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Snail Mail Still Winning The Bandwidth War
LR_none writes "Today's New York Times has this short piece suggesting snail mail is the leading broadband technology, at least for video movies on demand. The article states that the 8 to 9 gigs of data on a DVD would take two weeks to download at 56kb, making Netflix' three-day distribution by mail seem speedy. (Since they can send three or more movies at once, Netflix compares favorably with DSL download speeds, too.) The author estimates Netflix alone distributes 1,500 terabytes a day, which is impressive considering the Internet carries 2,000TB a day (by estimates cited in the article). The 'immediate gratification' aspect of Internet consumerism has given a huge boost to companies like FedEx and UPS, but it's surprising to think of the post office as being the leading infrastructure provider for digital entertainment, in terms of market share and efficiency, for the forseeable future. (Disclaimer: I don't work for Netflix or the post office.)"
The MPAA claims that the internet has creates significant consequences and risks -- citing to supposedly a kazillion feature films being pirated daily. This simple piece of arithmetic is a useful hunk of rebuttal.
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High throughput... high latency :(
"Broadcast quality" video requires about 5Mb. A cable system that carries 70 channels should therefore have at least 300Mb/s raw bandwidth. That's enough to download a 9GB movie in four minutes. One third of that would be enough to download the top 120 movies once a day. 1/36 of that would be enough to download 8 hours of network programming for each of five networks, for on-demand viewing, still leaving more than half the total bandwidth unused.There's lots of bandwidth out there, but people are too busy worrying about intellectual property rights to take advantage of it. Until we have an approach that separates compensation to artists and producers from distribution, our distribution system will remain wildly irrational.
So Fed-Ex is shipping in less than 10 seconds these days? A 1 Gbit link is just a matter of some money. Any big ISP should be able to sell you that and actually deliver as long as both endpoints are on the same, bigish, ISP.
/Mattias Wadenstein
If we were talking a factor 1000 more than 1GB, the Fed-Ex solution might have some validity. But then you have to take into account high-bandwidth tape drives in parallell and so on. My guess that you would be very hardpressed to find a solution that is faster than the internet for getting data from one file system in one city to another file system in another city.
And you will suffer the loss of quality and the inability to play them on a real TV that goes along with it, no thanks. DivX sucks.
I'm suprised no one has looked at the 2000 terrabytes/day number.
I'm sorry, that seems just a bit low. 1 site pushing 1 Gb/s is 84 Terrabytes/day. That means only 23 sites have to use that much bandwitch for that 2000 number to be hit. As I know of at least one site that pushes (not counting incoming) 10 Gb/s, that number is just a little unreasonable.
I'd really like to know where people get these kinds of numbers. I have seen silly numbers like this one and the 7 billion pieces of e-mail per day numbers and have to wonder where they come from. Acording to some numbers I saw released at one point, Hotmail alone receives over 1 billion e-mail per day.
I really have to wonder if someone is just making this stuff up or if they are looking at a very small set of data and extrapolating from there. In either case, I think better methods need to be used to create these kinds of numbers.
"All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening."
- Alexandar Woolcot
I met a gentleman who worked at a large brokerage
house on Wall street, and it was in fact cheaper
and faster to send data tapes from the west coast
office every day via FedEx than to do it by wire.
This conversation took place several years ago
and the relative costs may have changed by now,
but the way he put it was:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a fully
loaded 747 flying cross-country"
Daniel
A full movie often fits on 2 CDs, and damned if I can tell the difference from DVD.
I'm willing to bet you're the kind of guy who likes to distribute mp3's in 112kbps 'cause you can't hear the difference on your $2 headphones. If you can't tell the difference between a SVCD and a DVD you should either need to have your eyes examined or get rid of the old ass b&w TV. The difference in resolution is significant enough as it is to give a vast improovement... not to mention higher bitrate and more colors... That's like claiming to not be able to see the difference between a 1080i HDTV image and a standard NTSC signal.