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Will World Cup Streaming Cause Internet Meltdown?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cry-wolf-phenomenon dept.

MetaNick writes "It seems with every worldwide sporting event, e.g., Olympics, World Cup, we hear warnings of a "meltdown" as more and more broadband users attempt to stream video of the event to their browsers. And such predictions have just begun for the World Cup just getting underway: World Cup streaming to cause network meltdown, World Cup by broadband endangers networks. Has this ever really happened? Will it happen with this the World Cup just getting underway? I tend to doubt it. I looked for articles discussing how predictions of meltdowns did NOT come to pass, but I couldn't find any."

4 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. BBC Coverage Online by nbannerman · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, the BBC is using multicast to stream matches out to UK based residents.

    Multicast is perfect for this kind of situation, and I don't think we'll see a 'meltdown' because of it.

  2. Purely as an aside... by jd · · Score: 3, Informative
    Sprint suffered a cascading router failure in and around their transatlantic gateway some time back - Augustish 1995, I think - which caused an almost total outage between the UK and the US for a period of about two weeks. That's the only prolonged failure of any significance that I can remember.


    For temporary slow-downs, certainly major events cause problems, and most of those are indeed caused by streaming. More specifically, unicast streaming. If streaming was predominatly multicast, there would be no meaningful load imposed, no matter how many people had broadband.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  3. Re:Ah. Yes. Hmmm. by jaseuk · · Score: 3, Informative

    Football, when it started, was not restricted to the use of feet. Indeed, banning the use of hands only started after an enterprising young lad from the city of Rugby picked the ball up and ran with it to the goal. (Even today, this variant is called "Rugby Football", even though feet are rarely used outside of a scrum.)

    That's a myth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_football.

    Jason

  4. Not astroturfing, but maybe bad journalism by Morty · · Score: 3, Informative

    Astroturfing, by definition, is "fake grass roots" -- when a company gets people to write or post opinions on the company's behalf while claiming to be independent citizens. The articles noted that the source of this information are company representatives. So the company reps are acknowledging that the information comes from the company; this is not astroturfing. Astroturfing would be 5 guys writing letters to the editor saying "we're network guys, and we think bad things are going to happen unless people buy packet shaping technologies", and later, we find out that the five "network guys" actually work for Packeteer.

    That doesn't Packeteer is right, just that they're not astroturfing. The existence of two articles quoting one obscure guy is suspicious. This usually means someone issued a press release.

    The article from the Register does not take the Packeteer guy very seriously. They didn't fall for it. However, the vnunet staff are being non-critical in that they are writing stories based on the input of vendors without getting sanity checks. The vnunet article accepts the two network vendors' claims at face value without asking someone else if there might not be an opposing point of view. In my book, that's bad journalism.