence-line where it will be noticed.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How about properly designed barbed wire? Does that radiate much? Does the strainer, dropper or wire-run spacing make a difference? Is razor wire better or worse? Does the mile include the twists used as barbs, only the actual barbs, or none of it? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and I imagine that Hugh was well beyond sick of it before you even started. Sigh.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Cisco's LRE is a LAN technology. This doesn't have one rat fart to do with any part of the last mile. It works over existing Cat1-3 (phone) premise wiring for distances of up to 5000ft. This is not a replacement for Cable Modems, DSL, or ougie boards. And no, it does not "blow DSL out of the water." If you are within 5000ft of a CO, you can get very good DSL rates over ONE (30AWG) pair (not the 4pairs that comprise CatX cables.)
This is technology for multi-tenate units like apartment buildings, hotels, offices, malls, etc. The article spells this out in perfectly plain engligh:
- Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users.
You will not see this being run through the public telephone grid.There actually is an IEEE standards body for "Ethernet in the Last Mile" -- I don't know the number for it off hand. And companies are designing hardware to provide 10M ethernet connections with further reach than SDSL. And this is last mile technology. (I'm too far from the CO in any case.)
>robots to get fiber to the basements
>of buildings, and then use the existing
>cat-
Yeah, like that's going to work. Little thing crawls out and runs around with a string, and you think the cat won't attack???
:)
hawk
Think of the consequences. Who lives by the barbed wire?
That's right, the cows. The ones we eat. And what do cows produce?
Right again, *staggering* quantities of methane. Now think a second. Suppose you're a cow. You can't be *all* that thrilled about your future prospects (unless, of course, you're a dairy cow). So you start thinking slow cow thoughts between transferring your cud between stomachs. But it eventually comes to you.
If they can send ethernet over the barbed wire, how much harder can it be to send *methane*. As they work it out, the first signs will be press reports about herds of cattle charging barbed wire fences backwards. The second wave will be the explosions in switchboxes and phone relay centers. But once they have the bugs worked out, every farmhouse in the United States will be destroyed in a matter of days! What will we eat! Stop trnasmission over barbed wire NOW!
hawk
But what you're not picking up is that your 10mbit connection ONLY exists between you and the CO which is probably only a few miles from where you live. To the rest of the internet your connection is just a branch off of a T3 that goes from your CO to somewhere with an OC-3 or something. When you download anything from anywhere not directly connected to your CO you're using up bandwith on someone's pipe somewhere. Granted, if the CO provided a means for all users connected to the CO to talk to each other without involving the rest of the internet you'd have a point.
However your point about the comics is a bit flawed, if the server at your ISP has the comic image cached and you download it from that ISP that image still has to travel over a trunk line between the ISP's POP and your local CO. This does cost money. It costs money in terms of space required to cache it and the trunk bandwidth used to send it to you. The only way you'd get away with nearly free bandwidth was if your local phone company was also an ISP and housed its computer equipment in the CO building itself. With cable or DSL you don't have a whatever megabit connection to the internet, you've got a whatever megabit connection to a DLC and are lucky if that bandwidth is maintained once it goes out to the rest of the world. Letting you personally cache stuff would only work if you could talk directly to others on the local loop. No cable or DSL provider I know of does this because they're all structured to connect you to the internet, not connect you to your neighbor.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Multiple nodes with the same information only relieve traffic if they are close in terms of the network. Lets say you've got five mirrors up and serving some file. The load on each of these individual mirrors is going to be less than having a single server but if all of those mirrors are on the same connection (in the same data center), the stress on the pipe between the data center and the rest of the internet is the same. Now if these mirrors were like you suggest actually housed at a local POP there'd be next to no added traffic on external links. One big problem is a majority of internet traffic eventually moves over a handful of high speed lines. In theory the internet is a giant web of connections but in reality it is a bunch of small webs all connected by fat links. Anytime data has to travel over these fat links no matter how many nodes you've got on either side, the bandwidth over those links is stressed. That's actually where Akamai comes in, they get mirrors stuck up all over the place so no matter what file is requested it usually exists close (in network terms) to any node requesting it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.