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HD Video Could 'Choke the Internet'?
richdun writes "Yahoo! is carrying an AP story explaining how ISPs are worried large streaming videos could 'choke the Internet.' This is used as a yet another reason for tiered pricing for access to content providers." From the article: "Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive. To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example."
Where I work, which is a Canadian telco and ISP, we're doing a major infrastructure upgrade to transmit HD media over our backbone to our DSL subscribers to get IPTV. In October the system is supposed to go live, with 40 meg streams to the house, with a future of 120 meg, and then on to fibre. Quit bitching and develop the infrastructure. It's going to happen sometime anyway.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
What the telcos don't want you to realize is that they are already paid for the use of their wires on a per-packet basis by the owners of the routers that connect to them! Everybody but the consumer pays for the bandwidth they actually use. Today, if an ISP starts sucking down lots of bandwidth because its customers are watching HD TV, the ISP has to shoulder the larger bandwidth bill from the telco. They then pass the costs along to the customers who are using the most bandwidth.
Google and Joe Webclicker are NOT the telcos' customers! They already pay their ISPs for service. Nobody is getting a free ride.
The market should drive this process! ISPs that want more bandwidth (so they can deliver hi-def video to their customers) will look for the most bandwidth at the lowest price, and the backbones compete to upgrade their networks so that those ISPs sign up with them.
Why won't anyone stand up in Congress and say, "but Mr. Verizon, Mr. AT&T, aren't you just trying to charge twice for the same service?"
That's something I've been wondering for years. Not having the knowledge neccessary I still ask: What is the reason anyone and their mother can't set up a multicast audio/video stream? I mean stuff like a 128Kb MP3 stream internet radio station without sucking (128 x N users) Kb in bandwidth?
I'm a Network Engineer for a major US cable company and for about 15 months or so we've been moving our HD streams as IP multicast across our internal fiber network. It's not really that much bandwidth internally to our facilities, about 30 Mbit per channel. Once it reaches our facilities it's converted to QAM and can be streamed across the RF cable plant. Where this could/will pose a problem is for network rider services (ala Vonage) where this traffic needs to cross the egress POP. Anyone involved with carrier level services is well aware that bandwidth is oversold. It has to be due to the insane prices an OC-48 costs. It relies on the assumptions that 1.) Maybe 20-50% of your users will be using the service at any given time. 2.) Even if 100% of your user base is using the service they aren't all using the maximum speed available (ie web browsing versus running Bittorrent). So to sum up, yeah it's not a big deal for a few people to stream HD at 6~10Mbit through an egress point however if a killer service takes off and everybody starts using it in this way it could seriously impact service. In fact it could force a paradigm shift in the industry.
Seconded. A member of my family worked on laying fiber for Pac Bell (back when there was such at thing), and the reason they didn't lay nearly as much as they wanted to was just local red tape. Municipalities exert a lot of control over this kind of thing, and not only do they want you to pay to upgrade their city's infrastructure, they want some added perqs too.
And of course, the same kind of red tape occurs when you want to do anything involving multiple city governments. There's no such thing as, "for the good of the county and region" for these people, there's just their own constituents. And if those constituents happen to be affluent rather than poor or middle class, you're going to have a helluva time getting anything through there.
Take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), for example. I've heard (might be a tall tale, now) that it was supposed to not only go from San Francisco to San Jose, but that it was supposed to go up into Marin County as well. It just didn't happen. They stopped in Millbrae, which is about 12 minutes outside of SF. In order to get San Bruno (the next town in the direction of SF) to allow the rails to go on their land and to the airport, they needed to build them a new police station, and this was only after they were at least four years late.
And don't get me started about engineers employed by most cities. My closest friend works for the city of San Bruno, and while he was in the water department, the engineers tried to drill a well after the people in the water department said that there was a 90% chance they'd be drilling straight into a sewer main. What did they hit? A sewer main.
http://www.askaninja.com/news/2006/05/11/ask-a-nin ja-special-delivery-4-net-neutrality
The ______ Agenda
What ISPs are selling is latency. Watch the ads: "the page loads / game plays so fast!"
They're not selling bandwidth, even though that's how they inaccurately measure their latency. If they were, then servers would not be an issue.
All of that is moot, however, since there's simple math here:That is, they are selling a service which costs them a certain amount, and they see some percentage usage. They then charge some rate and the delta between those is the profit margin for them. If you are arguing that they should raise the price and eliminate bandwidth concerns, then that's one thing, but if you are suggesting that they keep prices the same, then clearly they have to control one of usage, cost or margin.
Margins in the ISP business right now aren't spectacular, but they're OK. ISPs certainly aren't looking ot LOWER them, so give up on that point. Then you have usage and cost. The cost is negotiated fairly strongly, but ultimately you have the same argument up-stream with backbones as you have between consumers and their ISPs. Then there's uage. Observe the current trend in attempting to manage usage.
If you really want to be charged for a full 1.5, 3, 5 or whatever you have down, you're going to have to expect that prices will skyrocket! If that's what you want, then what's wrong with tiered service?
From where I stand, the whole argument AGAINST tiered service is that the economies of scale in the averaged cost model favor a single tier of consumer service. Then again, I'm a Speakeasy customer now, so I've essentially opted for tiered service anyway by paying more than your average cable Internet user.