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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.
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?
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!
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?"
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"
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
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.
"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".
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.
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
"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.