Slashdot Mirror
Will ISPs Spoil Online Video?
mrspin writes "last100 writes: "With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There's a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don't have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. One way ISPs attempt to conceal this problem is to place a cap of say 1GB per-month per user, something which is common in the UK for many of the lower-cost broadband packages on the market. Considering that a mere three hours viewing of Joost (the new online video service from the founders of Skype) would all but use up this monthly allowance, it's clear that lots of Internet users aren't invited to the party. But what about those who (like me) pay more for 'unlimited' broadband access? There shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong." The article then goes on to discuss the recent trend of bandwidth throttling based on techniques such as packet shaping which punishes p2p traffic whether it's legitimate or not."
Good. The internet was not designed to be a video distribution service. Want to watch videos? Go to your local video rental shop or call your local cable TV company or satellite TV provider. I get along just fine with dial-up at 28.8 kbps even though sometimes I have to resort to Lynx to get the text information I want without all the multimedia crap and flash advertising. It irks the hell out of me when someone links a video to explain something when a few words would do. In many cases a picture is certainly not worth a thousand words, in networking terms a few words is often worth billions of pictures.
and stop whining.