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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.)"
Lag's a bitch though.
;)
Not millisecond.
Not second.
Not minute.
Not hour.
Lag measured in DAYS.
Hell, even carrier pidgeon is probably faster
TODO: Something witty here...
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.
What's the fastest way to move 1GB of data nightly from LA to San Fran?
Fed-Ex
that I could send a couch via FedEx easier than I could over the internet? These people are just plain nuts.
Oh wait...
Nothing like snail mail to remedy my need for DVD's via my 28K line.
:-)
Of course, if you're using a 28K line, you're probably not instantly gratified that often anyways.
This space for rent.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes" - SysAdmin humor
never underestimate the baud rate of a station wagon filled with backup tapes...
... hi bingo
Tried playing Quake by snail mail. Took forever before the letter saying I'd been fraged 10^5 times for just standing there to arive.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.
if you live on the East Coast, forget about it. Mail takes 5 business days, coming and going, making Netflix not all that cheap. If you get the basic service (3 movies at a time), if you watch the movies THE DAY you get them and send them back immediately, you still can't realistically get more than say, 6 movies a month. If Netflix opened a warehouse on the East Coast, shit, I'd get the best damn service they've got. If not for that huge mail lag for us on the East Coast, their service is fucking fantastic.
Bandwidth vs. Latency is always a big tradeoff in CS technologies. Sure you can ship larger packets (err... packages) via snail mail, but latency is still a big issue. An equivalent to a ping in mail might take two weeks using letters.
Cost is also an issue, next-day mail is REALLY expensive... shooting bits across the net is really cheap, and in comparison almost free.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
High throughput... high latency :(
Well Duh. of course you can ship huge amount of information faster by Mail then via Digital resorces. If you want I can transfer you 90 TerraBytes of information in one day via FexEx. Or lets say every molicule in a piece of paper is considered information there you have it I have sent more data. Mailing information is a 3d way of shiping and storage and in our 3d perceved world it is the best way to move data compared to the 1d Internet. Of course if you are shipping small amounts of information then Internet will win.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If I need it there Sometime Later This Week, I have no problem using the USPS for anything. They've never lost a piece of mail I was waiting for or sent out, and I have done a lot of business with patient buyers on eBay that were happy with the ship times and the handling with USPS. In fact, recently I have read about more issues with sending delicate equipment UPS/FedEx than with USPS Priority, for example.
Broadband just isn't a reality/necessity for enough people yet, and the size of applications and media in digital format is growing and is already too great for the Average Joe who has an affinity the Internet but doesn't know how to download 4 GB worth of video successfully (or patiently, for that matter).
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
To wit, from everyone's favorite echoing news site: link. They should have them in Boston, NY, and DC.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
1 gig takes 2-3 weeks over a dialup connection.
One gigabyte, divided by 5 kilobytes per second (average effective downstream rate for "56K" dial-up given line noise and TCP overhead), equals 200,000 seconds, or just under 56 hours. At that rate, an online DVD store would have already shipped the package.
CheapBytes: the fastest way for dial-up users to get an OS distro.
Will I retire or break 10K?
NetFlix alone helped justify the cost of
;-)
getting an HDTV for me - I find I spend
more hours per week watching Netflix-supplied content than anything else, and most DVD's are in widescreen
formats.
It works out to be cheaper than Blockbuster if you like watching lots of
movies, and is more flexible than the
pay channels.
I wish they had more content though, as
you can pretty quickly run through all the
movies you haven't seen already.
What about Satellite?
I have a 40gb PVR and it's filled all the time.
From a +3 comment this morning to the front page! Nice! :-)
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
Write the DMA (see near the bottom of the page.) I did it and my junk mail was reduced, but not eliminated. I get a lot less national stuff though, most of what is left is local offers.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Step 1: run your envelope through an industrial shreader.
Step 2: append 10 MAC shreads at the end of mail.
Step 3: permutate shread x with shread perm(x) where perm(x) is the chosen encryption algorithm.
Step 4: glue together
Step 5: shread, unencrypt, reglue.
voila.
...if you didn't have to share bandwidth with all those spammers.
A networks instructor once told me
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of an 18-wheeler full of CDs."
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Streaming snail mail doesn't work for DVDs, but you can get it to work for VHS.
The trick is to pull one end of the tape out of the cartridge, then glue it to a post card. Drop the postcard in the mail and leave the rest of the tape next to the mailbox.
Now, as the head end of the tape makes its way through the postal system, it automatically despools the rest of the tape which streams along behind it.
As soon as the head end of the tape arrives, the customer inserts it into in an empty cartridge and starts to play it . As the VCR plays, it sucks the remainder of the tape out of the postal system at the appropriate speed.
"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.
This reminded me of the time I read Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
SSH over USPS!
--Dan
It's no wonder the bandwidth and latency of shipping DVDs is higher than the internet.
It's simpler to make a lower bits per packet protocol (like rs232 or SSA) than a higher bits per packet (uwSCSI).
you just make up for lower frequency with bigger packets.
the internet is an 8 data bit protocol compared to the (4.7GB * 8) data bit protocol of mailing DVDs.
my livejournal is interesting and worth reading - I swear. I know everyone thinks their blog is interesting. mine is.
$7?
This sounds like the old George Bush guessing that a gallon of milk cost $9.
A mini-cd can fit in a small envelope, and weighs in under the 1-ounce, meaning only 1 stamp needed. A full size cd can fit safely in a padded envelope and mail at under $1.
For $3.95 you can send anything that fits into a priority box/envelope. You can probably fit 40 cd's in there.
Never send jewel cases either, just use sleeves
I've been mailing cd-r's with mp3 albums for a long time, and the postage isn't that bad until you start looking at over seas trades.
Unfortunately, they seemed to have gotten rid of all their "mature" titles after they went mainstream.
Magnus.
Just think, there was a virus attack on the USPS network last fall, and it was front page news for months, even though it only infected a handful of network nodes.
Meanwhile Klez keeps popping up in my Inbox again and again..
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Database guru Jim Gray
discusses what turned out to be the most reasonable solution to sending terabytes of data (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) in a convenient form across the globe: sending complete servers with terabyte disk subsystems.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of cargo plane filled with ait-3 tapes. :-)
you've got a 15GB/s (3 DVDs) line and some lag? stop complaining!
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
You're right. Thanks for reminding me that America isn't the only place full of fucking assholes.
Considering the article was about about UPS, FedEx, the United States Post Office, AND about Netflix (where only USA customers are allowed to be customers due to postal considerations) you'll have to forgive me for not reading your mind. I've traded packages with lots of European nations, and I never heard of any of them complaining about their postage rates except Yugoslavia.
So instead of your message being wrong, it's just off topic.
never underestimate all your base in a beowulf cluster of hot grits down natalie portmans pants! ...
profit!
... hi bingo
like amazon.ca, it would be great...
-- the cake is a lie
Maybe Netflix distributes 1,500TB a day of movies, but that's using DVD's MPEG-2 compression. Encode 'em with DivX and you're gonna slash that figure by what... 80-90%?
internet is somehow a faucet of distribution with which material and physical distribution cannot meaningfully compete. It is arguably faster and more efficient to distribute DVD's using the mails -- thousands of terabytes per day can be distributed far more efficiently (and cost effectively) in this manner than upon the internet.
The threat to distribution is not that it exists at all (you can find pirated DVD's on most any city street), but whether it is significant compared to the principal modes of distribution available to legitimate parties.
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.
It seems like Slashcode should be modified to automatically post a copy of the parent under any thread involving technology... would save everyone on /. (trolls, mods, humorists) a lot of time :)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I joined Netflix, one of the first of the DVD rental mailer companies, a long time ago and like it a lot. I was interested, then, to read a rough calculation that, in terms of 190,000 MPEG-2 format DVDs, Netflix's daily bandwidth totals 1.5 TB. This is a sizable fraction of the current total estimated Internet daily bandwidth: somewhere between 2-4 TB. Of course, Peter Wayner's calculations do not allow for the online delivery of movies in more compression-efficient formats, such as the MPEG-4-derived DIVX, where a typical 4-7 GB DVD can be reduced to around 700 MB with minimal quality loss.
I guess the CD manufacturers also thought they were safe, when a typical CD occupied 700MB of data in an era of mainly dialup connections. Then along came MP3 with its one-tenth compression ratio and so much for that idea. Netflix's current success is a temporary artifact of our restricted bandwidth and lack of suitable MPEG-4 hardware players.
And I found out from some surfing that some Netflix competitors, such as CafeDVD, QwikFlicks, and DVD Avenue, are cheaper and offer porn, something Netflix avoids.
Da Blog
It's true, though. I once worked at a company
where it was faster to drive down to the colocation site to dump the latest DB than
transfer it over the wire. Before you say
"duh", consider that the drive was only about
30-40 mins, the database was not that huge,
and the company was just cheap and had only
a dialup connection shared among ~8 users.
Considered harmful.
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
Now, now, now, now, now, and I'm going to hold my breath until I get it!
*Thud*
In the words of Scotty, " I canna change the laws of physics Cap'n."
Honestly people, what sort of harm are you actually going to come to by having to wait to watch a movie until you receive it?
Hey, here's what I do. I walk to my library ( 5 minutes each way) and take out three videos. They already have more in stock than I can watch in what remains of my lifetime and the collection grows daily. If I do this early in the morning I can watch all three, return them, and take out three more, watch them and then repeat that one more time, making the last return the next morning when I return for three more to start my day. Repeat until death.
Pretty good "bandwith," and ecologically friendly too.
KFG
Sorry, I'm sure someone has said it already, but I'm feeling a little reactionary.
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
Netflix opened an East coast distribution center about 5 months ago. I live in PA and all my dvd's come from baltimore.
Last time I checked, the chances of you dying from Klez were nil.
I send you this anthrax you have your advice.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yes you can. Think about it.
People's reaction to electronic mail is astounding. The combined effect of government repression of cryptography and statements of "no expectation of privacy" can not be underestimated. How is it that people who expect to go to jail for intercepting the post also expect people to intercept and read their email?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
the inability to play them on a real TV
I had a video card with TV-out several years ago, and in fact most cards seem to come with it standard now.
And if you don't like DivX's artifacts (what few there are now, on a properly encoded movie playing in any decent system), you can always try SVCD. A full movie often fits on 2 CDs, and damned if I can tell the difference from DVD. Added bonus, my DVD player plays em, so I guess that's what you meant by a 'real TV'.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
They used to brag about delivering Christmas packages, I wonder if they will be as diligent about Christmas packets ;-)
No, no, no. Firstly, even many of the original mpeg2 dvd has many quite disgusting artifacts BEFORE they are encoded with mpeg4. After the divxification they become even worse - and though you might not be able to tell the difference - many can.
Lossy Compression -> Lossy Compression = Even Lossier Compression.
Blah.
Arent periodicals/magazines "streaming" information to you? A chunk of bytes arrives today .. the next chunk a week later ... high latency, but still streaming. :)
Yeah, it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a truckload of CD's or DVD's doing 70mph down the interstate... ...but the latency...
:-)
Yeah, Quake III would be a very interesting game under those circumstances.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Right, and 128Kbit MP3s are CD quality.</sarcasm>
If you are already going to use two cds, rip it to SVCD. The artifacts are far less noticeable, and you can play it on a standalone DVD player. I know you can't do 5.1, but most DVDs don't have 5.1 audio anyway.
You can only stream if you can cache enough of the content first before starting the movie. DVD's have a huge throughput that your average 512kbs connection would not handle. Just try and download a linux iso and repeat 10 times. Thats how long its gonna take to get your movie down.
/b
Oh and if you live in Australia then they are gonna charge you for going over your bandwidth limit. So you have 3 choices. Netflix and 3 day lag, Download and possible data charges, or forsake quality and and download divx versions of the movies.
[Please type your sig here.]
Yeah, but the PVR lets you forward through the slow stuff... ;)
Today, I discovered a new (to me) form of troll: the Last Post troll. As most of us should already know, Slashdot locks all discussions that are more than 14 days old. A Last Poster takes advantage of this: (s)he comes into a discussion that's about to end and writes either some inane top-level comment ("LA5T POST!!!1!1") or a flamebait/troll reply to an existing comment.
Not that I'm necessarily implying that the parent comment was such a troll.
Anyway:
Last post suckaz!
Will I retire or break 10K?