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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."
Please. As if Bittorrent and P2P isn't already boosting internet traffic. Either people will watch the streaming downloads, or they'll download the movies another way. Looks like yet another cash grab.
I own a dedicated server and I have to pay per gig for bandwidth... So I have to ask how is this any different than what is already happening?
Are they just asking for more per gig? Or are they asking for money to flow up a chain (from hosts to network operators)?
The internet was only designed for transmission of '0's and '1's, but HD video uses a lot of '2's.
This is preaching to the choir, but bits is bits.
What the providers really fear is that people will actually start using what they've been told they already have.
They've got giant pipes running into everyone's houses, and business models predicated on the fact that most people don't use them. So they tell everyone 'unlimited bandwidth!' when in fact they cannot provide this.
The tiered-internet thing is just a way to punish the people who actually use the bandwidth they were already sold. And an attempt to enact a tax on those who dare to actually provide data that's interesting enough that lots of their customers want it, all at the same time.
Thank you for your concern. I'll risk it. Please remove your greedy paws from my content provider's pocket.
Disgustedly yours,
Cash cow 9463450.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There is already so much Dark fiber overcapacity that I think the ISP could easily supply bandwidth to grow with the demand.
Roads essentially have, or have had, the same issues. These are funded by state/federal taxes and/or toll roads or some other per-use charges. Perhaps a model like this could work for the internet too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So, the bandwidth providers have finally found an actual reason for wanting to charge content owners for content delivery to the consumer. They still have not figured out that the people who should be paying for more bandwidth are the consumers.
Either way--and I say this all the time when someone raises the issue of network neutrality--the Internet was designed to route around troubled, undesirable routes; should bandwidth providers choose to raise the cost of their lines, the Internet will simply route around them. It's as simple as that.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Maybe I'm just silly, but I'd think that this would have a sort of self-limiting effect, much like supply and demand in economic markets. My logic is that as HD video slows down the internet, the incentive to use the internet to watch this kind of stuff will diminish, thus alleviating the pressure. This balance between availability of bandwidth and demand for it, expressed as "cost," or rather, speed of downloads, would make the problem disappear by forcing usage to level out at a point acceptable to all.
And anyway, isn't there tons of dark fibre around?
Of course, I may be insane, and no, I did not RTFA.
So, The large corporations are now backstepping. Wait
when we ran all of those small companies out of business by
undercutting them and promising the world (and providing something much less) we were actually ruining another business model?
They are in year long contracts now with people who had a expectation of a service. Since most isp's haven't constantly been upgrading capacity as their client base grows, there is going to be a huge thunk when people realize
that there has been a lot of pocketing profits. Profits that should have gone
into improving the network.
The thunk is comming
Wasn't multicast (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6552/produc ts_ios_technology_home.html) supposed to take care of this?
multicast. Why oh why don't more ISPs support multicast?
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!
I agree HDTV on the wire could be a serious problem. But, what I've seen from Comcast (my only experience so far) it appears they're introducing extra compression, and the HDTV of a friend gives a status showing a transfer rate of 6MBs. But, this article shows HDTV needing aroudn 20MBs for streaming. To move to a world of on-demand HDTV for the masses would seem to (as they're claiming) require not only some prioritization of the network, but I would think it would also require a more capable internet, i.e., bigger pipes almost everywhere.
In addition, at my friend's, we found that HDTV streams could grind the house network to a crawl, I don't know if it's related (since it really isn't part of the network, but it is coming in on the same coax). Considering everything I've seen and experienced (hiccups in the picture, sometimes outright halting) I don't think HDTV over the wire is ready for prime time yet.
However, if I were a provider, I would have to consider that all of a sudden even a small percentage of my customers could consume all of my bandwidth and would have to come up with some approach to keep the pipes working.
That is, on the ISPs' customer side business, there are different speeds you could connect to the internet, from dial-up to DSL, from Cable to the Tx connections. If a user wants to be streaming big media in a constant stream over their cable lines, they could subscribe to a more expensive, higher speed connection. And the ISPs need to keep upgrading their bandwidth to allow for these people who want access to streaming big media.
This "choking the internet" complaint seems to be a cop-out for the laziness of the ISPs toward getting off their butts and really competing to bring a smooth connection to its subscribers.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
...proclaiming what could "kill" the Internet... sigh.
From TFA: "The solution, of course, is to make the pipes connecting to the Internet fatter."
No, no, no. The solution is solid multicasting. So what if everyone is watching American Idol and Survivor and Lost and whatever other crap is on TV at once. Content should be limited by the pipe/hardware itself (something that's measurable and predictable), not the erratic behavior of customer.
sig
Think of local cacheing farms. You can download the content, then when it's time to broadcast, it emerges from a local/home cache to be played.
Otherwise, there just isn't a way to do IPTV unless broadcasters (think the guys with antennas) figure out an alternate method.
The backpressure put on the Internet will one day be able to handle it. But until multiple lambda inter-regional distribution networks using SDH or equivalent methods become available, even OC192 becomes a bottleneck.
Think regional cache. Google, RU listening???
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As someone who is well informed as to how the Internet operates, I'm not even going to bother yelling "bullshit!" It's obvious. I'm sure there will be a hundred posts here going into great detail as to why this latest little ploy the telcos are trying is based on flawed logic.
The real issue is that these big companies will be whispering these ideas to the politicians, who of course have no clue about how the Internet works.
Even non-US citizens should bring this issue up with their government representative and inform about the real facts, and what your views as a voting citizen are. Make insistent phone-calls. Mail well-worded letters.
And something anyone can do instead of talking about the Net Neutrality issue to their fellow nerds, is bring the issue to the non-tech public. Tell the E-mailing Moms and Pops what could happen when they try to download photos their family members have sent, tell the teenagers what could happen to their MySpace access or their Skype connection.
The future of the Internet is at stake, dammit, and no citizen of any country is safe until we have widely recognized, firm laws that make sure the public, global Internet belongs to the people and their free speech!
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?"
On the other side of things, cost per gigabyte of bandwidth has dropped markedly and will continue to fall.
But in the short to mid-term, perhaps a case can be made that consumer demand for bandwidth will reach levels that current subscription fees can't cover. This is a reasonable argument, but there's nothing to this argument that requires these costs be offset by content providers.
Right now I'm getting about a half a MB a second over my cable modem. Maybe it will turn out that there are HD audio applications I really want, that will require greater bandwidth. Fine. I'm the one consuming this bandwidth. So let me shop around and find the cheapest provider of super-broadband.
But there's nothing in this article, and no argument I've yet seen, that gives any clear reason why content providers ought to be the one ponying up to cover these extra bandwidth costs. This whole argument is being made by large incumbent ISPs who are looking to extort content providers. It has nothing to do with charging people for what they consume. Those costs have traditionally be borne by Internet users, and they should continue to be.
If I find out that my ISP is charging content providers a toll to reach me, I'll immediately do everything possible to change ISPs.
On another matter, it's telling that this article quotes nobody who says that this is a bad faith argument. The reporting in this article is either inept or corrupt.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Let's review: The ILECs have been salivating for decades over the idea of becoming "cable companies," and distributing television content over the telephone infrastructure. (They wanted to be able to force customers to go only to their servers, but Judge Harold Greene said, "No, you don't get to control both content and carriage, because you'll abuse that position.") For the past several decades, it has been no secret just how much bandwidth video broadcasting requires, even with compression. It has also been no secret that the broadcasting industry has been moving in fits and starts toward hi-def.
Now here we are on the eve of large-scale HD rollout, and the ILECs are whining that the network backbone may not be able to handle the load. Well, kee-ryst on toast, what the fsck have you been doing the last twenty years? You knew Internet "television" was coming, you knew hi-def was coming, you knew it was going to be a bandwidth hog, you had at least twenty years warning, and you're telling us with a straight face that you didn't prepare for it??
And by the way, who else here is old enough to remember a few years ago when the same ILECs were complaining that all those modem users phoning ISPs were overloading their switches, and wanted to start charging a premium for data calls? My response then was as it is now: Why the hell aren't you building out your network?
Sympathy factor zero, Captain. You either get to work and build out the network like you were supposed to be doing, or stand aside and let the CableCos eat your lunch.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
"Either people will watch the streaming downloads, or they'll download the movies another way. "
Wow! Someone should invent a mass produced and mass marketed plastic disc that holds video and sound.
Perhaps, but HD video will certainly cause a few slashdotters to 'choke the chicken.'
POKE 36879,8
Here in Japan, the ISPs still oversell. But at least they give you the option of how much oversell you get screwed on.
When you buy FTTH service from NTT, they have a high-speed and low-speed option. The HS option is twice the price. However, if you look at the systems, both give you 100mbps over single-mode fiber.
What's the difference?
Well, the HS option has 16 customers per DSLAM; the LS option has 32 per.
As US customers become better educated about their line capabilities, expect more ISPs to cater to their needs. But, you better be prepared to pay for it.
Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
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.
First, the fiber network that was laid out during the .com boom globally by companies like global crossing currently contains a lot of dark fiber. So that part is cheap.
The capacity of a fiber is easily 10Gb/s per color times 125 colors or 1Tb/s, and a cable is easily 700 fibers, so a total of 1Eb/s. Order of magnitude less for ocean fibers.
*Very* HD is 20Mb/s, so a cable will handle 50 million channels.
Cisco's high end router handles up to 70Tb/s.
Lets take the olympics as a scenario:
You are broadcasting 500 concurrent HD channels at 20Mb/s each channel. This is 10Gb/s.
This fills less than 1% of one fiber in the cable.
Now, Every family member in the house watch their own event, so this is 100Mb/s
The Router handles 70Tb/s, so one router supports 700,000 households. So you need 1 router for Seattle, 1 for London etc.
The only clamp on this whole thing is all the ISP whining about problems and clamping down on bandwidth to try to maximize their revenue.
Like DeBeers and diamonds, it is actually a bandwidth glut, and the ISP's are creating an artificially high price for it by limiting supply.
"Fix it"
Exactly.
There seems to be a common misconception that since cable/DSL customers are only paying ~$10/megabit for bandwidth, that that's what the ISPs are paying. That's simply not true.
For ISPs, overselling bandwidth is the ONLY way they can sell it to end-users cheaply. I know there are some people who are paying $50/month for 8Mbps cablemodems. Do you realize that 8Mbps of bandwidth is costing your ISP THOUSANDS (maybe hundreds, if they're in a big city) of dollars?
Bandwidth just isn't as cheap as everyone seems to think it is. So yeah, there is NO WAY an ISP can afford to supply every one of their users the gobs of non-bursty bandwidth necessary to make HDTV downloads on a massive scale work.
And if EVERYONE went to the bank together to withdraw their savings- would you expect the bank to have it on hand for EVERYONE in cash?
BTW, if a run occurs on the bank, what do you think the FDIC does? sends over an armored car?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
guys this isn't what the isp's designed the internet for.
if you upgrade to internet 2.0 for 39.99 extra per month you'll be able to do it.
-- lol pwned
It's only the large, money hungry ISPs doing this. MOST of the ISPs I work with (I'm a board member of CISPA or California ISP Association which ever you prefer) don't like, nor will they practice this kind of crap.
Personally, the way _I_ see it, I hope they do start doing this. Customers will get angry and find other providers that don't do this. Which means people will go to the better providers anyway.
Unlike TCP, where the end-points do all the thinking, multicast requires that the routers are involved in the transactions. They are the ones who have to make decisions like, "does this address get bits, or not?"
The session management protocols of multicast are defined, but there are a few to choose some, and most have some kind of serious drawback associated with them. One of the ones that sticks out in my mind is the one where there's no way to "detect" if a multicast IP is taken, or any more security/authentication than knowing what the address is.
To properly support multicast, we need a session leader, and every router involved in the minimum-cost spanning tree must also know who else is involved. This means the routers have to be able to build the tree, and tear it down as clients join and leave.
Replacing or upgrading routers is hard because a lot of them are fire and forget. They'll place a router in a wall with PoE, and then leave it inside. They'll be on the bottom of the ocean, repeating traffic that goes along a trans-oceanic link. They'll be on top of wireless towers, miles from other people. Most of them were not designed to be remotely upgradable via software, because routers were always meant to be as cheap to produce as possible.
This is also who IPv6 is only really deployed in places where IP space ran out a long time ago (such as Japan). Until it really starts to break, traditional structure will be "good enough" for most people.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Multiple concurrent instances, even multicast, will choke the backhaul.
I want this show, someone wants to watch another, and someone ordered a movie upstairs. So perhaps there are five instances in my home all by itself. Wireless won't support, that, not even MIMO. Broadcast can, but not full res (or even close) DTV broadcases-- even with the best CODECs.
Then take my neighborhood, and start multiplying the instances. Do the math. It's pretty easy. Along about the tenth home or so, you start filling up an OC12-- even if there were distribution boxes that understood multicasting protocols. Take my block, add up all the other blocks in the city. Make it 9PM, prime time. Mulitple OC192 lambdas running on the best fiber today is going to cave. The backhaul will become clogged, and then the lights go out, running from green to red on somebody's Cisco 12000 in a NOC. Then they start to throttle back traffic by protocol type.
Ok, Mr Wizard-- which ones get throttled? Mail? Port 80? Oh-- IPTV-- it's not critical.
Wait, my set's blooming. All pixelated. Bummer.
For a fact, the implementations-- no matter what the last 100 yards are (even fiber) will clog the backhaul. The only solution is local/regional cacheing.... or using a different way of thinking for broadcasters. The numbers don't work. You either limit raster size, color spectrum, frame rate, or start losing information in the CODEC method, or you have data rates that are huge or are substandard compared to broadcast HDTV (US standard). IPTV has that to compete with. If it can't do it, and must forever mime something ugly like NTSC, PAL, or SECAM, then the game is over and IPTV loses. If, however, you can compete with advanced (and advancing HDTV methods) then there's a chance. To do that, given an isochronous data transport need, requires method that doesn't crack the time domain encapsulating the data stream. Multicasting can't do that but for a few channels at a time. Add VOD and other instances, and the backbone collapses or becomes throttled, impeding the streams-- and blowing their quality to shreds.
Local/regional cacheing is the only solution until everything becomes re-thought in terms of infrastructure-- and the economics are behind it. Until then, IPTV will have ugly, postage-stamp sized rasters at frame rates that can be measured in furlongs per fortnight.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
"Say there, Mister Content Provider, that's sure a nice video you tryin' to send. Be a shame if anything was to, you know, happen to it...
Not true. VoIP traffic is more time sensitive than FTP traffic. A SSH session needs better response than bittorrent. And video on demand needs to be processed before a /. page reload.
Sure, it's all 1s and 0s, but those 1s and 0s are arranged into headers and payload. Headers can be analyzed and tagged for prority. All this takes processing power and memory.
It's simple: if you want your VoD to play seamlessly and you want your VoIP to be a clear as a land-line call, you pay more for tagging.
If not, then your 1s and 0s can get lumped in with all the others. Your phone call to mom will be lumped in with my pr0n download.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The internet was only designed for transmission of '0's and '1's, but HD video uses a lot of '2's.
Bender: Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere...[shudder] and I thought I saw a two.
Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Only Chuck Norris could "choke the internet".
does anyone have a HD rip of someone reading the article? At least something that will take up some of all this idle bandwith I have?
FTFA
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
WTF, and charging more money from content providers will change the design of internet.
I live on a tropical island in the middle of the pacific (Okinawa) and have residential Gigabit fiber for about $70 a month (including land phone). I routinely get 4MB upload and 3MB download simultaneously. There is a business model that works because Japan is using it right now. So, why can't the US figure it out?
The Economics:
Myth: Companies should have to pay for the bandwidth they use.
Facts:
Bandwidth is already paid for on both the outgoing and consuming ends, and there are contractual agreements for each network segment the packets pass through on their way from point A to point B. All bandwidth is already paid for. The telcos are proposing to add a THIRD layer of charges onto the Internet, one they can control and manipulate at will and can charge whatever they want for. Even worse, if a packet crosses through 3 networks on its way from from Point A to Point B that would be 3 additional charges. As everyone knows, these charges will be passed directly onto the consumers in one form or another.
Imagine the packet passes through 12 networks to reach you, if any one isn't being paid and blocks or degrades the packet YOU the consumer lose. There is no way to ensure that a packet gets priority unless the company is paying every single possible network that packet might pass through.
Freedom and Censorship:
Since companies would be controlling the flow of information through their networks based on how much they are being paid or any other uncontrolled criteria, they have great incentive to limit, or stop certain bits of information that is in conflict with their new data "Sponsors". Maybe you couldn't read a blog about lawysuits against the telco. Maybe you couldn't reach a news site that contained a story that exposed problems with a company that is paying the telco a lot of money. That is just the tip of the iceberg.
China is a perfect example of a country that does not allow Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality is not only fair, and a key component in net freedom, it is the only model that will support innovation in a balanced way.
Don't give the Telcos a license to rob us all blind and restrict our freedoms.
Bandwidth is the size of the pipe. No one is advertising unlimited bandwidth, because there is no such thing as an infinite speed modem. They don't really advertise unlimited data transfer either, because the maximum data transfer would be the (speed of the modem)*(length of the billing period). What they do advertise is that you have unlimited access to the pipe, in the sense that it is always on at the speed you paid for, and you can send stuff accross it 24/7. However, ISPs are running into trouble since they oversold the lines on the assumptions that most people would not use their high speed connecion to transfer huge amounts of data - so that's why they are trying to back down from the unlimited access claims.
I agree on both points. However, there is a signifigant cost involved with moving a lot of traffic. As I have said before, Cisco, Juniper, and Bay are not cheap. Especially for equipment capable of moving data at OC-48 and up.
While the ISPs may not charge for peering, they both have to buy additional blades and pay techs to update and maintain those systems.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Electricity is metered because the cost of producing the electricity is directly proportional to use.
Water is metered for the same reason: the more water that's produced, the more in the way of intermediate resources are needed.
But the cost of bits isn't proportional to the number of bits transferred, it's proportional to the rate, and only because the price of the routing equipment is roughly proportional to the speed of the equipment.
But even that relationship is tenuous at best.
You see, thanks to Moore's law, the price of the equipment needed to handle a given amount of bandwidth should continuously drop over time, which means that eventually the expense of providing that bandwidth should be dominated by two things:
So any ISP which charges based on the amount of bandwidth being consumed is likely overcharging the high-bandwidth subscribers so they can undercharge the low-bandwidth subscribers, which they all should be charged the same flat fee.
And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be (thus, they would be running fiber and not copper) because in the end, the cost of building out the infrastructure is almost certainly dominated by the cost of the labor to put it in place, or perhaps the cost of the right-of-ways (which is proportional to the distance, not the bandwidth), and not the equipment itself.
We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest transport medium available, simply based on the fact that light has more bandwidth than any other conventional signal. Any bandwidth provider that has built out infrastructure using anything else is an idiot for doing so.
There are a lot of idiot providers in the U.S., thanks to the typical company's inability or unwillingness to look ahead more than a couple of months.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Its like getting an unlimited electricity contract from your power company, at a maximum of say 5KW. then you try to use 5KW for a while to run your airconditioner and your airconditioner blows up due to a brown out caused by 50 people trying to run 5KW aircons off of one 5KW maximum powerline, the the power company forgot to tell you was running the entire street. They then try to charge the airconditioner company for creating a device which uses lots of power, and want to be able to turn your airconditioner off if they have too much demand on a hot day, while letting those that pay the manager a bit of extra on the side run their airconditioners on high all day. Meanwhile the whole time this has been happening, you and all the other people in the street were paying money for a service listed as UNLIMITED ELECTRICITY up to 5KW, and yet not getting it.
Its bullshit. If we pay for a 1Mbit connection, we should get a 1Mb connection. If they want to limit our downloads on that connection, they should state the limits OPENLY and OBVIOUSLY and NEVER CALL IT AN UNLIMITED CONNECTION. whatever downloads we pay for we should get!! and no whingeing that we are downloading the amount we paid for, just cos they didnt actually expect us to use what we paid for
I cant get a contract to build a highway, get paid to build a highway, then mow a track through some paddocks with a ride-on lawnmower, just cos I figured no one would ever use the highway much anyway!
If they need more money because the ratio of users to actual available bandwidth is too low, they should charge more money to the users - UP FRONT. If they want to advertise an unlimited plan, thereby gaining an advantage in terms of number of customers over a limited plan, then they should be required to put in the equipment necessary to cover that plan no matter how much the users download. the cost of this equipment should be in the initial plan price. (obviously as costs rise, so can the monthly fee, but if its listed as unlimited it should goddamn well be unlimited and price all inclusive
watch "the money masters" on google video
That's the real problem. This notion of over selling bandwidth on the plan that people aren't going to use it anyways. Some ISPs have a horrific track record of doing this and it's inexcusable. If you're going to sell me 24/7, 6MB down/1MB up, then god damn it, I expect to get just that. If that's not what I'm getting then don't call it that, and don't promise it!
>>You see, thanks to Moore's law
Not really applicable here. Moore states that the number of transistors will double every 18 months. He states nothing about processor speed, bandwidth, or utilization.
However, let's both agree that the cost of tech is going down. A T1 today costs a lot less than a T1 10 years ago. I remember paying thousands in install fees and hundreds for monthly fees. Costs are dropping.
But, I think we can also agree that the customer demand is rapidly outstripping capabilities. ISPs are not structured to give every customer 100% utilization 24/7. Yes, they sold "unlimited bandwidth". Yes, they sold "always on". However, a lot of the fine print advised customers agianst 100% utilization. They just can't get upstream bandwidth cheap enough to resell to customers and still make a profit.
>>The amount of labor required to run fiber is roughly the same as the amount required to run twisted pair.
That's complete bullshit. I have installed fiber and copper. I have run "house cable" from comms closets to the customers' desktops. I have also been in manholes running cable between buildings. Fiber takes a lot more time to install. You need a lot of expensive, specialized tools to install it. You have to be a lot more anal about QA after the install.
>>The amount of labor required to add routes is the same no matter how fast or slow the links in question are.
That's BS too. OSPF and EIGRP are nice, but not perfect. You have to have people qualified to analyze the network before you upgrade. They have to examine every possible reason for the lack of performance. And, after install, they have to go back to find and fix the next bottleneck.
It isn't as easy as letting MRTG graphs show overutilized lines. You can't just take a OC-48 at 80% utilization and upgrade it to a OC-192. A lot of times, telcos save money by finding low utilization backdoors into overtaxed areas.
Cisco and Juniper are not cheap. Neither are the certified techs who really know how to herd them cats like a mofo.
>>And material cost doesn't vary much with the speed of the link, either.
Yet another misleading statement. The tools neede to diagnose noise on a voice line (i.e. a lineman's handset) are a lot less expensive than the tools needed to diagnose malformed cells on a OC-192.
Furthermore, the techs qualified to operate these tools get paid a *shitload* of money. It is not uncommon for a tech holding a Acterna TestPad to earn 4x what the lineman earns.
On top of that, the more lines you have, the more techs you need. You also need a lot more sophistication in the NOC to predict, diagnose, and reroute around broken lines. When an OC-192 drops, networks reel trying to automatically reroute. Well-paid NOC staff can identify low-priority customers (read, residential ISPs and cable ISPs) and disconnect them to perserve customers who would actually notice (and, more to the point, demand a chargeback for the outage). Sure, you could trust a computer or routing table to do that, but paid staff can do a much better job.
>>And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be
No residential ISP will start off by hiring a team of CCIEs to install and configure enterprise-class routers. They start off by installing a few DSLAMs and some Cisco 2600s. They link the whole thing together with stickytape, rust, and T1s. Then, as the customer base grows, they start an endless cycle of upgrades.
It'd be nice to have a network designed from the ground up to provide 100mbps FTTD/FTTC/FTTH. Look at Japan and NTT for an example. The problem with that is that there is no room for the "little fish" in that equation. While a lot of Mom&Pop ISPs are gone, their equipment still serves the same customers. The bills just go to AT&T vice Vicki and Kenniths' ISP and resturant.
>>We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest tran
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
http://www.askaninja.com/news/2006/05/11/ask-a-nin ja-special-delivery-4-net-neutrality
The ______ Agenda
THIS IS THE INTERNET. PLEASE PICK UP YOUR SERIOUS BUSINESS SUIT AT THE FRONT COUNTER.
($_ = unpack("B*", "NERD ALERT")) =~ s/(........)/\1 /g;
print;
"Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service."
Well, that's just the thing. They're not even trying to do that, they're trying to extort money out of Google and MS instead.
See, it's one of those cases where everyone sold what they can't possibly deliver, and now they're tripping on each other's lies. Everyone promised "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" based on the idea that, nah, you're not actually gonna use it. They figured that, yes, you're gonna see a web site or two, send a couple of emails, maybe even download a MB or two of short pixelated movies, but that on the whole you wouldn't actually _use_ 99.999% of that capacity.
Unfortunately it turns out it's as unsustainable as promising "FREE UNLIMITED ELECTRICITY!!!" and thinking people won't use more of it.
And the problem isn't just one of wishful thinking and creative marketting, but it's always been an outright lie. E.g., there was always some clause hidden in the fine print, or not even there, saying they can kick you out if you use "too much" of that "unlimited" thing you've bought. And for a while it worked to villify those who actually use the unlimited bandwidth they bought, and present them as some predators leeching off the rest of the society, because there were few of them, and everyone else didn't give a rat's arse.
But now it's more and more of them, and there's increasing resistance to buying "FREE UNLIMITED DSL" and then being treated like some kind of heinous criminal if you actually use what you've bought. It worked when those "villains" were some lone nerds running a server at home, but it gets people writing to the relevant authorities when their mom gets mis-treated for spending too much time talking to them on VOIP. Or when they themselves get a nasty letter because little Billy played too much World Of Warcraft. (But more likely, they don't even know why. It just says you've used too much bandwidth.)
No matter how you want to look at it, it's a scam. I'm not even opposed to mettered access as such, but I _am_ opposed to selling something and then villifying the people who use just what they've bought. If they sell something as unlimited, then it damn better be just that. It's like selling monthly bus cards on the explicit claim that you can ride the bus as often as you want to with that card, and then tarring and feathering some retired grandma for riding the bus 6 times a day instead of the 2 times a day your marketroids estimated when they priced that card. It's that sick and dishonest.
And the problem is that now getting out of that losing proposition is a bit of a prisoner's dillema, except the losing move is to confess the truth. Anyone trying to sell a service honestly, a la "ok, guys, it costs X dollars per gigabyte" is losing their customers to those promising "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!"
So now the plan is basically "I know!!! Google has money, right? Let's extort some protection money out of Google instead." The ISPs would now like to have their cake and eat it. They'd like to continue to scream "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" all over the place, but be allowed to extort someone else to pay the bill. That's all.
It's not even that Google's search even costs the ISPs that much bandwidth. FFS, it's a simple text page, with no graphics other than the "Gooooogle" letters. Even the Google ads are actually using _much_ less bandwidth than the more traditional ads, which in the meantime have inflated to be hideously huge animated popups or overlays. And certainly Google isn't responsible for P2P file swaps and P2P VOIP traffic.
But Google has money, and the ISP would like to be legally allowed to extort some money from Google. And for that matter, from everyone else doing any business on the Internet.
And the stupidity of it all is that all those sites already paid per gigabyte to their uplink. Having to pay extra so the users of some ISP can see your site -- or can see it without it taking 5 minutes to load -- is nothing short of extortion.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What the hell are we paying for if not infrastructure improvements? This isn't water, or electricity where you have to generate the resource - unlike resources, marginal cost of an extra bit is trivial. You just need to make sure your pipes are big enough. And lets not forget that the pipes are getting cheaper.
The arguments about the cost of ISP (or university) upstream feeds for videos or other large files moved around by P2P can be taken care of by making sure the P2P users get most of their data from within the same ISP (or university.) Napster was able to do this early on when it started getting complaints from universities that had big fat LAN connections but relatively small outside connections, but it could do it because it had a relatively centralized database it could use to control neighbor connections, and of course preferring short ping times helped.
BitTorrent doesn't really do that, but it does try to use faster connections when possible. This has somewhat the same effect, though it's much more pronounced for universities than for big ISPs, which have big fat fast pipes that are bigger than they want to pay for. Sounds like there's an obvious market for the telcos to pay Bram to tweak his algorithms some more...
The other scalability tool, which can help for broadcast-style TV, is multicast. Most ISPs could just turn it on if they wanted, but they don't have a good business model for the stuff, much less one that supports peering multicast with other ISPs, and most of the obvious uses look like something that people would pay money for, so you mainly see it inside private networks. Think about the scalability of 10,000 households behind one small-medium telco office watching HDTV at primetime. That's about 9 Mbps per user, which is ok on the line side if you've got the right flavors of DSL, but that's almost 100 Gbps of upstream even though most of the people are watching the same thing. If the telco feeds a multicast down to their office, a Gig Ether can handle about 200 channels and then split it out to the individual subscribers. Sure, the telcos would like to control content so they can charge subscribers more money and compete against the cable TV companies, but a lot of the net neutrality nonsense has been because telco officials are doing the regulatory bonehead thing instead of talking about the real technical issues.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was discussing this with a colleague, who insisted it could be done by combining streaming protocols with a swarming protocol like BitTorrent. I was skeptical, and pointed to the lack of success of multicast protocols as indicative that the technology to stream to large numbers of consumers already existed, but wasn't supported by the ISPs or by client software.
After thinking about it, I realized he was right. Multicasting will never work due to apathy of the ISPs, so it will have to be built into the application. Take a HD stream, and introduce a fixed delay that would be acceptable to consumers -- such as 10 minutes. Begin a swarming protocol like BitTorrent, but with a statistical weighting so that packets near the beginning of the stream earn a higher priority than those near the end (of the 10 minute window.)
In theory (according to some back of the envelope queueing theory calculations), it should be possible to ensure that 97% of the packets are there within 10 minutes with an average swarm size and typical xDSL bandwidth -- and if you're running a lossy protocol based on UDP, it won't matter too much about the occasional artefact occurring in the stream if the client player interpolates well.
The benefits of this approach for media providers is if they use a signing system with closed source client (both for Windows and Linux), then they could introduce non-skippable adverts and limited DRM, whilst also saving hugely on bandwidth by leveraging from BitTorrent's advantages.
I hereby release the above idea into the Public Domain, but retain the right to be credited as its originator (unless someone can demonstrate prior art.)
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
If the ISPs are worried about streaming, then they should flag the need for a media proxy solution. Certain shows are popular and will amount to a big percentage of the traffic. If they ISP stuck a smart media proxy that knows what most customers watch in between the customers and the backbone, then the customers would not choke the internet.
Problem managed!
Stop the brainwash
Is that what you kids are calling it nowadays? Excuse me, I have to go choke the Internet...