Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers

Anonymous Coward writes "Robert X Cringely is postulating today that as bandwidth applications grow, the data centers will never be ready to serve 30 million concurrent streams of data. Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams, which is never going to impress the TV network exec used to audiences in the millions. Cringely choruses that secure P2P is the solution to delivering not only high quality video but also to audiences that scale in the millions. BitTorrent seems to have worn out it's welcome with the MPAA recently, so maybe the future holds P2P networks owned and managed by Hollywood?"

Comments

Figures

[Kawahee]

"Akamai, with its tens of thousands of servers spread in an intelligent topology, still can't serve more than 150,000 concurrent streams"

Assuming Akamai has only 10,000 servers, that's 15 streams per server. C'mon now, we're not that stupid.

Akamai embellishment

[artemis67]

The Akamai figures are the embellishment of the submitter... Cringely doesn't mention Akamai anywhere in the article.

Re:What happened to the MBONE?

[Russ Nelson]

Whatever happened to the MBONE? I see that a book on the subject is now posted to the web and freely copyable because it's gone out of print. The MBONE FAQ dates from 1993. That's like (/me whips out his HP-41C calculator) 13 years old. Apparently the IETF has a group for MBONE Deployment, but it hasn't been updated since last September, and even then it was a year late for its final milestone.

Multicast works....it's political

[Danathar]

Multicast has been deployed on Internet2 for some time now. I've watched 720p streams multicasted from Europe with no problem.

The problem with deploying it on the commercial Internet is political. Backbone commercial Internet providers have had multicast on for a LONG time. ISP's that give you your home broadband connection which are mostly cable TV operators and companies like verizon don't want to provide a cost effective way for content providers on the net to deliver video. They would rather charge you for their "middleman" service. It's not like they don't know how to enable it, all they need to do is enable it on their switches and routers.

Most cable operators use multicast already to stream the channels through their set top boxes.

In Britain The BBC is working with ISP's to multicast to broadband connections. That would REALLY be nice if something similar happened here (In the U.S.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/

Revenue Streams

[Doc Ruby]

Cringeley doesn't mention Akamai. Where does this 150K max users figure come from? If "tens of thousands" of servers is only 10K servers, then 150K streams is only 15 streams:server.

But even a $2K P4/4.3GHz can serve over 1750 simultaneous 500Kbps video streams (from my own benchmarks), for 875Mbps. Since Gbps fiberoptics cost <$5000:mo, or under $3:stream:mo, 10K servers should serve at least 17 million simultaneous users; 58K servers serve over 100 million simultaneous streams.

Use more efficient servers, like SANs coupled more directly to routers, and you're talking about <$3:stream:mo for maybe 100K servers serving over 1 billion people, for a $100M investment that can be amortized over a few years. Years which can bring maybe $1-100:mo profit on 1-10 billion consumers, or 10-10,000x ROI.

Such a network is much more efficient and economical as P2P, or multicast. But even the raw numbers sound very profitable. That's why Akamai is making so much money, even though their market is still so small.