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Where The Bandwidth Goes
An anonymous reader writes "An often overlooked fact about network bandwidth utilization is that the bandwidth consumed on networks is more than the sum of the data exchanged at the highest level; it's data+overhead+upkeep. In the early 90's I worked for a large multi-national company whose software engineering department had a transatlantic x.25 circuit connection to it's European engineering headquarters. It was necessary that the connection be 'on' 24x7 due to the spanning of a large number of time zones, disparate working hours and tight contractual requirements. Very large data transfers were sometimes operationally essential. But the financial people used to scream constantly about the circuit costs (charged per packet, IIRC) of several thousand dollars/month. The sys admin realized that if he just reduced the frequency of keep-alives, he could shave something like 10% off the monthly bill. This article points out that p2p applications are greater bandwidth hogs than one might think because of the foregoing and more - they also search, accept pushed advertising and do other transactions that are transparent to most users, but add up. I doubt that developers of those free p2p applications have gave much thought to efficiency. This will be no surprise to many of you, but helps explain why ISP's rushing to put caps on transfers."
Actually P2P work does focus on efficiency because efficiency determines how large the network can scale on a give set of hardware (the users machines and comodity internet connections). ISP's want to cap bandwidth because their current business model demands that they oversubscribe their uplink by around 20-200 times depending on the type and pricing of the comodity connection. Besides caps are based on total bandwidth usage which includes networking overhead (the routers accounting program doesn't care about payload usually)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
We need web caches... It's stupid to have files crossing the ocean thousands of times. Besides not using web caches causes that those who cannot afford bandwidth costs cannot put content in the web... Caches now!.
Web developers must not be afraid of web caches, since the HTTP/1.1 protocol allows them to precisely define how and when their content will be cached.
The article itself was kind of ho-hum, but the following part of the Slashdot intro caught my attention:
Again...wow. One would need to search far and wide, even on Slashdot, to find another example of such absolutely astonishing cluelessness. Timothy has obviously never talked to a P2P developer in his life. Sometimes it seems like efficiency is just about the only thing P2P developers think about, unless someone's on a security/anonymity rant. Little things like robustness or usability get short shrift because so much of the focus is on efficiency. Hundreds of papers have been written about the bandwidth-efficiency of various P2P networks - especially Gnutella, which everyone who knows anything knows is "worst of breed" when it comes to broadcasting searches.
It's unfortunate that the most popular P2P networks seem to be the least efficient ones, and doubly unfortunate that so many vendors bundle spyware with their P2P clients, but to say that P2P developers don't give much thought to efficiency is absurd. They give a lot more thought to efficiency than Slashdot editors give to accuracy, that's for damn sure.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
p2p breaks our precious little ratio of what we expect and what we need
Uhh, yah, except this is how they're determining how much they can charge you. If the ratio becomes permanently skewed, the way they "evolve" as you put it is to simply skew their prices to compensate. Though your end user connections may be effectively "unlimited", someone upstream pays for the bandwidth by how much data gets transferred. I guarantee the costs will filter down.
So as a business, what would you do? Raise your rates for all "unlimited" customers? Create a new class of DSL customer with a lower bandwidth cap and re-figure the ratio? Block P2P activity entirely? Write into the end user contract some soft usage caps and go after the top 1% of bandwidth consumers? All of the above?
I don't really think P2P is going to drive growth (i.e. more bandwidth for less cost) any more aggressively than the growth we're already seeing. I just think it's going to annoy ISP's and make them re-think some of their "unlimited" bandwidth plans.