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IETF Mulls Standard For Multimedia Messaging
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.""
Congratulations, you've just invented USENET!
First of all, AIM, and I would imagine other instant messengers already support the transfer of video or audio clips, not to mention images or damn near anything else you'd want to send. Its called FILE TRANSFER people. It happens all the time. Its rather naive to say that they only support text. Someone isn't doing their research.
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
Play with my webcams and lights here
If you read the article they mention that any voice and video or other data transfer mechansim integrated into instant messaging *must* support congestion control. Funny they mention that because TCP has congestion control, and works just fine (TCP traffic will not collapse the net)
/dcc for IM clients)
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...