Video Usage Creates Traffic Jam Worries

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has an article talking about worries over the increase in video downloads in the last year. Free video hosting and the popularity of iTunes is blamed for this phenomenon." From the article: "This is far from an academic issue. Whether the new companies can deliver on their promises could have a profound effect on how the Internet operates--and it could hit consumers in the pocketbook. Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common. Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams."

Comments

I have a solutions

[stupidfoo]

Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common.

I call my solution POTS and I have submitted a patent to cover it.

Re:I have a solutions

[Anonymous Coward]

just one solutions?

Re:I have a solutions

[PrescriptionWarning]

maybe we should all just use aluminum cans connected by strings instead of VoIP

Re:I have a solutions

[MentalMooMan]

That would be damn cool. File a patent now, before someone else does!

We've been here before.

[Rob T Firefly]

Remember when dialup and fax transmissions completely destroyed the telephone network?

Re:We've been here before.

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally! And my ear drums! Misdialed fax calls were horrible!! EEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RAAAAAAAAGH SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH!!!!!!!! the horror.... and Slashdot filtered my post as lame because of too many caps making it like yelling... that's the point! Modem noise!

Re:We've been here before.

[RyoShin]

Why do you think everyone has cell phones these days?

Re:We've been here before.

[wetelectric]

Its pr0n downloads that will kill the internet

Re:We've been here before.

[tpgp]

Yep, and right in the article summary there's a clue that it's complete horsecrap.

....Free video hosting and the popularity of iTunes is blamed for this phenomenon.....

Do they really expect us to believe that video's from free video hosting accounts for more video traffic then bittorrent?

And itunes for Gods sake! What the hell? Do vod-casts (or whatever the sheep call them) really account for a significant amount of traffic? I doubt it.

Re:We've been here before.

[pvt_medic]

i am skeptical, especially since they cap so many people's speed. I have friends with the verizon fios service. They have a fiber optic line comning into their house, and they only are slightly faster than broadband. They are not using their networks to capacity by a long shot. So you expect me to beleive that the rest of thier network is taxed out? Give me a break its the telecoms trying to get more tax breaks.

Re:We've been here before.

[IAmTheDave]

Free video hosting and the popularity of iTunes is blamed for this phenomenon

"Blamed" as if this is a bad thing. This is a natural occurance in the "everything gets fatter" pipe of today's computing power and bandwidth. Processors are faster, RAM is cheaper, megabit is giving way to gigabit, broadband is becoming more ubiquitos. Speed/storage is cheaper, and will continue to get cheaper.

Let us not all forget the AMAZING release of v.92 56kbps modems. Whoa! 56k is almost double 36.6!

Psha, I say. My cable modem bandwidth has more than tripled in the past two years and I expect it to continue. Servers that can't keep up are just beat. It's the speed/size of progress my friends!

Besides, what is wrong with everything flowing over IP? A single, open system for information flow. Seems relatively natural to me.

Re:We've been here before.

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

I remember when my Computer Science teacher told me that spam and forwarded mails both took up excess disk space and slowed down the Internet.

I remember when AOL joined the Internet and everyone hated them because they had doubled the population and supposedly halved the overall intelligence.

I remember when.... damn am I old. I had a birthday this week and I'm almost thirty. Man, I need a freaking nap already.

Anyways, uh, These People Need To Get Stuffed. Internet2 is on its way and it is faster and hardier, so they can just pipe down for a bit and worry about the apocalypse later. It's all just a marketroid ploy to make your Internet more expensive than it already is - if big business whines, bloggers, governments and idiots listen but techies should stand up and say, "You know, that's drivel, and if you want to play this game you should play inside most of the lines like the rest of us always have instead of telling us that you like Calvin Ball better."

Re:We've been here before.

[drinkypoo]

i am skeptical, especially since they cap so many people's speed. I have friends with the verizon fios service. They have a fiber optic line comning into their house, and they only are slightly faster than broadband. They are not using their networks to capacity by a long shot. So you expect me to beleive that the rest of thier network is taxed out?

This is a specious argument. This is possibly because you don't know how the system works, so I'm willing to give you both the benefit of the doubt and a [very] short explanation. The fiber going to the door is not a contiguous piece with the fiber leaving the POP. In addition, fiber is typically shared between multiple subscribers. They only have so much bandwidth available to the POP, and it costs them money to get more. Plus, they have to throttle people to avoid segment oversaturation. The system can handle whatever speed, sure, but they only give you a piece of it, so that other people can have a piece, too. (It would be nice to see a more intelligent system that would let you have more bandwidth when no one else is using it, though.)

Re:We've been here before.

[Agelmar]

Internet2 is already here, and it's not making the net faster and hardier for people who want to download podcasts, pr0n, and spam. From the project: "Led by more than 200 U.S. universities, working with industry and government, Internet2 develops and deploys advanced network applications and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet."

Internet2 is not something that Comcast is going to offer you access to in a few years. It's a collaborative network accessable only by a few universities and a few other select partners, and is not going to replace the current Internet. Rather, a few select technologies that actually work might get pushed down, but don't expect to see anything groundbreaking. I've had access to Internet2 for quite a few years now, and to be honest it's really... anticlimactic.

Re:We've been here before.

[jaseuk]

Well actually it's more likely to be congestion at the ISP or poorly performing web servers than the local fiber. Many web servers are on 10Mbit or lower throttled connections or are incapable of sustaining good file transfer speeds.

I'm on a good quality 100Mbit internet connection and I rarely see download speeds over 2 Megabytes a second. A typical download is usually 200-400Kbytes/sec

Jason.

Re:We've been here before.

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Most of this is completely true, but it still misses the point slightly - I don't expect anything to really happen short-term with internet2 except for the technology that it involves slowly getting more mainstream until streaming video is again as mild traffic-wise as junk e-mailings.

It's early, so perhaps I didn't quite express myself effectively.... To be honest, I would expect that in the end either I2 gets its funding cut / goes bankrupt, or becomes another backbone- like system much like the original ARPA=net... Eventually, someone's going to try to implement cross-traffic if network traffic reaches the point of saturation the telcos are whining about.

Re:We've been here before.

[akgw]

No, it's all the Windows Service Packs that are cluttering the corridors of the internet.

Re:We've been here before.

[k2r]

> vod-casts (or whatever the sheep call them)

Why do you call users of video podcast "sheep"?
I'm into the networking-yaddayadda since 19 years and I have seen a few good things come and quite a few good things go, but being able to download e.g. daily news effortlessly and to watching them on the train is something I hope will stay and expect to change TV and radio broadcast as we know it.

Meeeh,
k2r

Re:We've been here before.

[AK Marc]

This is possibly because you don't know how the system works, so I'm willing to give you both the benefit of the doubt and a [very] short explanation. The fiber going to the door is not a contiguous piece with the fiber leaving the POP. In addition, fiber is typically shared between multiple subscribers. They only have so much bandwidth available to the POP, and it costs them money to get more.

All the FTTH that I've messed with (working for a telephone company, not a "telecom" that just resells other's stuff, but a real company that trenches their own stuff, owns it all, and provides dial-tone, among lots of other services) uses OC based gear to the pad, then can distribute from there to the home. The cost for an OC-3 and an OC-192 are pretty much the same. With a 10-1 oversubscription (way too much for dial-up over subscription rates, but just fine now for high-speed broadband of 1 Mbps or higher) on an OC-192 would be capable of handling 10,000 people or so at 10 Mbps. And if they were stupid and put in OC-3 to the neighborhood distribution, then (unless they were momumentally stupid and put in something that couldn't be upgraded) it is cheap to swap in OC-192 gear.

Almost all the speed issues in a network are in there by design, or are related to their link to the Internet. I'm guessing that they are grossly over-subscribed on their Internet bandwidth. FTTH would then only be useful for local distribution, such as video over the phone lines/fiber.

Re:We've been here before.

[sheol]

My cable modem bandwidth has more than tripled in the past two years and I expect it to continue.

That's funny, because my Comcast cable internet service currently is still slower than the service I had through its ancestor @Home 7 or 8 years ago. And I pay extra for the faster package. Go figure.

If this isn't an indicator of the sorry state broadband here in the U.S., I'm not sure what is.

Re:We've been here before.

[mahdi13]

I see the same thing, I have the FIOS service and I do not see Verizon actively throttling the bandwidth at all, it's the target sites in general doing the throttling.

I was actually impressed to see that a download flash game at nick.com hit over 6Mb/s incomming. You can have the biggest download pipe in the world, but it won't change how sites send the packets to you. There are more limitations then just your internet connection

Re:We've been here before.

[Firehed]

Do they really expect us to believe that video's from free video hosting accounts for more video traffic then bittorrent?

I'd certainly hope not, seeing that it's estimated that Bit-torrent accounts for about two thirds of all traffic on the internet.

We're in the 21st century FFS! Let's light up some of that dark fiber or whatever, not come up with bullshit excuses for raising prices and lowering QoS. If myself as a high school student can afford to have a gigabit network setup within the house, I don't think it should be that hard for the people that running the internet to up the bandwidth a shade.

Re:We've been here before.

[Andrew Kismet]

I think he means the bloggers who make up stupid names, ie blog, blogosphere, podcast, vidcast, maddox, vlog, etc.

Re:We've been here before.

[mahdi13]

If this isn't an indicator of the sorry state broadband here in the U.S., I'm not sure what is.

I think it's an indicator of the sorry state of Comcast cable internet service. It still baffles me why people continue to spend an outrageous amount of money for a mediocre quality ISP.

I stopped using cable right after Comcast became a monopoly and have not regretted it since. Then after hearing about their frequent network outages and high prices I continue to wonder why people use them.

Re:We've been here before.

[keraneuology]

It still baffles me why people continue to spend an outrageous amount of money for a mediocre quality ISP.

Because Comcast is the ONLY option for broadband other than satellite. They have a monopoly and they know it. When the county started to roll out wireless my city was one of only two or three that refused to even ask to be considered for phase I - if I understand the (somewhat secretive) agreement Comcast gets an exclusive franchise in exchange for cash payments to the city.

DSL isn't available (and even if it were I'd have to buy a phone line to go along with it which would make it even more expensive than Comcast). No wireless. No competing cable. No fiber for miles.

Thanks, congress. Thanks, FCC. Thanks, presidents Clinton and Bush. Way to encourage competition and a free and open market.

Re:We've been here before.

[tylernt]

"DSL isn't available (and even if it were I'd have to buy a phone line to go along with it which would make it even more expensive"

Not anymore. I have naked DSL from Qwest, just DSL, no dialtone. It's even cheaper than my local sucky cable provider by $7.

Re:We've been here before.

[keraneuology]

Last I checked (several months ago) Ameritech did not allow such things.

Re:We've been here before.

[joabj]

Both those examples *are* absurd, even as portenders. This story has feels lkike it has been planted by the telecom companies to help in their lobbying efforts for multi-tiered service.....

joab

Re:We've been here before.

[Anonymous Coward]

And "Video killed the Radio Star"

Re:We've been here before.

[Hatta]

Why do you think everyone has cell phones these days?

Because their souls are so empty they can't stand to be alone...

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.
-Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle" (1863)

As the post office then, cell phones are now.

Re:We've been here before.

[shotfeel]

We've been here before alright.

Anybody remember when the WWW was going to bring the internet to its knees? All those gifs and formatted text replacing poor old Gopher...

We get this every time there's a new use found for the internet.

Re:We've been here before.

[kandresen]

Exactly, we have been there before, and it will resolve itself naturally without the need for prioritizing traffic.
It simply boils down to providors offering clients a service they can't handle.

If they really can't handle that we download for lets say 2Mbps continously, why do they offer it without limitations? We will soon simply see caps on the service, where some hace 2Mbps but limited to 10GB of data each month, after that point speed will be go down to lets say 128Kpbs, unless the client upgrade to include more bandwitdh... Other providors will offer automatic upgrades in Gb increments, charging for the actual download.

Re:We've been here before.

[sheol]

I think it's an indicator of the sorry state of Comcast cable internet service.

Unfortunately, Comcast is far and away the best value consumer grade internet service 'round these parts. DSL is relatively unreliable (imagine that), and slower for the same price. Satelite has far too much latency and very limited bandwidth. Then there's a local microwave wireless service, but that requires a significant investment in equipment, and is still far less bandwidth for the money. The only other options are a business class connection such as a T1, which is far outside the price range for a household internet line.

The biggest problem I ever had with connectivity and reliability on Comcast is that the power connector of the cable modem they provided me originally eventually became loose, and would power off the modem if you jostled it. They replaced it without comment once I actually took the time to complain. You just don't really hear from the 95% of people who are totally satisfied with their Comcast service, because they don't feel the need to complain on Slashdot about their mediocre service for a mediocre price.

No, I think the sad state is broadband in the U.S. in general, certainly not just Comcast. Other countries that are much smaller geographically can pull off high speed internet to the vast majority of their population for much cheaper with significantly less required infrastructure. It makes the U.S. look bad. Aren't we supposed to be number one? :P

Re:We've been here before.

[k2r]

While a lot of these names just are idiotic, finding an appropriate name for a new product or technique is essential for adoption.
Do you still say "Tele-Vision" or do you say "TV"?
Do you say "html-interpreter&-renderer" oder "web-browser"?
The word "podcast" is here to stay, because nobody except us nerds memorizes "RSS-Feed with audio enclosures played on a generic audio playback device".
The invention of a catching phrase / word for a phenomenon is an invention, too.
Get used to it, Even to "AJAX" :-)

k2r

Re:We've been here before.

[Anonymous Coward]

waaaaaaiittt a second. for those of you who think there is piles of bandwidth out there and were only getting a tiny margin of it, it depends where your going. i used to work for a large data carrier that will remain nameless and they occassionally (about once a month) hit peak traffic at key gateways, i have seen major connections sitting at 99% usage from the switches. if your staying in your own end of the network you probably do have traffic to spare, but not when your traffic is going across the country, between carriers or cross-border. and for the record the nameless company had a policy of never telling it's customers that the link was just plain too saturated.

Re:We've been here before.

[GeorgeH]

it's estimated that Bit-torrent accounts for about two thirds of all traffic on the internet.

... by people who want to sell you devices to reduce BitTorrent's network usage. Good thing they don't have a financial incentive for inflating those numbers, or someone might suspect they're full of shit.

Also, they claim 35%, not 66%.

Re:We've been here before.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but his self has gigabit in his house! If he can set up a network that cost but a fraction of the price of the computers mom & dad bought him, the internet should be the same.

Re:We've been here before.

[tsm_sf]

"Blamed" as if this is a bad thing. This is a natural occurance in the "everything gets fatter" pipe of today's computing power and bandwidth.

And don't forget most ISPs recent marketing efforts. "Watch blazing video over your internet connection!" Ok, now I'm doing that.

Re:We've been here before.

[Burz]

Not to mention that these 'free' services actually PAY for their bandwidth.

Hello???

Perhaps the article should be re-headlined: "ISPs And Backbones Not Keeping-Up With Demand?"

The author is probably dense, or a suck-up.

Re:We've been here before.

[SacredNaCl]

Both those examples *are* absurd, even as portenders. This story has feels lkike it has been planted by the telecom companies to help in their lobbying efforts for multi-tiered service.....

This is exactly what it is, a PR-Hit.

As is about 40% of the news you read in the paper or watch on TV. One of the things I really love about Google News is that it allows me to check up on PR hits very easily. If I simply take a couple phrases from a PR hit and punch them into the search, I usually turn up 200 copies of the same story (maybe with slightly different wording in parts, but on the whole they are lazy and just print the copy given to them). Of course, PR firms also astroturf the wire services ... Video News Releases (VNR's) and Audio News Releases (ANR's) for TV and Radio can't quite be tracked in the same way, and they give different versions to different segments - larger companies get a raw footage collection with notes so they can edit in their own people to read the copy - smaller markets get a shiny complete package with all of the work done for them - so they don't have any production and editing costs to use it.

I had business dealings with a very large PR firm in St Louis, Missouri. It was not unusual for 3000 ANR's to go out every day from there, 400-500VNR's, and if they were lucky they could get their stuff printed in 200-400 papers or magazines. (Most of them on the behalf of a pair of large chemical companies one of which dabbled in GMO foods, the other major client a large beer company.) I didn't track their online efforts at the time, but they were working on that as well. In their trade magazines they would openly celebrate their hits and media manipulations. If the client had the money to spend, they could not only create the story, get it aired on many outlets, astroturf the comments, phone-in's to talk radio stations, and letters to the editor. They also did work for creating astroturf political lobbying.

I prefer to call them the Paid Professional Liars Industry rather than PR. The average person truly has no comprehension of how much of the media they read is nothing more than PR-hits. The interenet is now fairly well saturated as well with them. You'll see a lot more of this story, worded differently, but it will be the same story. As long as the telco's (and maybe a few media companies with specific interest in this as well) are paying the bill to SPAM the net with it. Soon you will also see the astroturf lobbying sites go up as well. Not that they don't have a huge army of lobbyist already. This is a pretty basic formula: Create a problem, cause a reaction, offer a solution. They simply want to be all 3 steps in the problem, reaction, solution scenario - and all of them manufactured.

Re:We've been here before.

[ArtStone]

,,, and how HTML formatted messages posted to Usenet by people using Netscape products was going to destroy Usenet if it wasn't stopped- because of their waste of bandwidth.

Hmmm...

Ban the WWW - bring back Gopher!

Re:We've been here before.

[jZnat]

Gopher still exists, and Firefox has full support for it.

Re:We've been here before.

[Grab]

"Almost thirty?" Man...

I remember when the only "connections" were BBSes. Getting to uni and seeing Telnet and FTP to servers around the world was a revelation. I remember text MUDs over Telnet. I remember NCSA Mosaic, and all versions of IE and Netscape. I remember downloading music files off FTP servers, and being annoyed when the Harry Fox agency stopped that. I remember when, if we were going to do anything over the internet, we had to do between 12am and 12pm (UK time), bcos everything dropped out during US working hours. I remember under 10 bytes/second transfers when the US was awake. I remember digits-only Compuserve email addresses.

Grab.

Re:We've been here before.

[jo42]

Because everyone is a feckin' moron.

Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[gasmonso]

This sounds little more than the usual doomsday stuff. In the US there is plenty of unused fiber that covers the entire country. Even companies like Google are interested in tapping this resource. This isn't so much a problem as it is an opportunity for a company to fullfill the demand.

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[Anonymous Coward]

Put your lame ass site in your f'en sig where it belongs.

Mod this ass down.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[mordors9]

Give up downloading pr0n videos so fatcats can talk over VOIP? Only when they pry my cold dead fingers off my..... well you know.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[Uber Banker]

n the US there is plenty of unused fiber that covers the entire country.

Exactly.

TFS (Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls,) reminds me that you get what you pay for. A business, whose existence or business at least partially rested on the internet would pay for a reliable connection and make sure their customers got a reliable service. That then gets tiered down into the low cost/free offerings. This happens at present and will do more so in the future.

Market solutions, etc, but not in a hazy-dream simplistic Utopia that a free market will make everything cheap and easy to access (that only those with the most basic understanding of economics/business/analysis understand) but in a nitty-gritty auction of service quality, far more based in any realistic assessment of 'free markets' (limited present resources, time lag effects of implementation, ability to differentiate customers, oligopoly/auction on 'dark fibre' (only few firms can make it work for a profit - those with a national stretch with reasonable bandwidth needs and/or localised bandwidth bottlenecks)).

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[mcbiondi]

Agreed.

Moderators, please mod parent up.

After all the tech bubble boom money that was sunk into pulling unused fiber it's a wonder anyone would think / worry about overutilization.

To the editors of slashdot - please post newsworthy items!!! Doomsday news stories only contribute to lowering the quality of intelligent posts on this rag.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[Skim123]

Teh end is neigh!!!11!!

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[AlterTick]

Teh end is neigh!!!11!!

You can shout that till your throat is horse, no one will listen.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[max born]

And besides that, ISPs tend over estimate the amount they spend on infrastructure so they can justify higher prices. Verizon, for example, predicts$91.7 billion USD revenue for 2006 and laying fiber and installing switches is probably the least costly of all there operations. I bet they spend more on advertising than anything else. I wouldn't be surprised if this doomsday senario is a plot by the MBAs to prep consumers for price hikes even though they already have the profits to fix the problem.

Doc Searls had an interesting article about this a while back.

Let's hope I'm completely wrong and the ISPs intentions are good and noble.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[theparag0n]

Mouse?

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[Anonymous Coward]

Mini mouse?

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[Senzei]

Give up downloading pr0n videos so fatcats can talk over VOIP? Only when they pry my cold dead fingers off my..... well you know.

You sicko, why are using cold dead fingers to...oh wait...I get it now...nevermind.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[cerberusss]

Give up downloading pr0n videos so fatcats can talk over VOIP?

Wait till you have kids. Let's say, two sons and one daughter. And you still have the same pipe you now have. And you want to VoIP with a colleague because you're working home today. And let's, for the sake of argument, say that they are in puberty.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[xaque]

His colleagues are in puberty? Wow, the future must have pretty good public schools!

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[xaque]

Come on, let's rein in this nonsense.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[Wesley Felter]

No, the dark fiber does not cover the last mile which is where the problem is.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[shotfeel]

I've heard that Google has purchased quite a bit of fiber. Makes me wonder what will happen if the "tiered network" is pushed through if Google might tell a few companies to take a hike and light up their own section of the net.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[donnyspi]

Tell 'em to get off the computer so you can work...

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[cerberusss]

Well, I don't know about you, but I can't imagine my kids won't have their own computer just like they'll have their own stereo etc...

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people have a linux box running in thier basement acting as a router, just throttle thier porn to 1kb/s.

Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource

[cerberusss]

Five hours of fiddling with IP tables can save a 5 minute lecture to your kids :D

neccessity is the mother of invention

[SparkEE]

This is simply the way technology works. From the begginning the web has been needing speed upgrades because of its content. And once the speed catches up to support the newest content, the content evolves and requires greater speed. Why worry about this natural process of innovation. If content is limited out of bandwidth concerns, then bandwidth won't improve.

Re:neccessity is the mother of invention

[GotenXiao]

Problem is that they only upgrade it partway. Give us all fucking gig lines and they'll last for more than 2 years.

Tiered Internet ....

[GoodOmens]

This just adds ammo to ISP's push for tiered internet. Scarry ....

Re:Tiered Internet ....

[Anonymous Coward]

stfu. how about that?

Re:Tiered Internet ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up insightful.

They aren't worried about traffic "jams"

[garcia]

ISPs are not concerned with traffic "jams". They are concerned with their overselling of bandwidth and people beginning to actually use broadband the way it was intended to be used -- not to replace dialup for speedier POP e-mail and a couple of websites.

Re:They aren't worried about traffic "jams"

[Paul Slocum]

It's not just on that end either. With videoblogs and such, those webhosts that offer up to 500GB+ of transfer and massive storage for really cheap are starting to have problems as people actually begin using more than a small percentage of what they offer.

Re:They aren't worried about traffic "jams"

[Winterblink]

Customers using the service as it was advertised to them? Yeah, I could see how that would get folks shaking in their boots. So for years we've been paying for a "rich broadband experience", and now that we actually can get it, they go "oh frack, our nice comfy profit margins!!"?

Re:They aren't worried about traffic "jams"

[TubeSteak]

And one of the solutions is more extensive use of Peer to Peer.

Ummm... What?

So, not only is everyone going to continue downloading large media files, but they're also going to have their upstream bandwidth constantly pumping out packets.

Like that's going to end well.

I have about 6Mbps down and 384 Kbps up. To get anything faster (in my area) than a 384Kb upload, you have to buy a business level connection.

I thought bandwidth was bandwidth. Why is it so much more expensive to get a faster upload?

Re:They aren't worried about traffic "jams"

[LionMage]

I have about 6Mbps down and 384 Kbps up. To get anything faster (in my area) than a 384Kb upload, you have to buy a business level connection.

I thought bandwidth was bandwidth. Why is it so much more expensive to get a faster upload?

Well, because broadband-over-cable is a kludge. The cable design philosophy centers around distributing a signal from one point of origin to multiple endpoints; it's designed for one-way multicast.

Kludging the cable systems to allow for bidirectional data transfer was problematic at best, and the artifact of this difficulty is that upstream bandwidth for most users is going to be a small fraction of downstream bandwidth. (To use a bad analogy, you're trying to transmit data "against the flow," so it's more difficult... like paddling upstream in a canoe versus paddling downstream.)

Having said that... most cable broadband ISPs artificially limit upstream bandwidth, partly to offer tiered services for business customers (higher bitrates and a higher Quality of Service), and partly to minimize the impact of certain users on local network segments. Cable broadband has this really rotten feature of forcing people on local segments to share bandwidth, so capping upstream bandwidth can be seen as a way to preserve an already precious commodity.

If you want a true symmetric pipe to the 'net, T1/T3 or some DSL variant is your best bet.

Cache server

[MacGod]

One of the ways thsi could potentially be alleviated is through the intelligent use of a cache/proxy server. I know of one small ISP back in the day (admittedly long before downloadable video was at all common) that elected to invest in just such a server, rather than significantly upgrading their bandwidth. They analysed their traffic and found that there were large swaths of data that were requested by many people (for example today that might be the most popular 20 Google videos, or the images on the Slashdot front page or whatever). By caching these locally, they were able to dramatically cut down on their bandwidth usage to their data provider. The ISP-to-user bandwidth was much cheaper, so this was a great way for them to increase their effective bandwidth without having to pay for massive data pipe upgrades.

Re:Cache server

[Pedrito]

This is really what squid and other proxy caches do for http traffic. eMule has tried to capitalize on that by actually allowing data to be cached by an ISP's http proxy cache and to let users of the ISP get the data from the cache instead of directly from a user on the otherside of the world. Maybe what we need is some more generalized cache systems that ISPs can run and applications can take advantage of.

But this idea only works when people are getting the same data, obviously. It won't work for voice over IP, for example.

Re:Cache server

[TeamSPAM]

I agree that proxy use is smart on the part of the ISP to manage their bandwidth usage. Unfortunately, I don't think a proxy server will solve for the bandwidth issue this time. The entertainment companies want their content protected (ala DRM) meaning that each video will be a unique file and serves no purpose being cached on a proxy server. These requirements are at odds with easing network traffic by using cache servers.

Re:Cache server

[MaceyHW]

TFA mentions a new technology which sounds like it "forces" ISP's to do this by breaking video content into small files that are formatted just like ordinary Web pages. When they're downloaded by a user, these individual pieces--Itiva calls them "quanta"--are stored in ISPs' Web caches, which are already distributed in every network.

That's certainly a clever idea, however existing P2P is already a pretty good solution. This part of the article makes no sense:

The problem with P2P is that it relies on ordinary computer users' goodwill. To work well, everyone must donate a share of his or her upstream bandwidth, sharing content with others. In the underground world of music or movie-trading, this regularly happens, but it has been less widely used for commercial applications.

Bittorrent punish leachers automatically. But more to the point, less tech-savvy users are going to be less likely to care about (or even notice) clogging their upload bandwidth, especially if everything is wrapped in to a media player app. If the next iTunes upgrade had P2P distribution, would most users even notice, much less be upset?

Re:Cache server

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a company in the UK called Cachelogic who already do a purpose built cache (and switch) specifically for P2P traffic
it can do BT traffic as well as the Gnutella/Limewire/EMule stuff
I know of a few ISP's that have sucessfully deployed the boxes and they have SIGNIFICANTLY reduced off-net traffic
and the downloaders are getting better downloads...

Re:Cache server

[Lumpy]

As an old-tyme ISP owner I also did this.

I had 56K p2p data links for some smaller towns with about 4 28.8 modems on each of them. to makes things faster for the customers I used gzip compression and ran a proxy at that end as well.

it worked great until I sold the whole lot in the mid 90's to SBC whejn 56K dial up was becoming the norm and made it impossible for a mom-pop ISP to do business without spending a crapload of money.

Re:Cache server

[timeOday]

The entertainment companies want their content protected (ala DRM) meaning that each video will be a unique file

No, each video file doesn't need to be unique. Do you think satellite TV broadcasts are individually encrypted for each receiving dish?

Re:Cache server

[shotfeel]

Maybe what we need is some more generalized cache systems that ISPs can run and applications can take advantage of.

I'm wondering if instead, more specific cache systems should be put in place. For example, is NBC has a show they want to offer for download or streaming, there's no reason every local NBS affiliate couldn't be mirroring the show.

Re:Cache server

[shotfeel]

Or maybe even every NBC affiliate.

Has anyone reported the bug that causes spelling errors in posts after you hit the "Submit" button? It even happens sometimes when you hit the "Preview" button first.

Re:Cache server

[chrono325]

Actually, depending on the DRM scheme, that may not be true. My old boarding school had a cache box which sat between the mean old web and your dorm computers. They also throttled all streams down to 40kb/s (arg!). The techy kids among us would use proz (Prozilla) to download multiple streams at once. Anyway, if you downloaded a file from the internet, it would go at 40kb/s, but if it was from the cache, it would go at around 800. Sometimes, when I purchased the iTunes free song of the week, I would get those higher speeds. I wondered about it for a while and then when Pymusique came out, it confirmed my suspicions: Apple sends unDRM'd files to your computer which are then encrypted by iTunes. All Pymusique has to do is simulate the remote calls (which I think are XML-RPC) to the iTMS and then not encrypt the file when it arrives. Apple might have changed the behavior since then, but it would not surprise me if other music/video services operated in the same way.

Re:Cache server

[TeamSPAM]

I made my comments based on the assumption that internet video will be different than satellite TV. In the satellite TV model, all subscribers pretty much agrees to use standardized/approved hardware that is allowed to decode the signal. On the internet side as I mentioned, expect that the content providers will be encrypt the video to your individual key, thus making it unique and useless to a proxy cache. A model could be setup so that the video is encrypted via a public key system. This then requires 2 calls to the service. 1 to get the video and a 2nd to get the key. The video in this model is very cache friendly. I expect that if a key is in a seperate call to the server, then it is easy to isolate the key to make available to others on the internet. Content providers don't want that, they only want you the payee to view the video. If possible they want to know how many times you watched the video and even more joyous to them would be to only let you watch it once or for a 24hr period. Given how I'm seeing the big content providers play ball, I don't expect them to make cache friendly content for downloading.

I have to wonder

[Recovering Hater]

Is this just another "The Internet Sky is going to FALL!" episode? Any excuse to charge another buck for bandwidth on the presumption that things are gonna get really bad if they don't.

Yep

[TheRealMindChild]

Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common

And this is exactally why I do not subscribe to the VOIP bandwagon yet. ComCast's service is so hit-or-miss sometimes, I can't trust a phone service on it. Hell, I can't even trust an uninterrupted game of Q2 deathmatch. Mind you, this isn't exclusive to ComCast. It's a trend propogating through all broadband ISPs as they meet a level they can't serve.

Re:Yep

[fatboy]

Boycott Google - Everything you've ever searched for is permanently associated with your IP address. Fun!

So is everything you have ever read on /. and any other website you have visited. With that logic, the logical conclusion is to boycott this whole Internet thing.

Re:Yep

[arminw]

.....And this is exactally why I do not subscribe to the VOIP bandwagon yet......

Was the original Internet design not meant for transferring computer files from one system to another? In that application it doesn't really matter if a few packets arrive late, out of order or not al all. The computers sort all that out between themselves until the data has been correctly transferred and recorded. In real time data, such as audio for phones this packet loss or mixup cannot be tolerated. Does this mean that the fundamental design of the Internet has to be changed to truly accommodate real time transmission of phone conversations? For streaming audio or video, the computer can arrange the data into a sufficiently large buffer to make up for packet loss and mixups. It seems that the present Internet is inherently ill suited for time critical data transmissions.

Anybody else read this...

[grasshoppa]

Did anybody else read this and immediately check to see if zdnet is owned by AT&T?

Maybe I'm paraniod, but it's a perfectly healthy attitude to have in this country.

Re:Anybody else read this...

[lopingrhondo]

Absolutely. This reads like a press release from the AT&T Verizon duopoly. More FUD that's going to circulate in the news in the coming months in order to convince people that tiered internet laws are necessary.

Re:Anybody else read this...

[Achoi77]

My brother was in Korea for the past 2 years, and the first thing he said when he came back to the US was "What is the connection so freakin slow??" We are on broadband, I was used to downloading big files at average download 'high' speeds of around 30-40kbps. Sometimes I would see it go up as much as 200kbps with BT, but never anything beyond that. To my brother, he considered 200kbps slow!

I'm gonna go out on a limb and have to agree with Dvorak: this needs to be government mandated if we are to see faster adaption of all this technology. I'm sick and tired of it all this being held back simply because of some greedy execs are trying to leech every last dollar out of us, without having to shell out any money to upgrade their systems. Why aren't those monopoly rules applying here??

Re:Anybody else read this...

[stupidfoo]

Here's a lesson in population density. This can be applied for cell phone coverage as well.

South Korea:
Population of 48,422,644 (CIA Factbook)
Area: 98,190 sq km (land - CIA Factbook)
This equates to 493 people/sq km

US:
Population: 295,734,134 (CIA Factbook)
Area: 9,161,923 sq km (land - CIA Factbook)
This equates to 32 people/sq km

Now that doesn't explain why a state like California or New York doesn't have better broadband service, right?

California:
Population: 33,871,648 (Google)
Area: 403,968 sq km (http://www.50states.com/californ.htm)
This equates to 83 people/sq km

New York:
Population: 18,976,457 (Google)
Area: 122,309 sq km (http://www.50states.com/californ.htm)
This equates to 155 people/sq km

(note: the above area totals are for land only. water is not included)

Re:Anybody else read this...

[pafrusurewa]

That's mentioned everytime, but it's not the problem.

Los Angeles County:
Population: 10,179,716
Area: 10,517 sq km
Population density: 967.9/sq km

LA County covers a huge area, something like one entire province in my country.

Now, let's see what it's like for a country that has great broadband, like Sweden:

Population: 9,047,752
Area: 449,964 sq km
Population Density: 20/sq km

The truth is, these numbers don't mean that much. Poeple tend to live in cities, be it in Korea or in Sweden or in the US. Yet, for some reason, major US cities always seem to be lagging behind in broadband and cell phone coverage (compared to much of Europe and parts of Asia). Population density isn't to blame here.

Is submitter a lobbyist?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same "Telcos want to throttle internet traffic" article that has been going around, but this time spun to look like it's an urgent need instead of a money grab.

simple

[Anonymous Coward]

dont offer services that you cant deliver
if an ISP sells xMB connections for x$ and cant deliver then how is that the customers fault ?

Wow

[Moby Cock]

This is so profound. I am simply staggered with this depth of reasoning involved with this. Companies that depend on the availability of a resource will be affected if that resource is unavailable. Amazing!

In a related story, high tech companies are concerned that they may lose money in the event of a power outage.

Let the info blitz begin

[narrowhouse]

Expect a lot of stories that logically lead to a tiered Internet in the next few months. First there were stories about the telecom companies considering tiers. Now there will be stories about how the current internet structure is threatened by certain applications that require high bandwidth. Then the excuse will be that they HAD to go to tiered service because the infrastructure just couldn't handle the strain without causing riots, plaugues and famine.

Re:Let the info blitz begin

[Ludedude]

I'm reserving judgement until the "Bandwidth shortage crisis threatens homeland security" headline airs on Fox "News".

Re:Let the info blitz begin

[eMbry00s]

The future has been predicted by parent. It'd be a sad day if the majority is closed out of the high-bandwidth internet usage-areas. They do, after all, provide a huge amount of the content. Big Champaigne estimated that 60% of the european internet traffic was BitTorrent-stuff.

Re:Let the info blitz begin

[Nikker]

The funny thing is a tiered internet will be able to block the very video/torrent downloads that will require its existence.

Re:Let the info blitz begin

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be the motivation behind this story, but there is a real danger to having too much traffic that is unresponsive to congestion (e.g. UDP video streams). A traffic meltdown happened at Berkeley in 1987 and motivated the development of the TCP protocol we see today.

A fairly understandable research paper which illustrates the effect.

Networks and roads

[bpbond]

Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams."

That's a really interesting analogy. It's taken us (the U.S.) fifty years to figure out that if you build more, and higher-capacity, roads, it alleviates congestion temporarily but ultimately results in...more traffic and more congestion. Does something similar apply to networks? Adding more bandwidth may be expensive, but unlike roads, (i) usage is easy to monitor and thus charge for, increasing companies' incentive to invest, and (ii) the many damaging externalities (i.e., costs like air pollution that traditionally aren't factored into the "price" of roads and cars) seem to be absent for computer networks.

Re:Networks and roads

[voice_of_all_reason]

That's a really interesting analogy. It's taken us (the U.S.) fifty years to figure out that if you build more, and higher-capacity, roads, it alleviates congestion temporarily but ultimately results in...more traffic and more congestion.

I'm genuine interested in that idea. It sounds plausible, like some of the reasons why one guy riding his breaks can cause a standstill three miles back, but maybe you can elaborate?

Re:Networks and roads

[deadlinegrunt]

"...more traffic and more congestion. Does something similar apply to networks?"

Sure - RFC 1925 Section 2.9 of Networking Truths.

Re:Networks and roads

[egarland]

It's taken us (the U.S.) fifty years to figure out that if you build more, and higher-capacity, roads, it alleviates congestion temporarily but ultimately results in...more traffic and more congestion.

This is nonsense. When is the last time your boss said you didn't need to go to work because traffic was going to be bad? People time-shift their travel to accomidate undersized highways, they don't eliminate it. The idea that increasing capacity to meet demand can't work is rediculous. I don't know how it crept into our society but it needs to be stamped out.. It's runing our roads and forcing everyone to drive on radically undersized dangerous highways.

Re:Networks and roads

[bennomatic]

It's true, traffic is like a gas; it expands to whatever space you give it.

The idea here is one of supply and demand: if the cost is too high, people will find a way to use resources more efficiently. When there is so much traffic that the morning commute is up to two hours, people will find ways to make it easier. Ride public transportation, share rides, telecommute, use small cars, ride bicycles, walk, etc.

But you build up the infrastructure to accommodate, two things can happen. First, better infrastructure may stimulate growth in demand for the infrastructure, and second, people get lazy. I grew up in Berkeley, where highway 80 which runs along the edge of town going towards San Francisco was two lanes in each direction when I was a kid. It's now up to five lanes in each direction, and traffic is backed up sometimes for 15-20 miles.

Now part of that is that San Francisco has gone through explosive growth, which might have been impossible without the bigger roads. But part of that is also that the road, instead of being filled with Honda CVCC hatchbacks and VW Bugs, as it was when I was a kid, is filled with Explorers, Hummers and such, each carrying one passenger--the driver.

One has to wonder if, were they to have not increased the road infrastructure, people might have stayed in smaller cars, carpooled more, and maybe, just maybe this Internet thing would have made it more likely for people to be able to bypass the commute altogether.

Re:Networks and roads

[Anonymous Coward]

To see this, you have to look at why the congestion is happening. Do you think that at the front of every traffic jam is some guy driving 5mph for the hell of it?

From my own experience around several cities, roughly 25% of all congestion comes from the fact that the exits are too narrow. When you build out your freeway to 10 lanes, and your exits are one lane each, you're going to have complete standstills when three lanes of cars try to cram their way into that exit. Once one lane stops, people will use the next lane over, drive up to the exit, then simply halt traffic while waiting for some kind soul to let them in. Once that lane has backed up, the next lane over repeats the same process, thanks to the number of kindergarten dropouts out there who failed to learn how to wait in line. This of course doesn't count the number of idiots who wouldn't recognize a street sign if it smacked them in the face, who slam on their brakes in the left lane 10 feet from the exit, and force their way through traffic to get off, sometimes blocking several lanes at a time. (I've seen some full sized extended cab pickups pulling this maneuver off while blocking three at a time, turned completely perpendicular to the freeway.)

Another 5% goes to exits that are wide enough but too close to a stoplight once you've gotten off. I drive past one of these every evening on my way home from work, and traffic backs up from the stoplight, onto the freeway, and up past the previous entrance preventing people from getting on the freeway.

Entrace ramps have their share of problems too. It's difficult to enter a freeway at full speed, moreso when you have to fight your way through stopped traffic (like in the case above) to pull onto the freeway at 0 MPH. The number of entrance ramps placed just before exit ramps is mindboggling. People getting on have to fight the people getting off, leading to slowdowns.

Another cause of congestion on freeways is the complete and utter lack of enforcement on the minimum speed limit (assuming there is one on the freeway where you are). Not just the guy out for aa very leisurely drive, but also overloaded dump trucks who couldn't go 45 unless they were falling off the side of a mountain and people with junkers that would probably burst into flame if they tried. Nearly all freeways have frontage/service roads with speed limits (that I've seen personally) ranging from 35-50, where these slowpokes could drive to their fullest potential without causing grief to those of us who drive vehicles that have not been likewise crippled. "Slow traffic keep right"... and the rightmost lanes are the ones on the frontage road. This can be helped with more lanes, but when these slowpokes drive in a center or even left lane, it causes a considerable amount of confusion and slowdowns (especially in the lanes around the car, as people who pull up behind the car tend to instinctively slow down before attempting to change lanes).

The rest are accidents, emergency vehicles, and just slowdowns for the hell of it, where you get to the other end and theres no sign of any reason to have been driving slow all this time. The only thing that will fix the first two would be to breed the desire to gawk at flashing lights and mangled cars out of the human race, while the latter needs more investigation into the actual cause.

Re:Networks and roads

[voice_of_all_reason]

Another 5% goes to exits that are wide enough but too close to a stoplight once you've gotten off. I drive past one of these every evening on my way home from work, and traffic backs up from the stoplight, onto the freeway, and up past the previous entrance preventing people from getting on the freeway.

Ah, I see you're also familiar with the Gowanus Expressway in lovely NYC.

Thanks for the reply. Plus infinity billion informative.

Re:Networks and roads

[dodobh]

Circuit switching would be the equivalent of private transport as it stands in the US today. Packet switching is more of a mass transit equivalent. Keep in mind that traffic engineering allows you to push the buying more bandwidth/lighting fibre from the 60% to the 70% mark (also known as a couple of quarters away, and then the whole amount you pend on TE is wasted).

The choke isn't at the backbone, it is near the edges, where the primary overselling occurs. DSL is oversold at high ratios, and when the DSLAM begins to choke, the only decent alternative is to push more bandwidth into that POP.

Re:Networks and roads

[mikael]

I'm genuine interested in that idea. It sounds plausible, like some of the reasons why one guy riding his breaks can cause a standstill three miles back, but maybe you can elaborate?


Because if you build a freeway, you have to add spurs (on/off ramps) to connect with existing roads. These then opens up large tracts of land for developers to build homes and businesses, as the freeway now allows a shorter commute time between commercial and residential areas. Home-owners need cars, and you end up with more traffic on the roads, which leads to more congestion, and eventually, you are back to where you started. And constructing a road, requires that some homes are demolished.

Taken to the extreme, you end up simply demolishing homes simply to build more roads so that people spend more time commuting.

The same principle applies to railway and metro lines. If you build a suburban metro line going out into the countryside, developers will build office blocks/condominiums/apartments above the stations, then shopping malls and fitness centres will follow.

Re:Networks and roads

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I live in Houston (home of the worst drivers and thus the highest insurance rates in the country) and regularly drive through Dallas to Oklahoma City, but I'm not surprised to hear that shitty freeway design isn't something limited to Way Down Here.

Re:Networks and roads

[dal20402]

People time-shift their travel to accommodate undersized highways, they don't eliminate it.

They still have to go to work, but if there is a particularly nasty bottleneck between work and home, they may move (or change jobs). Subsidizing people's ability to live ridiculous distances away from their work, as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested, leads to both excess air pollution and social problems exacerbated by 1) people spending time driving instead of with family/friends and 2) people not really belonging to a community because they're never there.

And, yes, the more roads we build, the farther out people choose to live. The roads fill up as fast as you build them.

Of course, with the internet, there aren't the same problems with encouraging people to download more GB of data. If we really wanted the sort of internet service that would keep us in the technological lead, we would stop giving whiny monopolists cushy protections and instead aggressively subsidize infrastructure improvements necessary for better service and more extensive competition.

Re:Networks and roads

[pomo monster]

The phenomenon's so predictable and the causation's so direct, it's become a central tenet of urban studies and planning over the past couple decades that adding free, unmetered roads ultimately results in more congestion, not less. I remember learning in college this general rule of thumb: 10% more roads results in 15% more traffic. It's pretty much as pure and reliable as economic theory ever gets.

Primarily, this happens because building new (non-toll) lanes and roads increases the attractiveness of driving in the short term, which tempts existing residents to buy cars instead of using public transit. Your city then develops sprawlingly, and in 10-15 years you're stuck with just as much traffic as you began with.

Automobiles are a funny beast in urban planning because their network effects are negative--i.e., the more traffic you have, they very quickly become terribly ineffective. This is exactly opposite the behavior of light rail, buses, and indeed most other concepts that make a city work and move.

A cursory Google search turns up this summary, which references some studies for further reading (if you can look past the source for a moment--nothing against the Sierra Club).

Re:Networks and roads

[bpbond]

That may be your opinion, but it's contradicted by plenty of studies and empirical evidence. But note this is NOT the same thing as "no new roads should be built," which seems to be what you're arguing against.

We don't/can't (with a few exceptions, like recently in central London) charge for road access, or for preferential access (again, with some exceptions like HOV lanes); as a result demand is not well matched to supply (in an economic sense). "Rationally," when faced with high demand we'd build bigger roads and raise the price of driving. But this second part doesn't happen.

B

Re:Networks and roads

[egarland]

They still have to go to work, but if there is a particularly nasty bottleneck between work and home, they may move (or change jobs).

So if I understand this right.. you are advocate letting our transportation infrastructure get clogged to the point where people's employment oportunities suffer as a result thus removing from them their best choice for a job or house? On that point you're fighting to make peoples lives worse.

Subsidizing people's ability to live ridiculous distances away from their work, as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested, leads to both excess air pollution and social problems exacerbated by 1) people spending time driving instead of with family/friends and 2) people not really belonging to a community because they're never there.

People don't chose to drive long distances to work because it's fun. That is a hard choice and people make it because it's the best one open to them. You are esentially saying that you know what's better for them than they do. That is fascist. By not building roads to capacity, we endanger and worsen the lives of everyone who has to drive on them. The stress of driving on an overcrouded road takes a horrible toll on people and has a drastic negative impact on their quality of life. Americans are great at self-flagellatin.

as we do by mindlessly paying billions to expand roads whenever they get congested

We haven't expanded roads when they get congested for 30 years now. We expand them when people's ability to time-shift to aleviate congestion breaks down and you end up with huge traffic jams that last many hours. People don't even understand what a properly sized road is anymore. They think of a road well past proper load, all the way to completely saturated yet still moving allong quickly as properly sized. It isn't.

The problem with your position is that you are fighting to make peoples lives worse. As with all people who work towards that goal.. I hope you fail.

Re:Networks and roads

[Detritus]

Therefore, the solution to our traffic problems is the demolition of the highway system.

Re:Networks and roads

[egarland]

"Rationally," when faced with high demand we'd build bigger roads and raise the price of driving.

I agree 100% that raising the price of driving when the cost increases is the right thing to do. The cost of something should reflect it's actual cost so that people make appropriate tradeoff decisions.

A gas tax is usually the most efficient and effective way to do this, not tolls though. Tolls usually unfairly peanalize people who drive on large roads that are more efficient to maintain than smaller ones because you can't efficiently toll small roads. It encourages people to move traffic off of highways and on to roads that are more expensve to maintain which is a bad thing. Gas tax also has the side benefit of encouraging people to drive more efficient vehicles which is usually considered a good thing.

So. My suggestion is double the gas tax and allocate the extra money exclusively to building roads.

Re:Networks and roads

[dal20402]

The problem with your position is that you are fighting to make peoples' lives worse.

No, I am fighting to make my life better. I am sick of paying huge taxes to massively subsidize the sorts of shortsighted individual decisions which lead to social problems. I am not "fascist"; I am not trying to restrict anyone's right to live, work, drive wherever and whenever they want to, no matter what pathologies those decisions may lead to for all of us. I just want people to bear the costs of those decisions themselves, not pick them from my pocket.

(I'll use an example from metro Seattle here because it's where I'm most familiar with the specifics... but my points apply everywhere.)

Seattle's eastern suburbs are in the first phases of a project to double the width of their trunk freeway, I-405, in a project that will cost approximately $15 billion (in capital costs only, mind you) when it's done. This is $3000, not including interest on the bonds, for every resident of Washington state, including me. The purpose of this expansion is to enable the construction of yet more far-flung edge developments... so that people can

• spend MORE time driving
• use MORE pesticides on their redundant and unused lawns
• pollute the air MORE
• have even less options to lead a physically healthy lifestyle because it's impossible to walk or cycle anywhere, and because they spend so much time driving they have to eat fast food instead of cooking
• and have no sense of community because they are always in their cars.

What you're telling me is that I should pay thousands in order that other people can keep doing these things to themselves. I'm sick of it. If you want to solve the problems associated with inevitable road congestion, avoid them by moving closer to work. It's basic economics: you can choose your huge unused lot, or you can choose convenience. Don't make me pay so you can avoid that choice.

The stress of driving on an overcrouded road takes a horrible toll on people and has a drastic negative impact on their quality of life.

Cry me a river. If the worst stress I have to put up with every day is waiting in some traffic and dealing with the occasional bad driver, life is pretty damn good.

Re:Networks and roads

[bpbond]

egarland, you might be interested in this re gas tax:

http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2006/02/in dex.html#009278

B

Quality of Service

[Jon Luckey]

Wow, its almost as if the ISPs were trying to say that people would have to pay more if they wanted thier packets routed with a high standard for delivery time. Where have I heard that recently?

Podcasts

[Plocmstart]

Very popular audio podcasts can cause some issues for small ISPs also. I own one such ISP that hosts a website with a podcast that has become very popular. Being able to deliver that much content to so many people hasn't yet maxed out our bandwidth, but it definately is using a majority of the total that we see right now.

Re:Podcasts

[3.5 stripes]

Why not set up a tracker and seed for a torrent?

This is the perfect application for this technology.

Re:Podcasts

[ocbwilg]

Very popular audio podcasts can cause some issues for small ISPs also. I own one such ISP that hosts a website with a podcast that has become very popular. Being able to deliver that much content to so many people hasn't yet maxed out our bandwidth, but it definately is using a majority of the total that we see right now.

Assuming that you haven't already, it sounds like it's time that your customer "upgrade" to a plan that allows for higher bandwidth. I'm sure that it's all in the ToS.

Re:Podcasts

[Snap E Tom]

I agree, and it affects the podcasts, too. I've seen a lot of podcasts die because of the bandwidth costs. The producers hosts a small time operation, post a 20-30 meg mp3 file out there, then watch their ISP bills go through the roof. With no consistent and reliable donations, they have to go off the air. They become a victim of their own success.

Re:Podcasts

[Snap E Tom]

Who in the world's going to use a torrent to listen to podcasts? iTunes and Podcast Alley are probably the two largest podcast directories. They pull the file directly. Moreover, you have tons of podcasters who talk about a variety of things like gardening and knitting. They can barely hit the record button on Audacity. You think they're going to set up trackers and torrents?

Get more bandwidth

[AKAImBatman]

The other day I overheard a fellow at a local game store chatting with a cop about getting better speeds on BitTorrent(!). (Disclaimer: Always remember that there *are* legal uses for BitTorrent.) At this point, BitTorrent and other P2P downloads have become so widespread that they are using a significant fraction of the Internet's resources. I don't see how adding more legal video downloads is going to create a traffic jam above and beyond what we already have. In fact, it's quite likely that many of the legal downloads will replace either illegal or amature-produced downloads. Thus the net effect, IMHO, would be undoubtedly far less than expected.

If service providers feel they actually have a reason to be concerned about the matter, then they should see it as an opportunity to sell more server class bandwidth to customers. Assuming they're not undercutting themselves (???), they should be able to use the sales to increase their bandwidth infrastructure to meet the needs.

Honestly, I think the question is, who is raising the concerns in the article and why? The answer seems to be, "the service providers" and "so they can sell the idea of tiered service". Will they just get over it? No one is buying the tiered service idea.

Re:Get more bandwidth

[Voxol]

Honestly, I think the question is, who is raising the concerns in the article and why? The answer seems to be, "the service providers" and "so they can sell the idea of tiered service". Will they just get over it? No one is buying the tiered service idea.

My guess is the same people who are pushing for priority packets. Create enough interest in the 'problem' and we might let them enact their 'solution'.

More info, see Cringley: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060209. html>

Wrong side of problem to worry about

[tibike77]

Well, let's see...

If Application X (games mostly) was too much for your system, what did you do ?
Try to improve on the application engine, request code rewrites and wait for patches ?
Duuh, nope. YOU GOT UP AND BOUGHT A FASTER MACHINE.

If you knew NY traffic was going to be awfull, do buy a faster car ?
NOPE. Actually, you could SELL the car.
And you will use the subway, or in case you can't, get a cab.
Or, if you're the mayor, put a huge "car usage price" and get the freaking streets empty (and the city rich) at the same time.

So... is your ISP (you being a big company) having problems with your traffic ?
Well... get a better "pipe" plan, or switch ISPs.

AS LONG AS YOU ASK FOR MORE BANDWIDTH, and you do it for "long term", somebody, somewhere is going to be more than happy to provide it for you.
So the answer is not "limit usage", but "build better roads".

If only people would pay for bandwidth, right?

[Angostura]

I'm not a blind free-market lover, but what is this article going on about? ISPs who want to offer their customers fast connectivity and decent throughput will preferentially pay for peering with decent backbones that have invested in bandwidth.... even if that means paying a bit more, in my opinion. Therefore there is a financial reward available for provisioning more bandwidth and therefore the market should ensure that it will happen.

It's not as if there is any shortage of dark fibre lying about and wave division multiplexing means that existing circuits can also have additional capacity squeezed out of them.

What this article is really about is the fact that packet-inspection companies are pushing their technologies as a way to let the ISPs offer tiered services based on traffic type. I don't have particular issue with this either, but enough of the 'we're running out of bandwidth' doom and gloom already.

Netcraft Confirms It

[nmccart]

Video killed the radio ... um, Internet star!

/ Slashdot won't let me use the <strike> HTML tags?
// But I can use slashies!
/// Wait, this isn't Fark

supply and demand

[Bog Standard]

You know this is nothing new. From a purely personal perspective, when I had 2.4Kb I waited ages to get stuff. When I went 128K ISDN mp3 and went realtime (I mean the time to download versus the time to listen). When I got 512Kb ADSL video downloads were then a viable proposition, a 43 minute episode was a 2hr download (for a 350MB file). Now I find that my 10Mb cable is good for multiple mp4/DVD ISOs, but HDTV TS in not quite there.

Its all a case of media volumes increasing and infrastructure playing catch-up, at least for the UK last mile anyway. As for the links between me and my sources, I see no bandwidth problems and I'm connecting to some pretty popular sites. I think the key here is that where p2p is concerned, apart from the university connections, its the home user's upload speed which is key.

There is stacks of unused bandwidth out there.

Be alert, the world need more lerts

OMG we are going to run out of bandwidth!!!

[16K Ram Pack]

Someone send zdnet on an economics 101 course.

If video is slowing stuff down, one of two things will happen - ISPs will start charging for bandwidth to reduce demand, or more fibre will get laid to cope with it.

It's little theory known as "supply and demand".

Re:OMG we are going to run out of bandwidth!!!

[cbchase]

I've got an idea. How about we do a reversal of what the media giants like to do to the consumer. Since the music industry gets a piece of the blank CD revenue because it's used to copy music, why doesn't the ISP's get a piece of the movie/music download revenue? It may be a bad idea but that is what they do to consumers.

OK, I get it.

[Vengeance]

From the article:

ISPs' rhetoric is increasingly strident about content from outside providers raising the costs of their networks," said Jupiter Research analyst Joe Laszlo. "But I haven't seen hard data that suggests the volume of legitimate video is coming close to swamping ISP networks yet.

I think I understand. ISPs (whatever THAT means) are annoyed that they will have to... how do I put this... Provide Internet Service? Shocking.

Simple Solution...

[Khyber]

Get all the internet companies in the US to stop selling crap broadband, stop being greedy, and catch up with the rest of the developed world and give us our FTTP. Problem solved.

Of course, with the current problem of corporations runnign everything, fat chance of that happening anytime soon.

Multicasting to the rescue

[Captain Perspicuous]

How about if the major ISPs finally get their act together and allow Multicast on their networks? For podcasts and videopodcasts with thousands subscribers, this would cut bandwith costs by huge factors.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Jeff DeMaagd]

That seems to require people on the same network to be downloading the same data at the same time.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Captain Perspicuous]

Exactly. That's why it works well with podcasting, where people don't need to have a file immediately, because the subscribe. Multicast an episode every 30 minutes and everybody gets the full episode daily with much less bandwith problems.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Pedrito]

Multicast has a number of problems in a global internet which is why ISPs generally don't forward multicast. Furthermore, as another poster pointed out, multicast only works when everyone is getting the same data simultaneously. In other words, it works kind of like TV without a recording device. You have to be watching the channel at the right time to get the data. So it's completely unusable for most apps.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Xugumad]

Kind of. There's tricks you can do, for example carousel, where you continously send the same file out again and again. So people can start listening at any point, receive to the end of the file in the current sending, then listen for the first half when it's broadcast again. Fcast (http://research.microsoft.com/barc/mbone/fcast.as px) is an example of this approach.

There are more complex tricks, but they're probably not worth going into.

Oh, or you could use swarmcasting (for example, BitTorrent). It's not as good, but tends to mean bandwidth usage is more localised (because clients will tend to connect to clients close to themselves in network terms).

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Andy Dodd]

I would say that many BitTorrent swarms (I've seen some with 10,000+ users) would qualify here.

Yes, BitTorrent doesn't currently support multicast, but if networks actually supported multicast it wouldn't be long before it was either integrated into BT or as a sort of "back channel" for BT.

Multicast would also be a great way to "push" content to local caches.

As someone else pointed out, IP Multicast in its current implementation presents some scalability problems, probably one of the main reasons it hasn't been implemented. What crack were its designers smoking when they came up with a system so complex and difficult for implementers to understand?

Admittedly, there isn't really any "magic bullet" solution, but at least an approach more similar to XCAST ( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=XCAST&btnG=Go ogle+Search ) is much easier to implement and would have provided some short-term benefits. (Yes, it has its limitations, such as a relatively low maximum number of recipients, but still, 16 recipients of an IP packet is a lot more efficient than 16 packets with one recipient, especially if the sender intelligently groups recipients to maximize the number of hops before the packet has to be split to multiple routes.) The basic idea of XCAST is similar to SMTP - one packet with multiple recipients that is split as needed. Of course, this has some problems (packet spam), which is why it would make sense to limit an approach like XCAST to 8 or 16 recipients per transmitted packet. Still, intelligent grouping of every 8-16 recipients would essentially cut used bandwidth by a factor of 8-16.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[burris]

> Oh, or you could use swarmcasting (for example, BitTorrent). It's not as good, but tends to
> mean bandwidth usage is more localised (because clients will tend to connect to clients close
> to themselves in network terms).

No, BitTorrent doesn't care about where peers are. It only cares about how fast they are uploading. If ISPs didn't cap upload between subscribers then the clients would definitely prefer local peers.

In any event, BitTorrent and CacheLogic have announced a caching system so ISPs can reduce the border traffic from BitTorrent transfers.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[xpyr]

Kind of. There's tricks you can do, for example carousel, where you continously send the same file out again and again. So people can start listening at any point, receive to the end of the file in the current sending, then listen for the first half when it's broadcast again.

What? So I should watch the last half of a show to see the ending and THEN watch the first half of it? That is completely pointless. It's like watching a movie where you already know the ending. It ruins it for you. How would you like to watch the last 5 minutes of a movie where the girl that was kidnapped gets rescued and they show who the kidnapper was, then you watch the movie from the beginning where they show the girl getting kidnapped but not who kidnapped her. NO ONE is going to want to watch a tv show like that.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[zippthorne]

If it only takes 5 minutes to d/l a 44 minute show, you won't care if it starts downloading in the middle or the begining.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[jmilne]

>Kind of. There's tricks you can do, for example carousel,
> where you continously send the same file out again and
> again. So people can start listening at any point, receive
> to the end of the file in the current sending, then listen
> for the first half when it's broadcast again.

What? So I should watch the last half of a show to see the ending and THEN watch the first half of it? That is completely pointless.

Not quite. I've worked with some software from Digital Fountain. Pretty neat stuff. Think about it like this. Take a two hour movie, break it into about forty pieces. Each of those pieces is going to be a multicast group, which is constantly running. Each of those pieces contain data from all portions of the movie, but in slightly different degrees. So, piece #1 would be about 70% from the first three minutes, 15% from the next three minutes, 5% from the next ten minutes, 5% from the next 20 minutes, and 5% from the rest of the movie. Piece #35 might be something more like 70% from the last 30 minutes, 20% from the last hour, and 10% from the first hour. The algorithm to actually split it up is quite a bit more complicated, but that's the general idea. Now, when you start up a movie, you wait about 10 minutes for the buffer to fill. Then it starts playing, from the beginning, and keeps on downloading in the background, filling in the areas you haven't got to yet. In the end, you're going to see the entire film, with just a 10 minute buffer to wait through at the beginning (and it'll probably be filled with advertising or previews of other films, if it's a commercial venture), and it's all multicasted. The hosting company is basically spilling out bandwidth for a single copy of the movie (plus some overhead) constantly, which can then get to any number of users simultaneously. It's very cool technology, and worked extremely well three years ago when I was playing around with it. I can only imagine they've improved on it since then.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Wesley Felter]

You don't watch it live, of course. Your computer/set top box "records" the download (possibly faster than real time) and shows the file to you once the whole thing has been received.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Detritus]

As someone else pointed out, IP Multicast in its current implementation presents some scalability problems, probably one of the main reasons it hasn't been implemented. What crack were its designers smoking when they came up with a system so complex and difficult for implementers to understand?

Hasn't been implemented? It's been in continuous use for years on at least one large international private internet that I am aware of. The problems aren't technical, they are political and financial.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Andy Dodd]

Compared to a "whole Internet" implementation, any single organization does not count as large.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[Watson Ladd]

IPv6. That's the solution to Multicast problems, but ISP's hate having to make major upgrades.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[xpyr]

Some people would rather have it right then and now. No waiting time.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[xpyr]

What if I want to fast forward through to a certain part right away? I'd still have to wait first. Other then the waiting for 10 minutes part for it to buffer, the idea seems great.

Re:Multicasting to the rescue

[xpyr]

Sure, bittorrent though seems like a much better idea. Then it saves the isp's from having to put out so much servers that have to pump this data out.

I try not to be paranoid, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I have a sneaking suspicion that this story is in some way a submarine. For who in specific, I'm not entirely sure, but a number of organisations are currently keen to start segregating online traffic, including those whose revenues are threatened by VoIP and those who currently sell bandwidth.

Getting people used to such an idea would be the first step. Either way, the talk of segregation has more to do with profiteering than "traffic jams" for consumers. Video content providers won't deliberately outpace the growth of networks that can accommodate them, and most ISPs already offer tiered broadband, so I'd lean towards this particular story being more the anti-VoIP crowd.

And, of course, not forgetting the plug for Itiva at the top of the story, who want to sell people their supposedly new and improved video compression tech.

It's all about tiered QOS

[TheCoders]

The Future Of The Internet (TM) is going to be varying levels of service depending on how much you (and/or the content providers) want to pay. The specs are mostly there for providing multi-tiered Quality of Service (QOS), but the implementation is still some years away. As we know, there is also some controversy involved here.

As an example, if a given company (can anyone say "Google"?) wanted to provide VoIP telephone service with a guaranteed, deterministic, bit-rate allocated to each connection, they would sign a contract with a particular ISP and pay certain licensing fees and so on. The controversy arises because we could reach a point where a large chunk of bandwidth is dedicated to these paid-for streams, and the rest of the world is left with a best-effort attempt at whatever's left over. This would of course leave the smaller companies out in the cold. If CNN.com pays the premium to provided guaranteed QOS for it's streaming audio, and another, smaller site does not, well, guess who's video is going to look better?

At the moment, there is still a lot of dark fiber and unused bandwidth in the backbone, such that the real bottlenecks, if any, are in the last mile to the house, so it's not an issue. Yet. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, but it's not hard to envision a future where the days of all internet sites being equal are long gone.

Re:It's all about tiered QOS

[Deliveranc3]

video is going to look better?

It's digital they'll both look the same, one might spend another instant buffering, people using cable modems have felt the effects already. They are sharing a fixed bandwidth between people, and sharing the undersea cables.

I forget the speeds that the backbone is able to handle but they're pretty absurd.

Streaming video and even bittorrent simply aren't enough to saturate high-speed internet 24/7 (except uploading I suppose and the reason they give people low upload caps is because ISPs are selling the upstream bandwidth to companies) if you have 6 meg you can fill a 120 gig HD in less than 24 hours.

HD video might make the diffrence but right now the most media someone can consume is on the order of video bitrate 20/7...

Not that much really.

Re:It's all about tiered QOS

[leegaard]

At the moment, there is still a lot of dark fiber and unused bandwidth in the backbone, such that the real bottlenecks, if any, are in the last mile to the house, so it's not an issue. Yet. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, but it's not hard to envision a future where the days of all internet sites being equal are long gone.

The fiber or cable or whatever wire is used is not the expensive part anymore. The big bucks has to come out when buying the equipment to handle gigabit connections (or multiples of that...)

Correction

[Cumikaze]

Pr0n Usage Creates Traffic Jam Worries

Fixed!

Should people pay for the bandwidth they use?

[Tominva1045]

Most big ISPs (comcast, verizon, etc.) charge a typical flat rate for monthly service. So Bobby checking his email pays the same as Grandma downloading those high-quality Frank Sinatra mpegs.

But maybe there's another way to do this- monthly fees based upon data transfer. I pay it now as the host, but maybe the consumer should pay some metered/scaled/tiered rate?

It's easy enough to compute transfer rates per account (they do this now in a limited way so they can send warnings to people consuming too much bandwidth) and the ISPs would relaize more revenue (so their stock holders would like it).

Finally, the companies could make many confusing, multi-tierd plans and market the bejesus out of them like the cell phone companies do. Whoa.. think I just hit the ugly part...

Re:Should people pay for the bandwidth they use?

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually like that idea, but would prefer more of a hybrid. A flat monthly fee plus a charge per GB over a certain amount. That way granny could get her grandkids pictures quickly and cheaply, and bittorrent junkies can get their fix without a nasty phone call.

A pure per-GB fee would mean insane prices for high-bandwidth users while Granny would almost certainly cost the companies more in tech-support then they would get in revenue.

Re:Should people pay for the bandwidth they use?

[dodobh]

Been there, don't want to do it again. You basically stop using the Internet if the service is being metered.

Re:Should people pay for the bandwidth they use?

[mweier]

i'd hate paying per GB overage as much as the next guy who uses his bandwidth as much as he can. That said, it's still the only truly fair way to assign costs to the parties responsible for using the resources. I think the fairest model is one which sets a prepaid amount of data bandwidth which, when exceeded costs the party accordingly.

That said, the ISP's would be liable to provide some pretty accurate monitoring tools imho since most people have no clue how much data hits their system when they check emails with attachments and/or visit websites. BT junkies generally see exactly what they're getting before they start the transfer, but on a website with video streams and other such convolutions, it's pretty hard.

Cell phones don't provide such things (other than calling in to check usage) but it's a much simpler thing to watch a clock while you're talking than it is to know exactly how many words were spoken.

Re:Should people pay for the bandwidth they use?

[Detritus]

It isn't that simple. You have to distinguish between fixed and variable costs, and know what truly drives your variable costs. The economics of bandwidth are not as simple as those for widgets. If the goal of the system is to deliver a specific QoS during peak usage periods, your variable costs are going to be driven by peak usage. The peak usage determines the amount of bandwidth that you need to buy, not the amount of traffic during off-peak periods. This means that the "cost" of a packet is highly variable.

Re:Should people pay for the bandwidth they use?

[dodobh]

Actually, think about that again.

Your loop is essentially a fixed cost. On top of this, there are administrative cost and there is a cost associated with how much bandwidth is being used. The bandwidth cost is not very variable, but it can appear quite high (it does get split over multiple users and is oversold).

Encouraging local P2P makes sense, particularly if you are peering locally The P2P traffic ideally should never go to a paid upstream. What can happen is that smaller ISPs end up uploading much more data than before, making it more reasonable for them to actually peer with others instead of just buying transit. This actually can reduce costs for smaller ISPs.

The problem is when ISPs want to keep overselling in the same ratio as before in assymetric streams, which doesn't quite fit the bandwidth usage model. All that is required is that the ISP start selling symmetric bandwidth, and life will be much easier on both sides.

Blue Screen of Death...

[__aaclcg7560]

There's nothing more distracting than driving down the freeway and seeing a video screen with the Blue Screen of Death. It will only get worse as Windows Vista has the Red Screen of Death that people will rubberneck just to see Microsoft's newest OS feature.

Heck...

[mangus_angus]

heres an idea....why don't the ISP's try upgrading their systems and get us up where the rest of world seems to be. Verison seems to be the only one not kicking and screaming about getting us caught up with the 50 meg+ countries...

greedy broadband provider oversells backbone hmm

[spacepimp]

Let me see if i am understanding this fully? Broadband company sells unlimited service at flat fee, overselling its bandwidth at a rate of typically 4 to 1. Users use the bandwidth they are sold. Greedy broadband companies oversell policy is so overdone that it hurts their QOS (qulaity of service). Greedy broadband company decides to push media sensationalism stating their need to upsell. End user gets prices raised for using what they were guaranteed in the first place. Why not go back to compuserve and pay per MB. I like to scream when i burn.

Uninformed

[TallMatthew]

Typical CNET column. They think there's a problem because it makes sense to them and then they go find someone who agrees.

Most Internet traffic is consolidated within large network companies (Tier 1s, cable companies, phone companies) at this point. Large network comapnies exchange traffic with each other over high-capacity circuits (peering points) in multiple locations. Typically they don't charge each other for it because it allows both to keep their traffic levels at public exchanges, which are expensive to manage, to a minimum.

The video over IP companies who will have issues are those who don't have an existing footprint. Peering like I describe above isn't available to them. They must provide services by purchasing bandwidth from the aforementioned companies. Otherwise bottlenecks they can't control will become a problem. The only way to avoid that is to purchase multiple circuits from multiple carriers ($$$) in order to get the packets to their customers with as few exchanges as possible. The fact they have to pay for this and the larger companies don't gives the large companies a tremendous competitive advantage.

dark fibre

[wwmedia]

fortunately the DOT COM era of the internet left us with piles of unused bandwith :)

I smell...

[GoodbyeBlueSky1]

F? Check.
U? Check.
D? Check.

What's that spell? "Slow News Day".

The press is stupid

[Kohath]

Oh no, a problem! We're the press. We don't know anything about anything. How can this problem possibly be fixed! What's to be done!? Are we all doomed?

People who solve problems instead of hyping them understand that if there's a shortage of something (bandwidth, or QoS in this case), you go get more of it. And the problem is solved.

Re:The press is stupid

[TubeSteak]

Go talk to a network administrator (your closest large college is a good place to start) who has to deal with heavy P2P usage on his/her network.

What you'll discover, is that without some kind of throttling, increasing the available bandwidth will only result in more P2P bandwidth usage. Unlike highways, it takes zero time for this extra bandwidth to get consumed, because most P2P programs don't have limits.

"Get more" doesn't work for bandwidth.
And frankly, I'm surprised you got moderated up.

Re:The press is stupid

[Kohath]

So throttle the bandwidth then. Problem solved.

My point about the press stands.

I have an idea - pay me to increase priority!

[wsanders]

Hey I have an idea - why don't you video providers pay me extra to access my pipes and I'll bump up the priority of your traffic.

Your truly,

-Satan

traffic jams

[Avohir]

did anyone else read the title and think... "well why are they watching the videos in their car?"

I'm not sure tiered Internet is a bad thing

[blueZ3]

Though obviously for geeks it's going to be more expensive. To be honest, there's "tiered Internet" right now, in terms of paying more for faster speeds.

Bandwidth is a limited resource, and there's a need for providers to be able to allocate that resource (or at least do resource planning) based on known factors. At first, they were assuming that everyone they gave "unlimited" access to would spend a couple hours a day surfing. Now it's looking more and more like they should assume that everyone will be downloading torrents of their favorite MS software and TV shows.

Charging granny $25 a month for 2GB of transfer at 128K and charging Pete the Pirate $50 a month for 20GB at 256k seems a reasonable way to help ISPs do capacity planning, as well as making money.

I'm not sure where the "businesses are evil if they make a profit" meme on Slashdot comes from (and this isn't pointed at the parent poster), but this is a gentle reminder that if ISPs can't make money, they're going to go under... and then where will all the geeks get their p0rn? :o)

Re:I'm not sure tiered Internet is a bad thing

[danimal67]

While I agree with you, you're correct in believing that this tiered concept certainly won't go over well on Slashdot. In fact, the concept of paying for anything usually tanks here, whether stated directly, or through the thinly veiled arguments of many here regarding P2P or DRM.

Re:I'm not sure tiered Internet is a bad thing

[slashkitty]

First, people don't want to have to watch how much they download. When you start metering the account, that's what you do. That will never fly (unless you give them some super huge about in the TB range.

On the server side of things, I pay for metered bandwith, which I monitor daily. However, I pay about $100 for 2TB of transfer at 100Mbs, and that's with a server. That's approximately 6Mbs constant for the entire month. I don't think most people have any idea of how much (little) they download.

Re:I'm not sure tiered Internet is a bad thing

[lamp540]

"I'm not sure where the "businesses are evil if they make a profit" meme on Slashdot comes from (and this isn't pointed at the parent poster), but this is a gentle reminder that if ISPs can't make money, they're going to go under... and then where will all the geeks get their p0rn? :o)"

The meme comes from all the immoral and ammoral things that businesses do. Where have you been living? It's not profits which make ISPs possible, it's maintaining enough revenue to meet operating expenses that does. The problem people have is with businesses that make insane amounts over their necessary income. A differentation should be made between making reasonable profits and making unreasonable profits. But anyway, I don't see a problem with ISPs trying to jack up their prices, it will just drive people to work around it...with adhoc wireless networks, community owned backbones, cat5 to your neighbor, etc The issue is that with "tiered internet" they would be destroying the decentralized, less hierarchical nature that allowed the internet to grow to what it is today. If the internet is just going to be a content delivery platform for megacorps then that would be fine.

Re:I'm not sure tiered Internet is a bad thing

[shotfeel]

And I'm assuming that's trivial compared to what Google pays. Which is why the "Tiered Internet" is a scam, IMO. Its not as if Google, or any other company isn't already paying massive $$$ for the massive amounts of bandwidth they use. What the telcos now want is more money under the guise of prioritizing data transfer on a packet-by-packet basis. IMO they should save us all the implementation costs, and if they really aren't making a sufficient profit, raise the price across the board.

Oh my, the Internet is going to implode!

[slashname3]

How many times have we heard that in the past? USENET can not possibly keep pushing around all those news groups, it's going to die! There's just to much traffic!

Should have put a picture of chicken little in a tin foil hat on this one.

Astroturf

[Doc Ruby]

When you read Borland's article, keep in mind that his argument about video streaming creating unfair expenses for ISPs, without compensating them as much as the content providers, is the reason that telcos like AT&T and Verizon are demanding different charges for accessing competitors like Google. The telcos want a "2-tier Internet", with more expensive "premium" fees for fast, reliable access to content competitors like Google and Time Warner, just as the telcos start competing with them with their own video streams. But Borland doesn't mention that aspect of his argument, even though it's hot news.

Re:Astroturf

[Doc Ruby]

There's a telco astroturf website tracking industry front groups posing as consumer associations. But who's funding the trackers?

Blame microsoft.

[leuk_he]

we can blame microsoft for this since they dropped the QOS api there was in windows 2000. Now we have to wait for ipv6 to become the standard because that one does have an option for quality of service buildin.

RSS/Atom Jam

[Elixon]

"This is simply the way technology works."

And there is even more comming! As an web developer who works on Atom implementation I see also big risk with coming RSS/Atom support in Windows Vista and all those RSS/Atom-enabled devices and browsers and aggregators...

I can imagine a users with the Windows that downloads automatically (without user's awareness) hundreds of feeds from all over the web every day... This is not "per-click" view but continuous (most of the time useless) feed updates...

If you watched what the Microsoft is ready to do then I'm afraid that your PC is going to download not only "news" but also feeds with pictures, MP3s, videos, ... Can you imagine that anytime the Windows goes in screen saver mode there is a RSS/Atom subsystem that hits your website regularly just to display some pictures taken from your web on the user's monitor when he/she is off for the launch? :-) I don't know but it might be a REAL problem in the future. I hope that the speed of Internet connections will keep aligned with increasing demands...

Re:RSS/Atom Jam

[Garak]

I can't see this being much worse than all the p2p and malware traffic out there right now. The only thing is that p2p dosn't usually use port 80 so its been easy for ISP to apply traffic shapeing to throttle p2p and keep the web fast.

Silly ISPs

[texaskid]

Why don't we make our own bandwidth out of a bunch of matter. Or hire 150,000 midgets to actually jaunt the packets around the country, sound good? Okay. We can tier that too. Our midgets legs are too short, want a tiered midget? we'll give you a "barely legal" midget--dang that "barely legal" thing is just so catchy.

Telco?

[XMilkProject]

Sounds like an article sponsored by the Telco companies, to build support for their networking plans to charge providers for QOS.

Late for work!

[slashbob22]

I can just see the excuses now.
Employee: Sorry I was late for work boss. My telecommute was delayed in a "traffic jam". Traffic was moving well down the backbone, but when I pulled off at the Cisco exit it slowed down to a crawl due to a collision at the next router. After so long in traffic I was running low on gas and headed for the nearest repeater, unfortunately I didn't make it and my 'car' was dropped off the road.

Or, to put it another way

[iainl]

Will you fuckers all stop downloading shit? I want this bandwidth to myself - Can't you understand that your needs aren't as important as mine?

I'm a professional, Goddamn it!

argh

[kevin.fowler]

I love it when the same net service I've been paying increasing amounts for over 3 years gets progressively slower and less reliable... and now they want to charge me MORE for LESS than I was getting 3 years ago?

I get better connections when my wifi slides to my neighbor's signal (different carrier). Let's punish the power user for attempting to utilize what they paid for.

I already have Vonage performance problems...

[maillemaker]

I already hear from my friends sometimes that our phone service (via Vonage) sounds like it has a delay or echo in it. Sometimes I can hear it on my end, too.

I sometimes wonder if my content is getting "throttled" by some carrier along the way...

Steve

If only..

[xx01dk]

..L.A.'s (and the rest of Cali's) freeway systems weren't built with "dark lanes" to which they could simply hook up a router (tollbooth) to enable more throughput. How short-sighted of them.

Yep

[bogie]

Exactly. Consumers actually becoming empowered is the biggest fear that corporations and our government has. Witness the debates on Bloggers rights, P2P trading and communication, etc. It's all about keeping the consumer marginalized and making sure they A) don't post information your trying to hide, *cough* Bu$h *cough*, and B)they don't develop alternative means of developing entertainment and communication that circumvent traditional Media monopolies.

It's all about control, and the fear of losing it.

FUD from telcos?

[nysus]

I have no evidence but I strongly suspect this kind of news story is part of a sophisticated PR attempt by the telcos to help lay the groundwork for their attempt to tier the internet.

I read a recent NYT article which said if we had faster broadband speeds like in other first world countries, the problems with bottlenecks simply vanish. Let's see if the telcos champion that solution.

Blurb Is Economically Ignorant

[Rocketship Underpant]

"Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams."

If people need and want bandwidth, the market will happily comply and keep increasing it. I've already got 55 megabit fibre to my house where I live. Besides government regulation and controls, I can't think of any reason telecommunication companies cannot meet the demands of Internet users.

Video on the IPOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Is for fucking faggots!

Death of Internet predicted! News at eleven!

[hph]

South Korea, Japan, Sweden point at USA and laugh...

How will this be an issue?

[ZonkerWilliam]

With most telecommunication companies moving to IP based Eeverything (telephone, movies, radio, etc.) this won't be an issue since they will be able to implement BWM (BandWidth Management) and have dedicated whatever amount of traffic for downloads they so choose...

Just for once...

[Alpha_Traveller]

I'd rather have these costs hit bandwidth providers like SBC in the pocketbook. Year after year they post incredible profits and they whine about not being able to provide us with faster connections and infrastructure. Eat some profits providers. Spend some money, instead of pushing it back on us with higher costs.

Asterisk is very very close.

[numbski]

I've been using asterisk for nearly 6 months now, doing all voip. My only grip is that even though my upstream provider will allow IAX2 termination, they will only let me use ulaw codec, rather than gsm or speex, which would significantly reduce the throughput needed.

I'm in the process of getting some IAX2 servers in place in our data center so I can use some leaner codecs, the trick here is that in practice this is all transcoding...I'm doing the equivalent of wav -> mp3 on all of that audio in real-time, which is the reason my upstream provider won't allow it, and I can't realy blame them in that regard.

If you work with someone that knows their stuff, gives you a properly prioritized connection, and you minimize latency to them, VOIP will just beat the living tar out of POTS. The problem is that companies like Comcast won't give you that kind of personalized attention. If I want to provide cheap sip or iax2 termination, I can do it, but I can't support you that well. If you're willing to wrestle with it yourself, absolutely.

We're heading into an area where high tech must be supportable, and not just throw out there.

Re:Asterisk is very very close.

[Martz]

Surely the problem is the ComCast VoIP service you've chosen then? If they are not permitting you to use your codec of choice, then you could should move VoIP providers/ISP.

I guess they have you by the short and curlies when it comes to either Internet or VoIP provisioning.

Re:Asterisk is very very close.

[numbski]

You've misunderstood.

I don't use Comcast. I work with a few other VOIP providers in the midwest that focus on SIP and Asterisk. I just choose to use IAX2 for all of my work.

The "codec of choice" conundrum is simply one of cpu horsepower, and it needs to be evaluated as such. As it is I'll probably set up of a bank of systems that are dedicated to a certain type of codec as to minimize transcoding on any one machine, but at the end of the day it all has to go ulaw when I hand it off to them. :\

NO to metered usage...

[maillemaker]

But maybe there's another way to do this- monthly fees based upon data transfer. I pay it now as the host, but maybe the consumer should pay some metered/scaled/tiered rate?

Back in the bad old days of pre-dialup, most services WERE pay-by-the-minute services. I HATE that kind of plan. I hate pay-per-minute usage for phones and cell phones. I can't stand every time I go to use the thing constantly fretting about how many minutes are ticking away. I want a flat rate that I can count on being the same no matter how much or little I use it.

I do not mind the idea of tiered service pricing. We already have it. You can pay X dollars for dialup, a little more for broadband, and my broadband provider has different levels of broadband service for which you can pay more for each step up in speed. I have no problem with that. You want to go faster, you pay more.

BUT - I should get a guarantee that I'm getting what I paid for. If I'm paying for X level of speed, then I expect that level of speed. If the Telcos want to throttle data based on how much the SENDER of the data has paid them, how do I know, as a receiver, what level of service the sender has paid for? It's no use to pay a Bazzillion dollars amonth for ultra-high bandwidth if all the content providers are throttled down to 56k.

Steve

Video traffic nonsense

[mmalove]

When we all purchased our internet connections, we purchased speeds "up to xMB/sec", or some such formula. Do we ever actually hit the up to cap? My ISP doesn't. It doesn't today. It didn't 5 years ago. What's new?

As long as internet service providers can get away with not having a service level agreement to a minimum traffic speed, talk about more or less bandwidth is just an excuse not to purchase more hardware. Basically it's the ISPs market right now, and the end user suffers.

Though I can say, verizon has been very reliable for me. The speed isn't always top notch, but it rarely if ever goes down in my area. And that's important when the queues for stormrage grow a half hour deep :P

Scaremongering by the badguys

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Disregard this completely. Networks will add capacity to meet the demand of their paying customers.

If you ask me, this is probably a bunch of scaremongering by the pigopolists over at Verizon and AT&T designed to get people to think more highly of the idea of a "tiered Internet" where "content providers" like Google have to pay extra for the privilege of sending bandwidth-intensive video over the Internet.

Fibre Channel to everyone's home!!!

[reverend0]

It is our right to have copper run to our home to host our precious video, voip, and other "special activities". Being for the U.S., I hear these "crazy" rumors that Korea, Japan, and most European countries have much better internet backbones. It just makes little sense that we can't get the same here.

It's a manufactured problem.

[pro-mpd]

The ISPs in question are run by businessmen who are set in the mentality of a 10Mb pipe costing more than a 1Mb pipe, and less than a 100Mb pipe. In reality, the same circuits and equipment could handle several times their current speed (think moving the 1Mb level to 10Mb, 100 to 1000, etc.), but it doesn't fit the business model. This won't get any better, and the ISPs will continue to claim the sky is falling until they realize that they cannot keep the same business model of the current service levels forever (which will probably only be effected by government regulation in this country where telecommunications companies are given free reign to be thugs... sorry).

Shucks

[szrachen]

I thought this was going to be some kind of article about how watching pr0n in your car might create traffic jams and then I found out that there wasn't really anything that I could laugh about here. Move along people. There's nothing to see here.

L.A. Traffic can't be that bad...

[ChePibe]

I mean, look at Jack Bauer! He can get anywhere in L.A. in less than 15 minutes, all while carrying out complex functions on his super cell phone and running over countless terrorists!

Stinks for ISPs

[MikeSty]

... who promise more bandwidth than they can actually give out. I suppose it's the same as gMail - no one will probably ever use 2GB of email storage. It's worse this time around though, because we're the ones who are actually paying for the bandwidth.

But, if people are going to blame google video, iTunes, and YouTube, you might as well blame hard drive manufacturers for being able to increase disk density by ridiculous amounts. Hell, just blame ISPs for starting the high speed revolution in the first place.

*shrug* I suppose the only options are to offer "real" amounts of bandwidth at a much, much lower price.

The rise of the stupid network

[Anonymous Coward]

Untrue. In the telephone network, a circuit is a circuit. If you have congestion inside a classic (not a VoIP telco network), the new calls gets rejected but the engaged calls work like a charm.

Now, were are all those IP guru claiming the rise of the supid network, rejecting any idea of priority on Internet.

Is the cherished network neutrality on content a principle that will hold everyday (video) life ?

IMHO, no. Internet has to evolve (charged) class of services have to be available so you can place your calls and make your online transactions with a reasonable reliability.

Othewise, this will become a big mess.

It wasn't designed for voice

[dpbsmith]

Let's see if I've got this right. First, they use a technology that isn't designed for voice to carry voice, knowing that it is a kludge that can only work properly when the network is unusually lightly loaded. Then, they complain that the use of the network in its intended purpose is interfering with their use of it for an unintended purpose.

Reminds me of people who buy houses near working farms and then expect the farmers to stop farming so they won't be offended by the smell associated with normal farm operations...

Beware of marketing posing as journalism

[ocbwilg]

First, the author demonstrates a lack of understanding of the current situation with the following quote:

Web companies and civil libertarians have bitterly criticized this idea, calling for "network neutrality" that doesn't relegate other content to a slow lane, or pass along costs to consumers.

Nobody is calling for network neutrality. The FCC already requires network neutrality. The telcos are calling for network neutrality requirements to be overturned so that they can charge more money for a tiered Internet that relegates "other content" (which will be essentially free content) to a slow lane.

Now about the marketing strategy at work here...

Step 1, identify the problem that your product solves:

The amount of video online is skyrocketing, whether it's "Lost" episodes or movie trailer mash-ups. The phenomenon is putting new stress on ISP networks, which are seeing the demands on their bandwidth burgeon.

Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common. Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams.

Step 2, introduce yourself and your idea for fixing it:

"Everyone loses in the current scenario," said Michel Billard, a former HP executive who recently joined start-up Itiva, one of the companies offering video-speeding technology. "What we need is a way to amplify the bandwidth that's available."

Step 3, identify your competition (aka, alternatives) and point out their problems:

Big ISPS such as AT&T have already argued that they should be able to charge companies such as Google or Yahoo for an extra tier of service, ensuring their content arrives swiftly at its destination. Web companies and civil libertarians have bitterly criticized this idea, calling for "network neutrality" that doesn't relegate other content to a slow lane, or pass along costs to consumers.

Step 4, elaborate on your solution for fixing the problem (make sure that you get your product/technology name in here):

From P2P to Quantum streaming...

Step 5, sum it up with a nice simile comparing your product to something that is already familiar to your audience:

"It's like BitTorrent for ISPs,"

Step 6, profit!!!

Great, now my ISP will cut me down....

[ShyGuy91284]

I'm going to be irritated if they say what has been my typical download pattern for years is "too much, and we are going to cut down your bandwidth, or only allow you x data to download per day" just because joe schmoe is finally beginning to realize what he can do over the internet now. Even a tiered internet can't solve this, since most of the high-bandwidth content providers have deep enough pockets to pay for their bandwidth. The US is behind on internet technology compared to much of Asia, but if we somehow manage to take a jump back in speed (Like the cheap $30/mo being done away with, $40/mo only giving you a 1MBit connection, and $60 giving you the full 3 MBit which is common in some areas still) instead of finally upgrading our internet system, it could piss a lot of people off. Gas is a utility. It fluctuates. And many would consider the internet a utility today. So with that logic, why shouldn't it fluctuate (from the ISP perspective)?

RE:Its pr0n downloads that will kill the internet

[oldwarrior]

Its pr0n downloads that BUILT the internet

"Worth Billions and Billions"?? come on

[jcd_lyeehaa]

Hey! The only reason we paid for this stuff in the first place was because the industry was providing us the service of putting it onto a disk or media and then distributing and shipping it to stores who then hired people to put it onto shelves and sell it to us. Now we have a new technology! No one is stealing anything ... It was our money in our very own pockets to begin with... It is our choice that I am talking about here. WE have the right to choose And choosing to keep our own money is no crime. ... Let's not forget that! ... It Our money we are talking about in the first place. We don't owe them money. A lot of you have been laid off while your CEOS stole your pensions and lied to you about the companies stocks. Let's start protecting ourselves and Lay off the money leaching MPAA and RIAA. It is certainly not their right to control our technology either.... The only reason they pay to promote their artists is so that we pay attention to the person they locked into a binding contract for ten years. The contracts usually pay these artists next to nothing. Lots of good artists are stuck Like being in some broken down gym membership they can't get out of. You know that is exactly were these industries learned how to sue people. They started by suing all of these starving Artists they lied to and signed up. They don't want us to find real art for ourselves. Their system is to force feed us with their willy nilly, Milly Vanilly, lip syncing "copying is stealing" bull shit. Hey, I am going to continue to choose to keep my money. There is no bag of popcorn worth 5$ anymore.....Not now that I have plasma., Piece out!!

Minor point

[Marce1]

Agreed, and btw, nice sig.

p2p is the cause.

[Mike_ya]

"Free video hosting and the popularity of iTunes is blamed for this phenomenon."

No it isn't.
The article states that over 60% of the traffic is p2p.

How much of that is actually legal stuff?
Whether you agree with current copyright laws or not the fact is half or more of the traffic is currently illegal stuff.

In the early days of the Internet pr0n was a big driving force behind better faster technology. Now it should be p2p, but there is currently no money being made from p2p to push it.

One of the (many) disadvantages of DRM

[Andy Dodd]

If the files are encrypted for each individual user, then many approaches for saving bandwidth (peer-to-peer, multicast) are no longer usable, because the content is different for each user.

Thus, a switch to legal downloads (with the assumption of accompanying DRM) will cause massive bandwidth problems near the source of the content, because DRM forces a centralized distribution topology.

(The one exception is if a content provider distributed many content servers all over the Internet which would perform encryption locally before serving up the content.)

Re:One of the (many) disadvantages of DRM

[stuuf]

Encrypt the data with a symmetric cipher with all copies using the same key (therefore the data is identical), then send the key, pubkey-ciphered, to each user. I think iTunes uses something like this. Other systems might use similar methods, but of course they're not popular enough to warrant an in-depth wikipedia article about their DRM.

Utter Crap

[TwitchCHNO]

FTA

"Downloadable video files are large enough that few are cached at the local level, and it's expensive for content companies to do so."

This is utter crap, video content on itunes and google is akamized. That means the popular stuff is cached on servers by your isp (if it doesn't suck). Or by the very least a public akamai server in your nearest city.

The bandwidth "pinch" referred to by the author doesn't exsist in a modern network. If it does your ISP is incompetant.

The only impact the increasing quailty of video can have on a network - is on the last mile - or close to the last mile.

Yes usage has increased, this is a no brainer - capacity has also increased, if your ISP is responsible capacity has increased to match demand.

Buisness critical video (as in live video conferencing)has preferred QOS (quality of service) on net - off net you can't guarantee QOS.

VOIP alos has preferred QOS if Diffserve tagging is enabled - if your ISP is offering VOIP and doesn't have this enabled on net (and to thier upstream) they are incompetant.

Voice, Faxes, Video, Data all go across the same pipes (physically - perhaps not logically). We have intelligent QOS managing with ATM and MLPS for network cores.

Regulatory changes have already been made to address physical bandwidth capacity and limitations. Collocations and POPs have been re-ordered as Tier 1, 2, & 3 determining how many physical lines they can suffiecently aggregate. (the FCC being pro-active for once)

Yes cable networks are slightly different than normal telco, they deliver streamed video via multicast - A HD channel is only 500Kb (prolly only 720i), cable companies have ample last mile bandwidth available to meet current and future demand (although some frequencies may need to be re-allocated). Basically traditional broadcast tv is already being delivered via IP, the physical bandwidth is already present.

Same thing with voice - ADPCM voice is already compressed - VOIP is nominally different, but they traverse the same trunking. VOIP can be flagged via diffserve routed across a layer two trunk (a logical trunk) with the same QOS perameters as traditional voice services.

If you are expieriencing issues with Vonage or Skype at home, it's because you have a traditional lack of capacity, or your ISP is not modern.

The author doesn't have the first clue about how the intarweb works, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's a paid schill supporting verizon's "preferred tier" bullshit.

OT - I interpreted the headline differently

[debest]

(Sorry for the off-topic, but this is somewhat related to the headline)

I thought that the article was going to talk about those huge, bright video billboards that I'm seeing at the sides of expressways. Specifically, here in Toronto on the Gardiner Expressway there are about a dozen of these things, with fast-action motion video trying to get your attention. I equate these to the meatspace equivalent of Flash banner ads on websites (if only there were a "Flashblock" plugin for my car's windshield :-)

I have personlly observed several instances, during stop-and-go rush hour, where the person in the car beside me would not keep pace with traffic for a few seconds because he/she was mesmerized by a video billboard. I also have noticed that fender-benders invariably take place right in the vicinity of these monstrocities (where someone likely rear-ended another because they were watching the video). Someone should investigate to see what is the cost to the city in wasted time due to these things causing delays in traffic flow.

About your sig

[colinrichardday]

I have a dynamic IP address, you insensitive clod!

The real perpetrator.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free video hosting and the popularity of iTunes is blamed for this phenomenon.

Yeah right. We all know it was porn.

Hey Mike_YA

[jcd_lyeehaa]

What do you mean 60% illegal... If you live in china, then google along with the other 99 % of the internet is "illegal". Lets not just buy into the "Illegal" milly vanilly lip syncing bullshit we get here in our own country either... We are suppose to be leaders not followers... -J

Re:We've been here before.- I blame wired

[Kevin Stevens]

I blame Wired for this. I love the magazine, but it tries too damn hard to be hip. Sometimes it seems that the editors' pay is linked to how many new retarded terms they can come up with. Either that, or they just do it try and give some legitimacy to the latest fads they are writing about.

Just remember kids, you don't have a shitty website no one cares about... you have a blog! you're part of the blogosphere! You provide infoporn to those like you who want to hear your rants about how the local mass transit system was running late today. If you really want to be hip you have to record these rants into an mp3, and make them available on your blog's site and then you're a podcaster! Uggggh.

What about the dark fiber?

[windowpain]

I asked it before and I'll ask it again. At the peak of the dot bomb boom supposedly miles and miles of fiber optic cable was laid that wasn't worth lighting up because the demand wasn't there. Has all of that capacity since been put online?

And supposedly the cool thing about fiber is that you don't have to do anything to the fiber to increase its capacity, just keep developing gizmos that can turn the light on and off at ever higher rates.

So has all that dark fiber been put into use or was it an urban legend or what?

We need to separate distribution from bandwidth

[EMIce]

Telcos and cable companies have been given exclusive rights to wire our neighborhoods through common carrier status, so they should have to play by our rules. If anyone were allowed to bring physical lines into our homes, the market would quickly weed out these attempts to nickle and dime us with tiers. Of course this isn't possible, so we need other ways to foster competition so that bandwidth is brought to us as cheaply and reliably as possible.

To do this, we should mandate that Verizon, SBC, and other cable/phone providers be forced to allow third parties to offer bandwidth from the third party's own backbone, just as is done with DSL. This would also be similar to what is done in energy sales, where many companies offer gas & electricity, but one entity is charged with collection and distribution.

Forget network neutrality, just allow third parties to supply bandwidth while setting their own rates and being charged a reasonable fee for distribution. This would remove temptation to exaggerate the bandwidth crunch, because when a third party X is able to offer more per dollar (up to the limits of what the residential area net supports), people will ask why the incumbents can't do the same.

We already have two distributors, cable and phone companies, so there is competitive incentive to keep the residential lines up to date as Verizon is doing with fiber right now, but it might not hurt to allow a third player into common carrier status either, as a generic provider of infrastructure for bandwidth, without tie-ins to these old business models.

If past battles over DSL are any indication though, the telcos want third parties out. This to me shows that they don't really appreciate the monopoly they have been given, and that politicians need to get a clue stick and beat these fools down. If the few that have the privilege of building infrastructure start fixing prices (with or without tiers), we won't have competitive alternatives. Nothing competes with wired service, so it will not simply be a matter of not buying if your are unhappy with the service.

I wonder what will happen to third party DSL providers once the switch to fiber is done. A verizon rep already came by a few weeks ago to say that the copper line from the pole to my house will soon be replaced with a fiber hookup, even though I don't get net access from them. How are the rules for third party providers written w/ respect to fiber?

I think the best way to address tiers is to allow it, as long as we can choose from alternative open-ended bandwidth sources that come through the same lines of distribution. This would put a much needed fire under the incumbents asses to offer us the best deal possible. After all, we granted them these lines of distribution. Also again, government mandated neutrality should probably be avoided, as this will only choke the market in a different manner.

It's SO true! I see this everyday when I'm driving

[Anonymous Coward]

Just based on the way people drive around here, I'd say they all need to quit watching their DVDs while driving. No wonder it takes so long to get to work with all this traffic! Hmm, that gives me a great idea. Maybe I'll watch a DVD while in rush hour traffic to pass the time....

The business way

[teslatug]

Watch the ISP's start to throttle people ala Netflix.

"Sure you can have unlimited rentals for $14.99, as long as you limit it to less than 5 a month, otherwise we'll throttle you to a limit of our choosing."

"Sure you can have 1Mbps up/down, as long as you don't try to use it, otherwise it will be 128Kbps."

How do they keep getting away with this. If I were to say, "sure I'll agree to pay you $14.99/mo for the service as long as it's only for one month, otherwise I'll just pay you $1.99/mo" I'd get service interrupted and a big splap on my credit history. We need consumer unions to protect ourselves. When one person drops the service, they'll be glad as it's just someone using the service to the advertised terms (instead of much lower than that), but if a thousand subscribers do it at once they'd notice.

TCP/IP is ideal for pod and vod catching.

[crovira]

This entire argument is a tax scheme by the telcos to screw more money out of the gummmint and out of our pocket.

The argument makes no friggin sense.

For example, the iTMS sells EVERYTHING via pod and vod catching.

The fidelity of the music & videos is dependent on the bits I play on my computer, it is NOT dependent on the speed of the line at all.

A faster line would get me nothing.

A faster computer wouldn't get me much either, except for being able to multi-task better.

And they have all that dark-fibre buried in the ground and NO fibre to the home.

Guess what we were charged for in the first place? Fibre to the home. And now they want us to pay again for their failure to deliver after we've paid already.

Well guess again Telco.

The line speed to my home is adequate.

With pod & vod catching, the line speed doesn't really matter anymore.

road designers shocked at traffic

[Danathar]

Designers of Highways are agast that roads being used. Quote "Well...we designed the built the roads NEVER intending that it would be used at it's capacity. I mean..people are only supposed to use their cars in the way we predicted. It's just not cost-effective from a profit standpoint to built a road and expect that people would drive here, there and all over the place all the time!".

If you don't understand the above analogy...understand most cable and DSL ISP's design their networks with WEB SURFING in mind...not video or other bothersome traffic. They moan and bitch when somebody uses it in such a way that breaks the amount of bandwidth they provisioned.

This article brought to you ....

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

... by Verizon. Stay tuned for more information on the Verizon Super-Super Highway, where your voice and data gets priority!

PR department -- oops, I meant "industry analysts" -- must be working overtime to get such as this considered to be newsworthy.

Are caches intelligent? think daily featured files

[CdBee]

Suppose a popular site has a daily hosted file which is uploaded with a standard filename - "FilmOfTheDay.mpg" for instance

Can a proxy server check attributes of a file on a remote server to check it hasn't changed, in order to prevent it interfering with the site-owner's intention by hosting an older version of the file?

Rest of the world

[caffeination]

Am I right in thinking that if an American telco implements a tiered service, it can either only really affect American companies and users? Sure, the rest of the world will have to move away from whatever American sites they use to faster ones hosted outside of the US, but apart from that, these bastards can't screw with us over in Britain can they? If it will, expect the UN's hands to suddenly get very heavy.
Or would this system actually screw the US over by putting it out of step with the rest of the world's internet?

E.G. Sky will fall unless we can double bill ...

[amcdiarmid]

This is the sky is falling arguement that SBC/Verizon/others have been promoting for awhile. E.G. Unless we can double bill content providers .. we'll go broke. It's also utter BS.

The Arguement:

1) Our customer (end user / ROBC customer) has paid for a certain speed connection to the Internet.

2) They cost us more than we thought they would.

3) We are afraid to charge our clients more, so we want to charge someone else's client. (content providers)

4) If we can't charge the content providers... we'll go out of business.

The Reality:

1) Charge what the service costs.
2) In the Internet Boom, many companies built out dark networks & went bust because they could not charge what stuff actually costs.
3) The remaining companies got the dark fiber for pennies on the dollar.
4) If they don't start charging what stuff costs, they will go out of business.
5) Charging other peoples customers breaks the share-share_alike internetworking argeements that construct the Internet.

On the other hand: Although the Cable and RBOCs have a (publically funded (via monopoly and monopoly pricing)) monopoly on wire access to the consumer... the powers that be (in the US) have decided that Data services should not be considered for regulation. .... It's likely that the RBOCs will be able to break the Internet anyhow. (I won't honor your traffic unless you honor my traffic and pay me $$loads.)

my $.02

Planted story tobuild support for tiered Internet?

[Animats]

This reads like a planted story, intended to build public support for the "tiered Internet" concept that Verizon and other incumbent carriers have been pushing.

Then there's a plug for "Itiva", which has some technology they call "Quantum Streaming" (tm). Itiva's web site is vague, but this seems to be more about DRM than transmission: "Itiva enables publishers and media content owners to monetize media content. The technology protects copyrighted material, supports embedded advertising, and defines the future direction of video publishing over the Internet." Itiva has done a demo, one that basically demonstrates that if you have 5.5Mb/s to the user, streaming works reasonably well.

Put free wireless in the whole city of New Orleans

[jcd_lyeehaa]

I think there is a shortage of bandwidth refineries here. we curreently dependent on foreign bandwidth. Bush is trying to get them to build some more refineries and In the meant time they are going tax itunes downloads at 1 dollar a download.... But seriously there is plenty of bandwdith out there. There is plenty of science to increase it. Shit there is free wirelless internet in the whole town of New orleans. There going to do it in San franciscoe. You know what else sucks. AOL is increasing the price of dial-up to match their broadband price in order to force their clients to upgrade..... What a bunch a loosers we all are, allowing our technology to be controlled by greedy industries and Chinese governments.. .. we are like a bunch of f%$&*g sheep ....

Re:Are caches intelligent? think daily featured fi

[afidel]

They certainly can be. There are various ways to check, size, date, metadata, etc. Proxy servers can also be set to only keep their data for so long.

Reminds me of the bash.org quote...

[1tsm3]

http://bash.org/?142934

Hopefully it stays funny in the future of broadband.

Ok I finally read the article

[jcd_lyeehaa]

Now it is time for more intelligent post... It is the Boyles Law of the internet. In that the Internet\bandwidth usage, like gas, will allways expand to fill any amount of space you give it. If you were to exponetiallly increase the availlable bandwidth today. Tomorrow new technolgies and useage will take full advantage of all of that space... Instead of the Internet phone it will all become Internet video phone with encrypted signature files that contain your entire media library when you make a call to friend. Everyone will have everyone elses library sent to them in a fraction of a second. Stop file trading then... MPAA scum bags

It's common business practice.......

[zmollusc]

This is just SOP for business.
Dial-up ISPs had more customers than modems.
Cable ISPs sell more 5Mbit accounts than their infrastructure can cope with at once.
Airlines sell more tickets than the flight can take.
If you look at the small print you realise that you are committed to paying out hard cash and the other party in the so-called 'deal' has many loopholes for not providing the service. That is why it is printed so small!
Is there a solution? Maybe we could all start up our own companies?

"Hello, Zmollusc inc. How can I help you? What? Your haven't been paid for providing intarweb access this month? Oh dear, I am sure it will just be a mix-up. You will have to call accounting on this number between 10.30 and 12.00 or 14.00 to 16.00 Monday to Thursday. Calls cost $1 a minute. Have a nice day."
"Hello, Zmollusc inc. How can I help you? What? Oh yes, the alleged pron downloads. Yes, the person involved has been severely reprimanded. I am sure it won't happen again. Have a nice day."

Re: Back to the Future

[monsieurintegral]

Don't toss those magneto phones, you guys - they might eventually come in handy!

Cell Phone Call Quality

[cbchase]

Anyone use a cell phone? My calls get garbled all of the time. Not so differet from garbled VOIP. I don't know that someone would be able to tell the difference between the two on the other end of the call. Annoying, but the benefits outweigh the irritation of garbled calls. Why can't we get clear cell phone calls all of the time?

What traffic jams?

[danpsmith]

The vast majority of the people I know aren't using 90% of their hard drives, 90% of their bandwidth, 90% of their brains, and you are trying to tell me that somehow a little Internet video is slowing down everyone? I have yet to see a day where the whole Internet just backlogged because of video traffic. Besides, it's not like dedicated video. Someone might watch 10-20 minutes of video online a day resulting in approximately 3-8 minutes of actual full-pull traffic. The video buffers and is eventually playing from memory anyway. There are lots of people who still just use the Internet for web and e-mail and cause about 0 traffic on a widescale basis. This is a total propaganda story that could be used to scare people into thinking the Internet can't function in it's current structure. And it's full of crap. Internet video has existed since the late nineties and hasn't caused a footprint, now all of a sudden because of iTunes video store we are going to need to change the Internet's structure? Please. To the telcos: stop overextending your networks and saying you can offer 3mb/customer when you can't because your bandwidth pool is shared and you didn't dedicate enough bandwidth to mom and pop who are now discovering all the features that you advertise to get them to buy into the service in the first place. This has to be from the marketing department.

YES to metered usage...

[Tominva1045]

When you go to the restaurant should you pay more for the big steak than the little one?---YES.

It is not fair that massive users of bandwidth can push off their usage costs on the rest of us.

Pro-socialist views don't fly with capitalists.

Digital Property (and bandwidth) HAS monetary value determined by the MARKETPLACE, so stealing it is non-viable in the long term and those forced to pay for this theft have every right to react to protect their property.

signed by a creator of digital property.

Re:YES to metered usage...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone whose website advertises "Download 100,000+ files in a single run!" wants pay per megabyte/gigabyte internet? Ummm, wouldn't that like really hurt you business?

Re:YES to metered usage...

[Damvan]

I am sorry, but I refuse to listen to anyone that has "Make Money Now!" on their website.

time for IPv6 yet?

[r_jensen11]

We've been talking about it for ages, how about now? Meh, let's just skip IPv6 and go and use teleportation.

Except when it's a buffet...

[maillemaker]

When you go to the restaurant should you pay more for the big steak than the little one?---YES.

Unless I go to a buffet - then I can eat big steaks, little steaks, or any combination of them - as much as I want or as little as I want, all for one flat price. Is it fair that some people can eat more than others?

Today, Internet access is a buffet. I like it that way.

Venturing off topic...concerning my sig, to see where I was going with the whole "digital property" thing, check out this thread:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177543&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=14727546

That is what prompted my new sig.

You are right - Digital Property has monetary value determined by the marketplace. The marketplace has determined that digital property can be copied essentially infinitely and freely, thus resulting in infinite supply, thus resulting in zero monetary value. You can't sell it if everyone can get it for free and the supply is unlimited. Steve

America is too big, thats just the point

[xenn]

Other countries that are much smaller geographically can pull off high speed internet to the vast majority of their population for much cheaper with significantly less required infrastructure.

...you guys still work in the imperial system. Your road system uses miles. That may very well be because to change all the road signs would cost too much, when the advantage is negligible.

I moved to Australia from New Zealand about a year ago, I can see the same things happen here, simply because the infrastructure is so huge. Little old NZ moves waaay quicker when a new technology arrives. In fact it is often used as a test bed for new tech' because we have small cities with a comparable demographic to larger ones without having to invest so much money to see if things will work.

I'm living in Syndey now, geographically it's roughly the same size as Auckland, but it has the same population as the ENTIRE country of New Zealand. I guess it's a matter of populational intertia.

another incorrect use of "content"

[brre]

Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars already flows...

No, the expression is worth that. The content has a different price tag, usually less, and is generally freely available. You can't copyright content, only expression.

Traffic jams?? easy solution .. ban videos in car!

[freaker_TuC]

If video usage causes traffic jams, they better ban them videos in the car not? Just like cellphones shouldn't create traffic jams videopods should neither...

relax, it's a joke...