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.""

Comments

Re:The net to a halt.....

[Tackhead]

> How about an advanced cache system, a master cache or multimedia files as they get sent, files matching the same name/size/crc value get sent down to smaller cache hubs. Larger isps could host these cache hubs, the incentive for them would be less bandwidth external to the network.

Congratulations, you've just invented USENET!

It's called FTP

[Stiletto]

Along that route, why clog up everyone's email servers with MP3's, when you can just upload it to a FTP server you and your friend have common access to?

Besides, lots of email systems are already set up to filter out large attachments.

After all, when transferring files, it only seems logical to use the File Transfer Protocol.

WHAT?!?!

[Restil]

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

UDP is what they are concerned about.

[PureFiction]

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)

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 /dcc for IM clients)

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...

The main issues

[maggard]

There's really three issues here:

1. Online chat in it's various forms is popular.
2. Folks are starting to use chat clients to send files to eachother.
3. Chat is moving from text to audio or audio/video.

All of these features have been around for quite awhile, integrated and not. However they're now getting rolled into all-in-one applications that are popular. Also a critical number of folks have fast connections and are now comfortable going to the computer to send/recieve/interact.

Big news? No. Entirely forseeable evolution is more like it.

Things like IRC already enables a lot a lot of these features, and so do the various video-whackoff online applications and big-scale internet telephony has been the promised for a few years now. But those are all small potatos compared to the market penetration of AOL IM / ICQ / MS Communicator / Yahoo Messenger. With these now offering these feature traffic is going up, up in a big way.

No need to download a specialized program, install it, and figure out which of your friends has the same or compatible ones. The big IM programs are pretty much ubiquitious in the mass market, heck they come pre-installed on many new computers. Co-workers, classmates, relatives, friends across the street or in distant parts of the world are going to be likely to have the software, all installed automagically as they upgrade their tried-'n-true chat programs.

So we're now back to the issue of cross-communication: How to get the AOLians to talk to the MSNers with the ICQites with the Yahoolies. A solution has been promised for text messages but now after all these years it's arriving just in time to be irrelevant, perhaps simply being the building block for a more versitile system.

So what are the big technical hurdles? Again, three:

1. Directory Services: How to find and connect to folks.
2. Interoperability: How to negotiate settings & protocols between various clients.
3. Traffic Management: What to do with all of these packets streaming from the previously almost-all downloading users who now want to send streams of highspeed data upstream, LOTS of it (think teenagers on the phone!.)

So why is this an issue for NetworkWorld and not Teenbeat? Because directory services means some sort of servers, interoperability means protocols and that surging volume of low-latency traffic going upstream is going to upset the pricing and service model most broadband is built on.

Again, none of this is new, it's just the matter of scale. Currently in most environments the 5% of folks who are considered "Top Talkers" account for over 50% of all traffic. What happens when half of the users become "Top Talkers"?

If you're selling webcams and mikes and soundcards and sticky applications that folks spend hours on and want lots of services from then it's all golden. However if you're an exec in the already shaky ISP market this is like seeing the first few seconds of an avalanche and knowing those that the avalanch has effectively started...