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Will Internet TV Crash the Internet?

Stony Stevenson writes "Analyst groups and Cisco have come out saying that the internet is heading for a crash unless it increases its bandwidth capabilities which are being strangled by the increased use of Web TV. Stan Schatt, research director at ABI said: "Uploading bandwidth is going to have to increase, and the cable providers are going to get killed on bandwidth as HD programming becomes more commonplace." He added that the solution to the problem is to change to digital switching and move to IPTV. "They will be brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century," he said. Cisco weighed into the argument, adding that it had found American video websites currently transmit more data per month than the entire amount of traffic sent over the internet in 2000."

267 comments

  1. Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    whether they are going to give us what want, and find a way to stay profitable ... or not. In other words, they're going to have to start acting like real businesses.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    1. Re:Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ... by nurb432 · · Score: 1

      Unless its the cable companies you are speaking of, which have a virtual monopoly in their area. Monopolies dont have to act like 'real businesses'.

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    2. Re:Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ... by narrowhouse · · Score: 1

      This is just another story that is designed to convince people that creating a tiered internet is the only possible solution. Many small ISPs aren't even involved in this discussion. This is all about the owners of big sections of the internet infrastructure looking for a way to justify charging sites not only for the huge amounts of bandwidth they need, as they do now, but also charge for actually using the huge amounts of bandwidth they have purchased.

      Tiered internet is like charging someone $50,000 for a car with 500 horsepower and them charging them again each time they go over 35mph. Unfortunately most car companies would probably try that system if they could figure out a way to implement it.

      --


      Insert pithy comment here.
    3. Re:Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 1

      It's more like if, say, cell phone companies were to charge you a fixed rate every month, and then added extra charges for voice calls, data transfer, Web access, text messaging, etc. That would be ridiculous, of course, and nobody in their right mind would buy such a service.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    4. Re:Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ... by WPIDalamar · · Score: 1

      Only so much TV can fit down those tubes! I mean, just the other day I was sent an internet and it took three days to get to me because some kid in hoboken was watching power rangers.

    5. Re:Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ... by kimvette · · Score: 1

      It doesn't HAVE to crash the Internet. See, the media giants and ISPs can encourage users to set up networks where they share out what they downloaded, signing into central servers just to negotiate, establish, and track connections, and transfer files directly to one another. The server can not just help negotiate and track the connections, but keep track of the number of completed diodes. Since the clients transfer the data directly to one another, we could call these Peer-to-peer networks, or "P2P" for short. The companies running the "tracking" (or "tracker") servers can report the stats back to the media companies, who can then determine and adjust the rates for the advertising embedded in the free content. Advertisers will be happy because they will know EXACTLY how many people download the content, media companies will be happy because they have stats proving their offerings are popular and ISPs will be happy because a lot of the bandwidth will remain within their networks, and not extend out over their links to the backbone, keeping overhead down --- hey, I think I'm onto something here. Excuse me while I patent the idea! ;)

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  2. And the answer is..... by 3seas · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I don't know but we are going to find out...

    1. Re:And the answer is..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure, crashing the Internet. ISPs will simply throttle high bandwidth digital broadcasts, and take the opportunity to introduce new, more expensive 'Digital TV Compatible' packages.

  3. By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by mbone · · Score: 3, Informative

    They certainly have had time to deploy it.

    1. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by CPT+Carl · · Score: 1

      But IP Multicast won't cut it for the current method of watching TV on the Internet "on demmand". Right now, say you want to watch last week's episode of your favorite show. If its multicast out, then anyone who starts the stream after you will have missed the beginning. Kind of a bummer for them. IP Multicast is great to stream shows on a scheduled basis. Then viewers could "tune in" at the appropriate time and catch the show, just like they do with standard TV.

      Its possible that someone may devise an way for the "on-demmand" viewing model to work using the efficiency of IP multicast, but right now its not a drop in replacement to magically save bandwidth.

      BTW, I am a big believer in using multicast on the Internet...

      --
      THIS SPACE FOR RENT Call 1-800-555-CARL
    2. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by mbone · · Score: 1

      You can certainly use multicast to pre-cache a good chunk of the Video on Demand out there. Check out, for example, Arootz, an Israeli company which is planning to do exactly that.

      And, of course, channels are certainly not going to go away...

    3. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by tji · · Score: 1

      It all depends on how it is packaged. Subscribing to shows, like you can do with podcasts in iTunes, would work very well as multicast. They might re-multicast the show several times, and weight it towards off-hours when utilization is lowest.

      A Tivo Season Pass type model also works well for this.

      It will obviously not work for 100% of the cases. True on-demand viewing, like browsing through YouTube, won't benefit much from multicast. But, they could cut down a huge percentage of bandwidth usage by using multicast where practical.

      Depending on the type of service, users could be encouraged to use the pre-scheduled model by pricing it more attractively. If the multicast season pass was 1/3 the price of instant on-demand, most people would choose the cheaper option.

    4. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by Znork · · Score: 3, Informative

      "IP Multicast is great to stream shows on a scheduled basis."

      Once you start using MythTV or other capable PVR application you change your view of 'tuning in'. You simply dont do that anymore, you just mark what you want and treat it as a delayed-scheduled download service. Heck, the next step in that evolution (as storage grows the next order of magnitude) is simply using multiple tuners and pre-recording everything, so you can, in effect, decide what you want to watch post-multicast.

    5. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      You can use multicast quite effectively for distributing like this, as long as you don't want streaming. Split the file into n chunks, and simultaneously send it to n multicast addresses. Clients join 1 to n of these groups, depending on their bandwidth and download the data in chunks.

      As the other poster said, you can also have ISP-run caches in the multicast group, allowing their customers to download from a local node, reducing the strain on the backbone.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by FireFury03 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You can use multicast quite effectively for distributing like this, as long as you don't want streaming.

      Only if you're dealing with popular content. If you have a single file that tousands of people are requesting at roughly the same time (i.e. maybe within a day, if you want to allow to to a day to download it) then a system as you describe works ok.

      However, if you have relatively unpopular content then it doesn't work too well - to take things to the extreme, lets say you only get 1 download a day. Suddenly multicast doesn't work - you're going to have to unicast that download unless you want to force people to wait for over a day for it to download.

      You may not think this is a big deal - I mean, if the content isn't popular it's not going to be using much bandwidth, right? What happens if you have thousands of unpopular files - you're going to have to unicast each one, and that'll suck your bandwidth just as much as tousands of people requesting a single unicast file.

      I would be interested to know how much bandwidth cable companies such as Virgin expend with their "on demand" services. A street full of on-demand viewers fastforwarding and rewinding content is going to be pretty bandwidth-heavy (especially if they start doing HD content too).

    7. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by GodWasAnAlien · · Score: 1

      Even "on-demand" often comes from popularity.

      The vast majority of people are not going to be getting random unpopular things.
      They download things because they heard about it or read about it where other people would too.

      Multicast takes care of the big things, like everyone-watching-the-superbowl, or everyone-watching-the-season-finale, or everyone-watching-the-current-disaster-footage.

      For non-simultaneous popular media, P2P could help. Then, the provider can offload service to some connected clients.

      The bandwidth space for popular and unpopular media would be limited like a giant video store. When you request an unpopular item, and it's not currently available as P2P and the current maximum broadcast has been met, then you get a message that it's not available currently. Try another selection out of the million available.

    8. Re:By digital switching, they mean IP Multicast by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      For non-simultaneous popular media, P2P could help. Then, the provider can offload service to some connected clients.

      P2P decreases the strain on the provider, but increases the strain on end-ISP networks since their users are uploading content as well as downloading it (and even worse - they are probably uploading it to other ISPs so it's not even staying within the ISP's network). Having some built in smarts in the P2P software to make it favour downloading from users topologically close to you would probably help a lot by reducing the load on the connections between autonomous networks.

      When you request an unpopular item, and it's not currently available as P2P and the current maximum broadcast has been met, then you get a message that it's not available currently. Try another selection out of the million available.

      That would be annoying. When I want to watch a particular video I generally don't care about the other million videos I could have - I care about the one I want to watch. I could probably live with having to wait a bit longer for the download though (although that would likely encourage people to start off multiple downloads at once so it doesn't really help - I'm still using the same total bandwidth, even if the individual downloads are going slower).

  4. Cost will go up.. by astonishedelf · · Score: 1

    Well, someone is going to have to pay for the increased bandwidth. Most likely the consumer.

    1. Re:Cost will go up.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Well, someone is going to have to pay for the increased bandwidth. Most likely the consumer.

      The cost of bandwidth is next to nothing compared to the cost they expect to charge you for the TV content.

      Someone is going to have to pay for the increased amount of TV content. Most likely the consumer.

  5. tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Nimey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet?

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
    1. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Oddscurity · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More times than I care to count. I suspect it's to do with "We've got the solution to this imminent catastrophe, and will sell it to you for 1 billion dollars."

      --
      Indeed!
    2. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by SoapBox17 · · Score: 1

      How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet?
      About 42.
    3. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by mbone · · Score: 1

      Pretty much continuously since 1988, the last time it crashed.

    4. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by garcia · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet?

      I wish I had taken a screenshot of last night's Google News default page. Dead Miners, Death Trap on I-35W, Vick is a Dog Killer, Los Angels Man Dies of West Nile, Firefighters die at Ground Zero Fire, Passengers tell of coming close to death, Breastfeeding moms taking codeine could kill their babies, and 1000s of Deaths Expected in Hati from Cat5 Hurricane.

      This is just YAHTTAD (Yet Another Headline to Talk About Death). It's tiring, it really really is. But remember kids, thankfully the FCC is out there looking out for your best interests and keeping smut off the airwaves.

    5. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not only that, didn't we have this exact same prediction a while back for the Olympics?

    6. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by neonmonk · · Score: 1

      With good reason. Netcraft Confirms internet is dead.

    7. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Mantaman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Dont forget the study was done by Cisco .. now what is Cisco's business????

    8. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Colin+Smith · · Score: 1

      They'll just buy more bandwidth. Now. If it's ever nationalised it'll crash.

      --
      Deleted
    9. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Funny

      45. Don't forget the 3 redundant slashdot stories today.

    10. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Oddscurity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly my idea. Their gear powers a sizeable chunk of the internet, so of course some people (Pointy-haired Bosses?) will say "That probably shows they know what they're talking about." Problem is, do you know if it's their engineering or marketing guys that are doing the talking? I'll give 'em this, it's a brilliant sales strategy. Now all they have to do is make sure the death of the internet isn't imminent too often, since it failing to die too often is going to get noticed at some point.

      --
      Indeed!
    11. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by yabos · · Score: 1

      Exactly. "The internet is going to grow beyond capacity soon. But don't worry we have these 10Gig E switches and routers we can sell you".

    12. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Taleron · · Score: 2, Funny

      ...and 1000s of Deaths Expected in Hati from Cat5 Hurricane. In Soviet Haiti, Internet kills you!
    13. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by bekeleven · · Score: 1

      "Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially."

    14. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by onion2k · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that it's their highly qualified engineers that are saying Cisco products won't be able to cope with the bandwidth requirements of the future. I guess they're telling us to buy elsewhere.

    15. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by mike2R · · Score: 1

      Now all they have to do is make sure the death of the internet isn't imminent too often, since it failing to die too often is going to get noticed at some point.

      Right. Same way as you should limit yourself to three grandmothers funerals per year.

      --
      This sig all sigs devours
    16. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      As they say in the news biz, if it bleeds, it leads.

    17. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      tag: ohnoeskittystoledmymegahurtz?

      It would show the editors how seriously we take these nonsense articles.

    18. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by mickwd · · Score: 4, Funny

      "...and 1000s of Deaths Expected in Hati from Cat5 Hurricane.!

      Is this why the internet is gonna crash? Coz all the ethernet cables blew away?

    19. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by pogopogo · · Score: 1

      Don't forget that Scientific Atlanta is now owned by Cisco, too. They make the infrastructure systems for cable companies. I think the Sci Atl home page tells you all you need to know about this study.

      It says:
      The Bandwidth Crunch
      Squeeze More Performance
      from Your Network or
      Join the Move to 1 GHz

      It's marketing for a Cisco business.

    20. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by RLiegh · · Score: 1

      I'm in, if only because that made me laugh.

    21. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by TheLink · · Score: 1

      Maybe we should ask what Juniper Networks thinks.

      I think they'll be very happy to help to prevent cisco related failures of the internet ;).

      --
    22. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by jollyreaper · · Score: 1

      How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet? Yeah, but this time I really feel good about my hunch!
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    23. Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tubes, you insensitive clod!

  6. Effort already being applied to reduce user ..... by 3seas · · Score: 1

    ...produced bandwidth to make more room for TV?

    http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbthread.pl/a miga/expand/149564

  7. If unicasts overload the network... by JackHoffman · · Score: 3, Informative

    then let's have multicasting. There you are, another good reason for IPv6. Get to it.

    1. Re:If unicasts overload the network... by Anaerin · · Score: 1
      Why would you need IPv6 for multicast?

      See:
      • RFC 1112 "Host Extensions for IP Multicasting". Steve Deering. August 1989.
      • RFC 2236 "Internet Group Management Protocol, version 2". W. Fenner. November 1997.
      • RFC 1458 "Requirements for Multicast Protocols". Braudes, R and Zabele, S. May 1993.
      • RFC 1469 "IP Multicast over Token-Ring Local Area Networks". T. Pusateri. June 1993.
      • RFC 1390 "Transmission of IP and ARP over FDDI Networks". D. Katz. January 1993.
      • RFC 1583 "OSPF Version 2". John Moy. March 1994.
      • RFC 1584 "Multicast Extensions to OSPF". John Moy. March 1994.
      • RFC 1585 "MOSPF: Analysis and Experience". John Moy. March 1994.
      • RFC 1812 "Requirements for IP version 4 Routers". Fred Baker, Editor. June 1995
      • RFC 2117 "Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM): Protocol Specification". D. Estrin, D. Farinacci, A. Helmy, D. Thaler; S. Deering, M. Handley, V. Jacobson, C. Liu, P. Sharma, and L. Wei. July 1997.
      • RFC 2189 "Core Based Trees (CBT version 2) Multicast Routing". A. Ballardie. September 1997.
      • RFC 2201 "Core Based Trees (CBT) Multicast Routing Architecture". A. Ballardie. September 1997.
    2. Re:If unicasts overload the network... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Multicast support is required in IPv6 and optional in IPv4. Also you'd probably soon find that one /8 network is a tad small for global multicast address usage.

    3. Re:If unicasts overload the network... by Forseti · · Score: 1

      Also you'd probably soon find that one /8 network is a tad small for global multicast address usage. Class D is actually a /4 network. That's over 248 million distinct groups! (Even more if you consider that a lot of them will be local only.) Got any sources that show why this wouldn't be enough?
      --
      Delay is preferable to error. (Thomas Jefferson)
  8. Buy Cisco stock now! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The sales department at Cisco are geniuses.

    1) Tell the world the internet will crash unless infrastructure is upgraded.
    2) Sell infrastructure.
    3) Profit.

    1. Re:Buy Cisco stock now! by realdodgeman · · Score: 3, Funny

      What's the deal with everybody forgetting the ???? step? You know, if you were working as a CEO, your company would be bankrupt by now.

  9. Simple partial solution by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Internet providers like Comcast will simply do what they've been doing. They've been throttling bittorrent because of the bandwidth it can take up. They'll simply throttle or block any internet TV that they don't specifically provide since it would be considered competitive to their cable TV offerings.

    1. Re:Simple partial solution by plasmacutter · · Score: 1

      going to tell you the same thing..

      have comcast service, tested their allegations last night, notice no real change in bit torrent behavior from the past year and a half.

      did lookups on the peers which remained stable, NONE of them were comcast users.. I'd love some corroboration on this but as far as i'm seeing this allegation of cutting off bit torrent seeding to users outside the comcast network is fud.

      --
      VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
    2. Re:Simple partial solution by ScrewMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have the feeling it's not so simple as that. I'm on the Comcast 8 meg tier and have also noticed no difference in behavior. But then again, where I live I have lots of broadband options (I didn't plan it that way but there it is.) I doubt Comcast is going to screw with me too much because I could switch to a more congenial provider with a phone call. On the other hand, if you're someplace where Comcast (or any other ISP) is the only game in town, I think it might be a different story. Besides, Comcast is huge and is under no obligation to apply any policies equally across their entire network. You and I could be among the lucky ones (for now.)

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    3. Re:Simple partial solution by plasmacutter · · Score: 1

      as far as i know my area is one of those 2 pony shows ("the cable provider and the dsl provider").

      i honestly think the story, which only came from one source (a torrent site rather than say dslreports where most of the throttling stories originate), stemmed from numerous possibilities.
      from greatest likelihood to least:

      -problems with a popular client (utorrent?)
      -anti-comcast vendetta by the proprietors of the site taking license with an unrelated problem
      -astroturfing by comcast's competitors.

      I've just never seen problems with seeding on the comcast network, and in fact comcast implemented new protocols a couple years ago which made their modems more stable under BT. All they would ever need to do is roll back that protocol and the modems of bt users would simply fall offline all the time.

      --
      VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
    4. Re:Simple partial solution by ScrewMaster · · Score: 1

      Could be. I'm not arguing either way, and like I said, my own experience has been good regarding large downloads. Occasionally I'll download a TV show if I miss an episode, and the other day I pulled one down at over ten mbits/sec. In Azureus no less.

      I've had less luck with Comcast's DNS and mail servers, so I don't use either of them. But that's another issue.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    5. Re:Simple partial solution by owlnation · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Internet providers like Comcast will simply do what they've been doing. They've been throttling bittorrent because of the bandwidth it can take up. They'll simply throttle or block any internet TV that they don't specifically provide since it would be considered competitive to their cable TV offerings.
      Yes, that is likely what the will do. However... when online business in Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia, Eastern Europe etc. overtakes that of Western Europe, Australia and North America then everyone's going to be sorry.

      If they put their customers first -- and tried to compete with ISPs in countries that are already far ahead of, and far cheaper than the west -- then they'd make lots more money and there would be no question of us hearing this "breaking the internet" nonsense.

      If you work for an ISP in the west then listen! Listen closely. Shhh! Hear that? That's the sound of the World's smallest violin.
    6. Re:Simple partial solution by Urza9814 · · Score: 1

      I dunno about that. I actually have one choice for broadband: Comcast. No slower broadband, no DSL, nothing. I have my connection completely saturated 24/7, and have for a few months. I'm still getting the full speed, and even the occasional PowerBoost. My guess is they only throttle things where they need the bandwidth and have no other option. I can't see that being the case where I live. The only problem I've ever had with Comcast is their phone system perpetually saying they are aware of and working on problems in my area when in fact, when I finally decided after about a week to just stay on and talk to them, their system apparently reported no outage at all.

    7. Re:Simple partial solution by fbartho · · Score: 1

      So it's your fault my torrents are being blocked and reset all the time!

      --
      Gravity Sucks
    8. Re:Simple partial solution by ls354 · · Score: 0

      Wait till they force Qos, you know you want your VOIP to work,pay for the priority.

  10. It's not rocket science by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Interesting

    whether they are going to give us what want, and find a way to stay profitable ... or not.


    If you ask me, the whole "problem" is a bunch of balony. ISPs oversubscribe their services, because most people just browse websites, and that's low-bandwidth. Now, they're realising they can't do that, because people are using youtube and bittorrent, and that's about to reach critical mass when people like the BBC legitimize it in a consumer-oriented shrink-wrap. Suddenly, ISPs can't claim that people who actually USE their services are doing something immoral or illegal.

    So, what's the problem again? You sold a service extra-cheap, because you didn't think you'd have to provide the full service? Tough. Get real, and sell what we're buying. The prices might go up, sure, but either we'll pay, or we won't care about the new service. Your upstream providers might charge too much for bandwidth, but that'll soon change as ISPs start demanding more.
    1. Re:It's not rocket science by ScrewMaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, they sold us a service based upon consumer expectations at the time ... worked great for a while too. Then (as always happens) our appetite for capacity increased, they didn't predict it (or, if they did, failed to act on that prediction) and now they're scrambling to keep the bandwidth hogs in their place. The problem is that, as you say, everyone is on the verge of becoming a bandwidth hog. If nothing else, things are about to get interesting.

      --
      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    2. Re:It's not rocket science by Shishak · · Score: 5, Informative

      I would gladly sell you what you are buying.

      Lets see, 24mbps (ADSL2+) @ $30/mbps = $720/month. Are you willing to pay that much money or would you like me to overcommit 100:1 and get the price down to $7.20 ?

      $30/meg is decent bandwidth, you can approach $10/meg for crap bandwidth but you do get what you pay for.

      To put it another way, $30,000 for a GigE connection per month, but you need 2 of them because you have to be redundant, so $60,000 for 1 Gigabit of redundant bandwidth. A HDTV signal eats up 7mbps so you can support 142 of them on a GigE connection, $422 per channel. Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view. You wouldn't be able to watch on-demand or fast-forward the signal. You could pause/rewind it if you had a hard drive in your set top box. That isn't what consumers want. As a provider selling triple-play services you need to dedicate at least 7mbps per end user in your edge/aggregation network. You will also need massive hard drive caches in your POP to cache as much content as close to your subscribers as possible. Set top boxes with big drives so you can pre-load content using multicast/broadcast techniques (i.e. pre-load the new hit movie on all set boxes and make them available on the release date) The cable infrastructure isn't built to handle this type of content delivery. DSL is but DSL distance limitations make getting 7mbps to customers hard (10kft limit). FTTH is the obvious answer but that is insanley expensive

      The days of broadcast television are dying. Things like AppleTV & YouTube are going to kill it. Soon independant television producers will be able to produce/distribute the show directly to the consumer, no need to sell the show to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. You'll be able to subscribe to the shows and download them. All of that is unicast traffic and it will destroy internet bandwidth ratios.

      Apple & iTunes is the way to go, once they start distributing content around the Internet (ala Akamai) they will have the parts needed to replace the broadcasters.

      --
      Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
    3. Re:It's not rocket science by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Notice also that they didn't sell *us* the service. They sold their excited investors the business plan to sell exponential growth, based on badly researched growth of their businesses and excited sales plans.

      We saw this all about 7 years before the first dotbomb, with web businesses. We're seeing it now with new online video businesses. The people who learned their lessons last time are selling their acumen this time around, selling the datacenter space and storage acumen to people willing to pay on credit for massive expansion that is never going to happen. These people are snickering as they carefully insist on cash up front.

    4. Re:It's not rocket science by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I would gladly sell you what you are buying.

      Lets see, 24mbps (ADSL2+) @ $30/mbps = $720/month. Are you willing to pay that much money or would you like me to overcommit 100:1 and get the price down to $7.20 ? Most people are happy with the service they're currently paying for. What the ISPs need to start doing is accurately describing their services. If your network only has the capacity for users to download 30GB/month, then start advertising it as a 30GB/month service, not an unlimited one.
      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:It's not rocket science by Shishak · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Most consumer grade ISP services are sold as 'up to X mbps'. There is no guarantee in availability. read the fine print it is all classified as 'best effort'. You may have read it as '6mbps all day every day' but that isn't what the fine print says. You agreed to the fine print when you signed up for service so you really can't complain. You can speak loudly with your wallet, buy services from the few remaining independant ISPs and get better service, lower over commit rates and keep the big guys honest.

      --
      Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
    6. Re:It's not rocket science by azrider · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most consumer grade ISP services are sold as 'up to X mbps'. There is no guarantee in availability. read the fine print it is all classified as 'best effort'.

      The Army Reserve used to advertise:

      You will serve one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer

      Then, it became:

      Most will serve one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer

      Then, it became:

      Many will serve one weekend per month and two weeks in the summer

      Then, the statement disappeared entirely

      Cable is making the same sort of statement with "*cough* Up to X mbps *cough*" - the fine print doesn't say "Most will only get sustained speeds of Y mbps where Y is significantly less than X

      --
      And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
      John 8:32(King James Version)
    7. Re:It's not rocket science by uolamer · · Score: 1

      yes i will '24mbps (ADSL2+) @ $30/mbps = $720/month.' if that includes the local loop.

      --
      s/©//g
    8. Re:It's not rocket science by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      they didn't predict it (or, if they did, failed to act on that prediction) They did predict it, and did act on the prediction, else youtube would not be able to move as much data in a month as the whole internet did in a year in 2000. They under predicted the growth curve though.
      -nB
      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    9. Re:It's not rocket science by FreeUser · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Doing a quick look around at the local market...

      http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/products.asp?typ eid=35&kt=323&gclid=COyx-ev4gY4CFQ0eEgoddkfJOw

      £24.00/month, even at today's rates, is still only $48.00/month, and with a little research you can probably do much better than that. That's a far cry from the $720 you're looking to charge. Oh right, the US has artificially killed the high-speed broadband market. All hail the FCC and the Bush administration...and America's entry into the technological backwater.

      --
      The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
    10. Re:It's not rocket science by Albert+Sandberg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The days of broadcast television are dying. Things like AppleTV & YouTube are going to kill it.

      The same way internet radio and mp3 kills radio stations? Or wait, I still listen to convetional radio stations at work 5 days a week ~10 hours per day (including traffic and lunch). It's not that easy. Basic stuff like news, weather forecast and hot stuff just coming in just aren't covered on youtube. Youtube may kill "america's funniest home videos" or whatever that show is called. No loss.

    11. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      $30/meg is decent bandwidth, you can approach $10/meg for crap bandwidth but you do get what you pay for. Okay, I'll bite: 1 mbps makes 10 gigabytes per day, 300GB per month. Why are the caps typically 1/10 of that?
    12. Re:It's not rocket science by neoform · · Score: 1

      I've had 10MBit cable at $70/month for more than 2 years (unlimited transfer), but a few days ago I got a letter saying that a 100GB/month limit (up/down combined) was going to be applied to everyone's connection and charging $1.50/GB extra.

      If internet TV or other high bandwidth medias take off, I have a feeling more ISPs are going to start doing the same, which will kill it real fast.

      --
      MABASPLOOM!
    13. Re:It's not rocket science by Tango42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There's no big difference between failing to predict growth and under-predicting it when that growth is (near) exponential. Your prediction is out by a factor of 20% in the first year, and by the fifth year, you are out by (according to the back of my envelope) 150%.

    14. Re:It's not rocket science by Ironsides · · Score: 1

      A HDTV signal eats up 7mbps so you can support 142 of them on a GigE connection, $422 per channel.

      ???? An HDTV signal eats up 20.4mbps Say, roughly 50 on a GigE.
      --
      Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
    15. Re:It's not rocket science by me+at+werk · · Score: 1
      --
      For context, click Parent.
    16. Re:It's not rocket science by labyrinth · · Score: 1

      In this country (the Netherlands) broadcast tv is a thing of the past already. It wasn't YouTube who killed it, though- it was cable.

    17. Re:It's not rocket science by Taleron · · Score: 1

      Why is the OP modded for trolling? It seems that everywhere I look, broadband prices in the US are inflated compared to Europe. Is it really a surprise that AOL and Virgin are on the high end of the price range in his link? If there's really a reason for the difference, I'd like to know.

    18. Re:It's not rocket science by Shishak · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm talking backbone bandwidth, i.e. what your ISP buys their bandwidth for. Not consumer bandwidth which has heavily overcommitted.

      Cogent is $10/mbps @ 1gbps commitments ($10,000/month) for bottom of the barrel pricing
      Sprint/Qwest/ATT/UUNET all hover between $24-$32/meg for 1gbps commitments ($24,000 - $32,000/month).

      Verizon DSL 3.0mbps is $19.95 so $6.65/mb but they overcommit
      Comcast is 6.0mbps for $49.95 $8.32/mb also overcommited

      My point was, if you actually paid for the bandwidth you use (i.e decicated/not-overcommited) it would run $700/month, not $20/month

      ISPs have to overcommit, customers are idle 90% of the time. it is what makes the business models work.

      New applications (YouTube, BitTorrent, etc) change the business model, someone needs to adapt. the ISP can easily increase the bandwidth available, but can the consumers afford to pay for it?

      OC-768 line cards (40gbps) cost $250,000 each. And the router they plug into costs millions. This stuff aint cheap

      --
      Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
    19. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Using the figures of the parent poster, $1.50/GB is about 15-50 times as much as the bandwidth actually costs. You are being screwed.

    20. Re:It's not rocket science by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Most consumer grade ISP services are sold as 'up to X mbps'. There is no guarantee in availability.

      The issue isn't the connection speed - the problem is the total bandwidth available over a period of time.

      Here in the UK, many of the smaller ISPs are selling accounts with a well publicised bandwidth limit (e.g. 30GB per month on-peak, 300GB off-peak), and making a number of different bandwidth limits available at appropriate prices. If you don't use much bandwidth then you can get a cheaper account, whilest the heavy users pay more. This is a sensible business model.

      However, the larger ISPs still advertise "unlimited broadband". If you're using the word "unlimited" in your advertising then you probably can't complain when people try to max out their connection 24/7. Notably, two of the big ISPs (Tiscali and TalkTalk) have recently been complaining about the bandwidth used by people with "unlimited" accounts using the BBC's iPlayer. They sold something they couldn't provide without running at a loss on the assumption that people wouldn't use it, and now that people _are_ using what they paid for the ISPs are demanding that the BBC pay them to get them out of the hole they made for themselves.

      You agreed to the fine print when you signed up for service so you really can't complain.

      Most of the fine print for "unlimited" accounts just have a hand wavey "subject to fair use" clause with absolutely no indication as to what the ISP believes is "fair use". In any case, it seems like misrepresentation to me - if you advertise a product you can't then have small print that removes the very feature your adverts are using as a selling point. Advertising something as "unlimited" and then imposing limits is illegal.

      You can speak loudly with your wallet, buy services from the few remaining independant ISPs

      I do - I avoid buying from the ISPs who group all users together into a one-size-fits-all account. I'm not interested in a stupidly cheap service that's been overrun by the 24/7 bittorrenters and I'm not interested in a stupidly expensive service that forces me to subsidise the bittorrenters.

      keep the big guys honest.

      I don't hold out much hope for that. The big guys seem to be basically run by marketting departments who believe they will succeed by undercutting the competition and misleading the customer in order to do so. I don't see that this will change (hell, the cellular operators have been doing the same for years and there's no sign of them stopping any time soon) - my only hope is that the small ISPs can hold their own. The masses can stick to their massively oversubscribed AOLs whilest I use a small ISP that knows what they are doing.

    21. Re:It's not rocket science by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

      The days of broadcast television are dying. Things like AppleTV & YouTube are going to kill it. Soon independant television producers will be able to produce/distribute the show directly to the consumer, no need to sell the show to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. You'll be able to subscribe to the shows and download them. All of that is unicast traffic and it will destroy internet bandwidth ratios.

      You mean just like video killed the radio star? Oh wait...it didn't...and neither will video over the Internet kill traditional broadcast/cable TV anytime soon.

    22. Re:It's not rocket science by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 1

      I've been struck with a sudden car analogy. It's like a dealership selling you a Mustang for the price of a Yugo and getting pissed when you drive fast?

      No.. that's not right. Can anyone think of a better one?

      --
      Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
    23. Re:It's not rocket science by blurryrunner · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What they need to do is instead of caching it locally, they should have set top boxes with large hard drives running bit torrent. Then bit torrent style, distribute the content to the customers. So instead of caching it near your customers, you cache it with your customers.

      This works great, because all the customers are near each other. You would also seed the content centrally, but you wouldn't need gobs of bandwidth from the central office to the customer, just between the customers.

      Too bad ISPs are starting to throttle Bit Torrent--it really is a solution, not a problem. /br

    24. Re:It's not rocket science by ultranova · · Score: 1

      OC-768 line cards (40gbps) cost $250,000 each. And the router they plug into costs millions. This stuff aint cheap

      A good 100mbps card costs $100. To get 40gbps you need 400 of them running in parallel, costing $40,000 total. Still not cheap, but not in the hundreds of thousands.

      Of course the real solution is to get rid of the backbone-centric net structure and use mesh routing, from one (consumer-owned) access point to the next. But if this was allowed, the Big Brother would have harder time to figure out who did what, and we can't have that, now can we ?

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    25. Re:It's not rocket science by LarsG · · Score: 1

      It is like your water utility connecting your house to the water pipe and getting pissed when you have it turned on all the time.

      --
      If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
    26. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Piracy and increasing storage to the rescue. Instead of streaming (re-downloading) the shows/episodes every time you want to see it, just download and store.

    27. Re:It's not rocket science by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 3, Funny

      Let's see you try recruiting with:

      "You will serve up to 15 months at a time in various warzones."

    28. Re:It's not rocket science by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      No, my Bob Sagat stock will plummet. SELL SELL SELL.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
    29. Re:It's not rocket science by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 1

      An ATSC channel consumes nineteen point something Mb/s, but most channels multicast, so that 1080i stream might consume 15--16 Mbs. A lot of stations use even less bandwidth, making the 720p/1080i a sad promise that turned out not to be. But that's MPEG2. Apple delivers 720p24 with 7 Mb/s and 1080p takes about 9 MB/s

    30. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you can't wrap your mind around the idea that joining the Army Reserve might imply actually having to fight...well then you're just the kind of person they're looking for! I'm pretty sure the one weekend a month thing doesn't apply when there's an active, costly war going on and the military is facing a huge manpower crunch. That's when your "Reserve" capacity kicks in I would imagine.

    31. Re:It's not rocket science by shmlco · · Score: 1

      Unless you've failed to notice, large portions of the US are relatively empty. So unless you're proposing that we move large amounts of data from the east coast to the west and back again by meshing over farmer's WiFi networks, I think at least a "few" backbones are going to be needed for city-to-city traffic.

      Some people need to spend more than a half-second on their "solutions".

      --
      Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
    32. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I expect google predicted it. Hence their mass buyup of 'unused' fiber networks.

    33. Re:It's not rocket science by cheater512 · · Score: 1

      $100 for a 100mbit card? I can get 3 good gigabit cards for that.

    34. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      My isp didnt predict shit all, and now that its becoming choked they're calling me up to tell me to use less bandwidth, even though my bandwidth usage (on their highest download/mo option) hasnt really changed and isnt exceeding my capacity. When I tell them I'm acting inside our contract they cap my connection and now I suffer high choke. I call them up, they go "oops how did that happen" and undo it and then switch it back later that day. I feel like a conspiracy theorist or something but this is what's happening. Tragically they are one of two options in town, and the other is potentially worse (an old dsl company). I pray for the day when a real company comes to Vancouver, BC, Canada and shows them how its done - they charge way more than american competitors for worse service/speed.

      Of course, I'm moving to university for next term, and this particular one doesnt fuck around on bandwidth I hear, so I'm happy :D (or I will be, until I have to leave campus)

    35. Re:It's not rocket science by WhatAmIDoingHere · · Score: 1

      Not only is that not a car analogy, but it's not even correct.

      It would be if the water utility connected your house for a single monthly fee and not by gallons used, and got pissed when you actually used the connection that they never set a limit on. Which is how current ISPs operate.

      --
      Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
    36. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People who can't or are not willing to read should just turn on the boob tube and get off this computer network anyway. ISP's should just start routing these requests to dev null.
      I've got five TV's in this house with all of them with 24 hour CNN and the idiots start putting video news on the web. I go online to read the news not watch it.

    37. Re:It's not rocket science by cnettel · · Score: 2, Insightful

      100 Mbit for what medium? Cat5? So, tell me again, how many repeaters are you going to place per mile?

    38. Re:It's not rocket science by Coriolis · · Score: 1

      Um. This might sound radical, but why don't they just charge for the bandwidth we use? Not our potential usage (which is what you're talking about). I mean, I might watch a lot of video on the internet, but I'm pretty sure I don't watch 7TB a month.

      --
      Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
    39. Re:It's not rocket science by Chrono11901 · · Score: 0

      Indeed, it also seems my ISP [Cablevision(Optimum TV,Voice,Online)] knows they cant screw around either, and are putting fiber up like crazy. In fact they RAISED our cap recently, no I only pay 30$ a month for 15down/5up and this is not even their "Boost" package. I get no slowdowns (pulling 1.5 MB/s download as i type this). Now they are trying to phase analog cable out because its a huge waste of channels.

      PS: I guess this is why competition is good, Verizon and Cablevison are duking it out where I live.

    40. Re:It's not rocket science by cibyr · · Score: 1

      My ADSL2+ connects at 10mbps. So by your price, that should run me $300 for unlimited. I'm currently paying $120 for 60GB. Oversubscribe by 3:1 should get me over 800GB with room for profit...

      Somehow I don't think your numbers are right.

      --
      It's not exactly rocket surgery.
    41. Re:It's not rocket science by Ironsides · · Score: 1

      Woops, ok, 19.4mbps for ATSC.

      You give a great example there, but even wit H.264, the HD 720P is below broadcast quality. First off, most of it is low motion, which further reduces the necessary bandwidth. Try putting in some more fast moving stuff and it will break down (think sports). There is some artifacting at about 1:03 into it, that would not be tolerable in Broadcast. (I used to work in TV, I got used to this.) At 1:59, in the lower left and right there are some more problems. I also see some more at about 2:20 with the open blue blocking. At 2:23, the color is having problems with all the red and artifacts I see that should not be there. I noticed a few other things, but those are the highlights that would be intolerable in broadcast. Further, that was completely pre-compressed, where they could optimize the compression and still they had those problems.

      Sorry, but H264 isn't up to MPEG2 at those low bit rates just yet.

      --
      Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
    42. Re:It's not rocket science by Torvaun · · Score: 1

      If there was a gas station that charged a fee per month instead of by gallon because everyone nearby drove Yugos, and then you go buy a Hummer.

      --
      I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
    43. Re:It's not rocket science by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

      Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view.

      Could be either, it just wouldn't be instantaneous.

      As I understand it, pay-per-view on satellite, for instance, is the same show running all day at regular intervals. You pay for it, and have a choice of either jumping right in at wherever it's playing and watching it till the end, or waiting for the next showing to start.

      This would work just as well with multicast.

      You wouldn't be able to watch on-demand or fast-forward the signal. You could pause/rewind it if you had a hard drive in your set top box.

      I'd say you want a hard drive there anyway. You pausing/rewinding should not result in the same data being sent to you twice.

      You will also need massive hard drive caches in your POP to cache as much content as close to your subscribers as possible. Set top boxes with big drives so you can pre-load content using multicast/broadcast techniques (i.e. pre-load the new hit movie on all set boxes and make them available on the release date)

      And with this, I think all those huge pipes really become unnecessary.

      Really, why do most users want big pipes nowdays? Either they want web pages to load faster (in which case, really anything but dialup will work), or they want to use BitTorrent. If we had multicast that worked reasonably well, I think many BitTorrent users would switch, even if the multicast solution cost money.

      FTTH is the obvious answer but that is insanley expensive

      Happening in my small town in Iowa, right now.

      What bothers me is, if people actually continue to use things like BitTorrent, it won't take ten users to saturate this ISP's upstream connection, once they're distributing 100meg connections to every house.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
    44. Re:It's not rocket science by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

      Weather? Weather.com. News? Lots of news sources on the Internet.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    45. Re:It's not rocket science by japhering · · Score: 1

      Really, why do most users want big pipes nowdays? Either they want web pages to load faster (in which case, really anything but dialup will work), or they want to use BitTorrent. If we had multicast that worked reasonably well, I think many BitTorrent users would switch, even if the multicast solution cost money.


      Until the day, every show ever produced is available via iptv..there will still be bittorenters..
    46. Re:It's not rocket science by turbidostato · · Score: 1

      Let's see you try recruiting with:
      "You will serve up to 15 months at a time in various warzones."

      Instead of the sad truth: "You will serve up to 15 months per year in various warzones". Try *that*!

    47. Re:It's not rocket science by TheLink · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but selling fuel is a bit different from selling comms connections.

      When you sell fuel the fuel cost is a substantial part of the price.

      Whereas once you've paid for the expensive comms equipment, sending/receiving electrons down the line doesn't really cost you very much more.

      It only costs you money because someone else you're connecting to is trying to get you to pay for their expensive comms equipment (and for their yachts and private jets).

      So you could get a bunch of people charging each other super high prices but the bulk of it cancels out, and the people at the edges (aka subscribers) are where the real money is extracted from.

      If people are really interested they can go add up all the comms equipment and fibre laying that was required, and then amortize it and then they can figure out how bandwidth can cost and if the Telcos are being "too big a parasite and not enough of a symbiote".

      That sort of thing is usually a regulator's job, but that's not very Free Market Capitalism I guess.

      --
    48. Re:It's not rocket science by utopianfiat · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Fuck that, you know some countries have near-ubiquitous internet in the megabit range, and for a fraction of the cost that the states pays? Cisco is full of shit. The internet ain't heading for a crash (first of all because it's _not possible_). ISPs need to buck up and figure out how to GASP spend money on upgrading their goddamn infrastructure.
      There's money to be made here, but only on people who can fuck their shareholders gently (and give them some smooches too).

      --
      +5, Truth
    49. Re:It's not rocket science by boost1 · · Score: 1

      See, that's what I don't get about the UK and USA. Here in Denmark, 15/1 Mbit flatrate ADSL, at one of the more expensive (but also top quality companies), will cost you $72 a month. And that's with a guaranteed fullrate, meaning that you can download at 15 Mbit, 24/7. It's like this with all the ISP's in Denmark, even the cheaper ones, which only require a little research. My own line consists of a fibre connection 25/25 Mbit, for $72 a month. Somehow they seem able to afford it, and fibre is coming up all over the country, offering faster, lower-latency, and cheaper connections. I just don't get how it is such a problem for the ISP's to deliver full flatrate, when that is what they've promised. As a little side note, I once used the full scope of my connection and generated 8 Tera Bytes of traffic in two weeks and I've never heard anything from my company regarding over-usage. I've had mates who've used 3TB in two weeks on an ADSL line and they've never heard from their ISP either.

    50. Re:It's not rocket science by umghhh · · Score: 1

      I wonder why any new technology has to be such a hummer on existing ones and 'kill' them (more or less ) instantly? In my experience new technologies are the ones that die, not the established ones.
      I still use newspapers and go to cinema occasionally. I do not buy new vinyl but that is because I think I have all I want already on CD and not much new stuff is comoing about worth my money. I still listen to radio and whatever the transport technology I will continue doing so. I do not watch that match of 'traditional' TV but that is because it is crap. Why would I want more crap or for that matter more crap over IP??? Why would it matter? That I can chose what I see??? But I can do it now and I still think majority of broadcast information is crap. The crap saturation levels will increase with more channels of distribution.

      What I wanted to say is the following: new technologies come and some of them change the way we do things but majority are incorporated in the way invisible (of seemingly obvious) for a common user so they change something in the way the service is delivered but not the way it is consumed.

      BTW: you say that it is almost impossible to use the service as the way 'we want' and yet you say that this is going to kill traditional TV??? Not very logical, is it?

    51. Re:It's not rocket science by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      And that's with a guaranteed fullrate, meaning that you can download at 15 Mbit, 24/7. It's like this with all the ISP's in Denmark, even the cheaper ones, which only require a little research. My own line consists of a fibre connection 25/25 Mbit, for $72 a month. Somehow they seem able to afford it, and fibre is coming up all over the country, offering faster, lower-latency, and cheaper connections. I just don't get how it is such a problem for the ISP's to deliver full flatrate, when that is what they've promised.

      In the UK, at least, the problem is that the ISPs don't own the local loop. ISPs selling ADSL basically have 2 options:

      1. Pay BT for bandwidth over the BT network. This involves using BT's equipment (DSLAMs, etc) and network bandwidth to transport the traffic to the ISP.
      2. Use an unbundled local loop. This is only possible at certain exchanges (although more are appearing all the time) and involves the ISP putting in their own equipment at the exchange and providing their own network infrastructure to the exchanges.

      Option (1) puts a fixed (fairly high) per-magabyte cost on the bandwidth, which the ISP has to pay to BT.

      Option (2) is cheaper for high population areas, but isn't feasable for areas with a low population density.

      I imagine that the cost of laying fibre to your door is rather too high for most ISPs - I'm not sure why it would be very cheap to do that in Denmark.

      However, I would point out that $72 is rather higher than most residential ADSL connections in the UK. Normal residential connections probably average around 15ukp ($30usd), but are available at well below 10ukp ($20usd). Sure, the 10-15ukp connections are crap and very limited, but if they are sold as "unlimited" most people will buy them rather than spending the extra cash on a $72 connection. Sadly, people believe the false advertising and as far as the general public is concerned, a 10ukp "up to 8Mbps, unlimited" connection is better value for money than a 30ukp "up to 8Mbps, 50GB limit" connection.

    52. Re:It's not rocket science by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      Instead of the sad truth: "You will serve up to 15 months per year in various warzones". Try *that*!


      15 months per year? That's a pretty good trick. When did the Army get time manipulation technology?

    53. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly.

      Some programming will be killed off because of the Internet. Thats a given. However, I prefer to watch Monday Night Football, English Premier League, and about a dozen other channels on the TV because that quality of picture can not be matched by the Internet. Nor will it, within the next 2-3 years.

      And for those of you saying bullshit, show me a Internet site, much less an ISP that provides HIGH SPEED BROADBAND, where I can watch a 1080i broadcast over the net and pipe it to my 46' Sony, all without being crippled by DRM.

      TV Broadcast will exist for well over the next decade. Until the FCC, and Telecomms come to terms that its all the same boat, the public will be the ones who suffer the lag in the communications game.

    54. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Uh...

      AT&T U-verse uses Multicast, and it supports on-demand and pay-per-view in addition.

    55. Re:It's not rocket science by JCSoRocks · · Score: 1

      Additionally, the quality of YouTube videos is AWFUL. It's like the anti-HD. I only watch YouTube when I want to see goofy clips of old movies that I haven't seen in ages. I don't think there's much else on there worth watching.

      --
      You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
    56. Re:It's not rocket science by jagspecx · · Score: 1

      OT but my guard unit (when we were in Iraq) had a running joke about stupid lines from recruiters:

      "So, you like camping...?"

      The irony, of course, being that we made these jokes in a warzone after we had, ourselves, been recruited.

    57. Re:It's not rocket science by Methlin · · Score: 1

      Video (music videos) most certainly did kill the radio star. There hasn't been a new non-photogenic singer with a hit album in decades.

    58. Re:It's not rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When did the Army get time manipulation technology? That's classified.
    59. Re:It's not rocket science by Catmoves · · Score: 1

      Couple of problems with these statements: 1. It seems to me the little resellers are the ones with oversubscription problems. The biggies are still ok. 2. I have yet to discover a cheap price on cable TV. Comcast (the only one I've had experience with) is greedy as hell. I guess if you consider their "introductory special" cheap, you haven't waited til the regular bills kicked in. They are outrageous for the inadequate "service" supplied. But I bet they've got a solution for bandwidth problems: They'll just hike the prices into the stratosphere. After all, somebody's got to pay for the boss's new yacht.

  11. Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted by PhoenixHack · · Score: 5, Informative

    Choice quotes from this article written at the close of 1995:

    http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/me tcalfe/bm120495.htm

    Dazzling product literature and advertising require at least ISDN speeds. But the major corporations upon which we are relying to upgrade Internet access past 28.8Kbps are the local telco monopolies, which like our postal service and public schools have become little more than jobs programs. The local telcos will escape demonopolization in 1995 and, while they pursue long distance voice business in 1996, their motivation to lower costs on high-speed Internet access will wither, fatally constipating the Web.

    You've read that the Internet was designed to survive thermonuclear war, but it's repeatedly been brought to its knees, its circuits choked, for example, by the reaction to one measly jury verdict in Los Angles. The Internet is intermittently overloaded, and the TCP/IP architecture doesn't deal well with overloads. Furthermore, the Internet's naive flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won't be, so no problem.

    One of two bad things will happen with video over the Internet during 1996. Either the Internet's attached computers, operating systems, and applications software will fail to deliver video, or they will succeed. If they succeed, the packet-punctuated pre-Asynchronous Transfer Mode Internet will fail to carry it. In either case, without video the Internet will lack the energy needed to sustain its current expansion.

    The Internet traffic carrying arguments about pornography on the Internet will during 1996 swamp the actual pornography, so even the most sophisticated Web search engines will too often fail to find any. What quicker road to collapse? More gems to be found via http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=imminent+demi se+of+the+internet+predicted...
    1. Re:Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      oh wow and that was written by Bob Metcalfe. I do suppose that coming up with ethernet and working at PARC needn't correlate with an ability to make accurate predictions though... Actually all of his predictions have fairly reasonable basis, he was just assuming that people would make reasonable choices based on the circumstances. And they obviously didn't.

    2. Re:Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hmmm ok I'll admit I hadn't read the whole thing when I clicked submit, but I think it was somewhat tongue-in-cheek...

    3. Re:Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted by jez9999 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Dazzling product literature and advertising require at least ISDN speeds. But the major corporations upon which we are relying to upgrade Internet access past 28.8Kbps are the local telco monopolies, which like our postal service and public schools have become little more than jobs programs.

      Damn, it's still just as relevant today!

    4. Re:Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Considering it was something like 2006-2007 before YouTube took off, you could say video over the Internet has, in fact, been a long time coming. And HD video over the Internet? May be a long time still. It's a big jump from YouTube to streaming even 720p regularly.

  12. A link to a thread that links to a fuddy /. story? by plasmacutter · · Score: 1

    sure, soft capping has been in place a long time, and despite hundreds of transferred gigs i have never been told to lay off.

    but i live in the same geographic area as the poster and notice NO changes to the same old bit torrent behavior i've seen for the past 1.5 years.

    i'm leaning toward the "story is fud" conclusion on that allegation. it comes from a single source which fails to link in any mass testimonials or objective data to prove it's claims, claims which btw run counter to what i've experienced testing their hypothetical "hinderance" of bit torrent seeding.

    --
    VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
  13. What about those previous slashdot articles? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know? The ones talking about increasing internet speeds over copper? I guess bandwidth utilization actually is ouptpacing the deployment of new(expensive) technology. I guess were all in a crunch! It's back to dial-up for me.

  14. It will pass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We went from text only web page to ones loaded with graphics and then mp3 then Bitorrent. Each of these are as worrying as the WebTV in their own times.
    Well, based on our past experience. It doesn't seem it will be much of a problem.

  15. FUD by +Addict-09+ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What a bunch of FUD. Let's all run out and buy more/new routers, switches, circuits so Cisco and the like can see a bump in their stock.

    The amount of bandwidth available internally to a Cableco/Telco and what's generally available between the source (some video streamer) and the ingress of the Cableco/Telco are apples and oranges.

  16. My alternative... by Panaflex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've spoken with a few engineers in the IPTV business... they're al about multicasting and QOS delivery. I'm going to go out on the limb and say... uhhh.... no. Why?

    Because that's NOT what internet TV is all about. Sure, for some content think it's great. Like ABC, Fox, whatever - they can do the multicast. But for the rest of the content providers, it's going to be on-demand. And that solution is really quite simple. And it makes money.

    Basically you take an Akamai like model and extend it. Deploy caching servers right to the ISP's - on the customer doorstep. Offer subscriptions to the customers and the ISP gets a chunk of the monthly. Customers get instant access to the content from the caching server. Content people get a chunk from the number of views statistically. ISP's only have to move content over their uplink once for all their customers nearby.

    Best part is you could do it securely for the media providers, and give people a reason to use the service (more shows, better quality, faster delivery). Eventually you offer sell-up items like movies, sporting events, etc. In other words it would be better than cable, cheaper than cable, and far cheaper to operate.

    There's all kinds of great stuff you could do here - and you could do it on the cheap and make beaucoup bucks. So, ya know... send me a bag of gold hehehe.

    --
    I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
    1. Re:My alternative... by Shishak · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Exactly,

        I expect Apple to buy Akamai and use their network to distrubute iTunes TV/Movies to feed AppleTVs. Once that is in place there is no need to ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX. TV Show producers can sell their show to Apple and bypass the middle man. Straight to the consumer/per-click payments

      My ISP pushes 200-300mbps (not huge by any means) and the Akamai boxes in my network save about 10% of that (20-30mbps)

      Buy Apple & Akamai stock now, they have the tools to flip the broadcasters on their heads.

      This is also why it is so importan to keep Net-Neutrality. If Comcast & Verizon have the ability to rate-limit/traffic shape BitTorrent into oblivion they can do the same to VONAGE/iTunes/YouTube/ etc. The network has all the power/control. It has to be kept open, it has to be a 'public resource'

      --
      Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
    2. Re:My alternative... by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      I'm finding your analysis perceptive. And I'm keeping my eye on the excited new small companies buying their first cool chairs with all the fancy knobs and levers.

      Those of us who actually have a hint on how much providing reliable video download services cost to provide are laughing sadly, and selling our services dear to clean up the messes and salvage *something* out of it. I wish I had a nickel for every recruiter who's tried to hire me the last few weeks for these thngs. I'd have.... enough to pay for nice latte on my way to work. And I'm referring them to my younger, less experienced friends, who can use the resume filler contract work.

    3. Re:My alternative... by Panaflex · · Score: 1

      Well I cut my teeth on secure server deveopment over low bandwidth, got the tshirt and the patent to prove it, heheh. ;-)

      This model they want to deploy is hard to get right. And I don't believe it's the solution for the midterm, especially when you start promising on-demand and HD quality. If you calculate the bandwith for 32 channels, multicast, at 24x7 versus on-demand caching - there's no comparison. Multicast would greatly increase the base bandwidth required to operate an ISP.

      --
      I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
    4. Re:My alternative... by vhold · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think the reason why we won't see that is because the ISPs want to take advantage of their unique position, and basically hold a monopoly on ultra fast and cheap content delivery that doesn't go out over the internet.

      Comcast already has the most comprehensive on-demand services, and it's quite expensive for the end-user. $6 to watch a HD movie. Why would they open up that door to equal competition? As competitors pop up, they'll always be able to undercut them because they don't have to pay a 3rd party for bandwidth.

    5. Re:My alternative... by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 1

      Speaking of Akamai, are there any others who do what Akamai does?

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    6. Re:My alternative... by killbill! · · Score: 1

      Interesting. My brother and I have been developing exactly what you're describing in our spare time. I believe no online distribution system can be successful if ISPs aren't aboard: if they don't get their cut, they'll just kill the quality of service.

      So we've written a BitTorrent extension that uses cryptographic signatures to provide infalsifiable upload statistics. Those upload statistics can then be used to reward uploaders. ISPs can set up the caching servers you're mentioning, and get paid just like any uploader.
      (It is also possible to pay the writers of compatible clients as well, using the same statistics.)

      The code is released under the LGPL. Drop me an email if you're interested! (hgs at killbill.org - please mention /. in the subject) ;)

    7. Re:My alternative... by maeka · · Score: 1

      How do "cryptographic signatures" make upload statistics "infalsifiable"?
      The best I believe you can hope for is to make me use two corrupt clients to fake upload statistics.

    8. Re:My alternative... by Panaflex · · Score: 1

      Google has machines everywhere - I'm pretty sure they have similar capabilities. I'm not sure about Yahoo, but I believe they've got a number of servers out there in the world - mostly at large hosting facilities.

      --
      I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
    9. Re:My alternative... by killbill! · · Score: 1

      Statistics work as follow:
        0. All peers must acquire credentials from the tracker T. Credentials are user-specific and single-use.
        1. Downloader U testifies it has downloaded piece P of file F from uploader U, signs, and sends that to U;
        2. U verifies the statement, signs it, and sends it to T;
        3. T verifies the upload statistics that were provided by U, and credits U's account accordingly.

      Statistics are signed both by the downloader and the uploader. This ensures non-repudiability of statistics. As a result, we can be absolutely 100% positive that any fraud will be caught by the tracker.

      The best you could do with two corrupt clients is to claim to have downloaded a file or part of a file which you actually have not. But in order to do so, you need to purchase download rights in the first place. So yes, you can cheat, but why would you?

    10. Re:My alternative... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do I have this right?

      D and U both have public key pairs issued from T. U verifies D's signature based upon the public key for D U gets from T. U cosigns D's statement and passes it on to T to obtain credit.

      What happens when D legitimately fails to get a packet due to network loss?
      What happens when D refuses to send a testimonial to U?
          Given enough peers U's private black-list isn't going to stop D's abusive behavior.
              If U has the power to globally black-list D, there is another form of abuse potential.

    11. Re:My alternative... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not to be pedantic, but the needed purchasing of download credits is what makes this system hard (not impossible - nothing is impossible - just hard) to game with two corrupt clients, not the cryptographic signing.

    12. Re:My alternative... by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

      Like ABC, Fox, whatever - they can do the multicast. But for the rest of the content providers, it's going to be on-demand.

      Ok, if by "the rest of the content providers" you mean "YouTube", I'd agree. YouTube cannot be done with multicast. The best you can do is a caching network like Akamai.

      But take anything popular enough to make a good torrent, and it's also popular enough, I think, to make good multicast.

      As an example, look at how Pay-Per-View works. If I understand it, I can go onto a satellite box and purchase either a movie already being shown (and start in the middle), or I can buy the next showing and wait for it to start, or I can buy something called an "all-day pass", and then watch the movie whenever I want.

      In fact, take anything that people are willing to wait that long for -- and people put up with NetFlix queues, so it can't be that bad -- and make your entire content library available that way. If nobody's currently watching a particular stream, you aren't broadcasting at all, thus wasting no bandwidth.

      If on-demand is so important, and there's enough bandwidth for it, you could still use clever multicast tricks -- let someone start a second broadcast, up to a maximum number, and have them "tune in" to the first. That way, if the movie is half done when I start watching, it will download the second half while streaming the first -- after I'm done watching the first half, I can stop wasting bandwidth; the second half is right there. And it doesn't use any more bandwidth from wherever the nearest cache/proxy is to send me that second half, if I understand multicast.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
    13. Re:My alternative... by Panaflex · · Score: 1

      There's no business case there. No customer would willingly pay to upgrade, pay more for the ISP to upgrade their bandwidth and get... a more limited and failure-prone system than they have now.

      What you've describe is workable - but again you're severly limited in the total channel number as it's limited by the smallest connection in the network. With a caching system, as I've described, you're only limited by the customer connection to the ISP in channel count. You could schedule caching update during off-peak hours and provide a more secure system.

      I think the other question is reliability. Multicasting is inherently failure prone - as it depends on a very reliable network to reach all customers in near real-time.

      Lastly, the security of the video stream is questionabl. Multicasting requires a "broadcast" of packets - providing an easy target of attack. Caching would be directly addresses and take advantage PKI without a single key point of failure.

      --
      I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
    14. Re:My alternative... by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 1

      There's no business case there. No customer would willingly pay to upgrade, pay more for the ISP to upgrade their bandwidth and get... a more limited and failure-prone system than they have now.

      I don't think it has to be much more limited. And right now, most customers have nothing or BitTorrent, and BitTorrent is soon going to be impractical for them.

      I think the other question is reliability. Multicasting is inherently failure prone - as it depends on a very reliable network to reach all customers in near real-time.

      Do UDP. Customers which don't get a particular chunk can ask for it again, as they continue to download the rest. If everyone has really, really unreliable networks, and if you're not doing any caching, then it would start to cause problems with your ISP's uplink. Other than that, I think it would work well.

      Multicasting requires a "broadcast" of packets - providing an easy target of attack.

      Sign the packets and they can only DoS you. And I'm hoping you're not suggesting DRM-ing them, as the whole point of this exercise is the assumption that customers will pay for better service.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  17. Web TV? by level_headed_midwest · · Score: 1, Funny

    The summary mentions Web TV choking the internet...didn't that die off a while ago when computers became ubiquitous?

    --
    Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
    1. Re:Web TV? by nysus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, my Mom still has it. Bought the thing in 1997. Still works!

      --

      ---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.

    2. Re:Web TV? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      WebTV is still around, but it's called MSNTV now.

  18. FUD by dashslotter · · Score: 1

    In 1994 an otherwise intelligent EE told me that the pending popularity of the internet would bring it to a halt. At the time I figured, meh, this will actually push the build-out of the infrastructure, it's simple economics. Here we go again.

    --
    I was flipping bits on an abacus, newb.
  19. I smell baloney by nysus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder with telco/cable company this "research" firm was paid by. This bit of disinformation helps support their case for why we need to turn the net into an information superhighway dotted with toll booths. However, there are better ways to do things.

    Isn't funny, that a country of South Korea does just fine with super fast broadband connections many times faster than ours in both directions? No problems there. Unfortunately, this country's moronic embrace of unfettered capitalism and foolish trust in corporations to deliver essential public services is stopping us from seeing the best approach to delivering an infrastructure that will serve people well.

    --

    ---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.

    1. Re:I smell baloney by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Isn't funny, that a country of South Korea does just fine with super fast broadband connections many times faster than ours in both directions? No problems there. Unfortunately, this country's moronic embrace of unfettered capitalism and foolish trust in corporations to deliver essential public services is stopping us from seeing the best approach to delivering an infrastructure that will serve people well.
      How big is South Korea? What's the population density there?

      God, you're dense.
    2. Re:I smell baloney by ScentCone · · Score: 1

      Isn't funny, that a country of South Korea does just fine with super fast broadband connections many times faster than ours in both directions?

      How about trying South Korea's infrastructure in a country that has nearly 100 times the landmass, with a population density that completely destroys the cost effectiveness of close-in networking topographies? Right: it doesn't work. And of course, ask people in the most rural areas of South Korea if they're seeing anything like what someone in a beehive-like apartment building in Seoul is seeing. They're not.

      foolish trust in corporations to deliver essential public services

      Are you saying that fake UFO videos, footage of idiotic junior high school students lip-synching, dogs doing tricks, and pirated re-runs of The Simpsons are an "essential public service?" The bandwidth that's being burned up, here, is being burned up primarily for entertainment. You seem inclined to nationalize/socialize that. You're willing to place control over entertainment infrastructure in the hands of the government so that you can imagine that you'll get it somehow cheaper. I can't imagine what track record, government-wise, you're thinking of that suggests it would cost them LESS to build out and administer fiber to your door than it would for competing businesses to do so... but you're probably in the camp that just hopes that someone who pays more taxes than you do will pick up the tab, because, by making more money than you do, they deserve to pay for your entertainment plumbing, since you're entitled to that Essential Public Service.

      --
      Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
    3. Re:I smell baloney by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's funny, I tend to blame our problems on rather the opposite.

      Why is the US so far behind in internet connectivity? I believe, and a lot of people on Slashdot seem to agree, that it comes from the fact that when you want internet, you can either choose between the phone monopoly, the cable monopoly, or options with severe technical limitations like satellite.

      Why do we have phone and cable monopolies? Because the government didn't trust in unfettered capitalism and instead granted those monopolies because they had this funny idea that it would improve services. And now we're stuck with them, because they're entrenched. Your solution is to replace this government-supported monopoly with a true government monopoly and hope that things will get better? Save me from the help of people like you! Instead, root them out, force them to open their lines, and bring in competition, and we will see vast improvements.

      Here's a great example of how government screws with the system. Where I live, my broadband choices are Verizon DSL or Comcast cable. I went with Comcast because in the end it's cheaper and faster. Now, literally across the street, their choices are Verizon DSL, Cox cable, and Verizon FiOS. FiOS is about 30% cheaper and twice as fast as my Comcast service. Oddly enough, the Cox service is also cheaper and faster than my Comcast service... hmm, I wonder why.... But I can't get either of those. Why? Because the street I live on marks the border between my city and the neighboring city. My city gave Comcast a monopoly on TV services and still will not let FiOS in. As a result, no real competition and I'm paying more for less.

      Now, the situation across the street is just stronger competition between the cable monopoly and the phone monopoly, but at least it's a start, and it's already giving those people much better, cheaper service than what I am able to obtain. Imagine what would happen if the government jumpstarted some capitalistic competition in the sector and we were able to enjoy real competition.

      If you want to see what can happen there, look at France. The government forced open access to telephone lines and as a result there are a whole bunch of competing broadband ISPs and it is common to see speeds of 25Mbit and up, all the way up to 100Mbit in larger cities, all for less than what I'm paying for Comcast's craptastic 6Mbit service.

      And you want to take away the minimal competition we have now and turn it into a true monopoly?

    4. Re:I smell baloney by vertinox · · Score: 1

      How about trying South Korea's infrastructure in a country that has nearly 100 times the landmass, with a population density that completely destroys the cost effectiveness of close-in networking topographies?

      New Jersey and South Korea have about the same population density (1,200 vs 1,000 persons per square mile), yet New Jersey's internet sucks.

      Of course a better comparison would be to ask why Finland (who has a population density of 40 /sq mi) has better internet than us.

      --
      "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
      -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
    5. Re:I smell baloney by vertinox · · Score: 1

      Oh and...

      Are you saying that fake UFO videos, footage of idiotic junior high school students lip-synching, dogs doing tricks, and pirated re-runs of The Simpsons are an "essential public service?"

      Bread and circuses.

      --
      "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
      -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
    6. Re:I smell baloney by yabos · · Score: 1

      If it was all about population densities then there would be many big cities with FTTH but there aren't. There are many big cities in the U.S. and Canada that are highly populated and could easily be upgraded to faster speeds.

    7. Re:I smell baloney by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As long as people live in clusters, number of people per area is a stupid measure. With that measure, the population density of USA would be the same even if everyone there lived in New York.

    8. Re:I smell baloney by Charcharodon · · Score: 1
      Their is nothing capatalistic about the telco industry. It's a heavily regulated partial monopoly, which is why things are moving so slowly in the States.

      There are all kinds of stupid rules about who can provide what and where. Until the FCC starts cleaning house and gets rid of regulations that support the big telco's well never see service improve quickly.

    9. Re:I smell baloney by timeOday · · Score: 1
      The best analogy for wired Internet (including fiber) is sewage, water, and roads. We are not going to have a dozen different fiber networks to each home so we can let the market decide which is best. That is why the "free market" for bandwidth is a failure in the US. Compared to global norms for price and service, we are losing the race and falling further behind all the time. This is not an ideology-based prediction, but actual fact about the current state of affairs.

      Now I guess you can say it doesn't matter because so much Internet usage is recreational. Perhaps you could sit along any Interstate and complain about all the people towing jet-skis and RVs since after all the Interstate highway system was touted during the red-scare '50s for the purpose of national defense, not wasting time. Yet roads (including "unnecessary" travel) are vital to the economy and our way of life. Nothing is better correlated with economic growth than the ease and speed of communication, which for the forseeable future means the Internet.

      I see one possible trump card that might allow an efficient market for bandwidth by private industry, and that is wireless. Maybe eventually it will be good enough, and the spectrum regulated properly so as to create a competitive marketplace. Maybe one day, but not yet.

  20. Already crashed... by omgamibig · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

    [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Transaction (Process ID 238) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

    /efytimes/fullnews.asp, line 76

  21. A big thanks to the taggers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    <sarcasm> I'd like to give a big thanks to the many people who are tagging this article with "no". Why, just the other day I was thinking to myself "let's go look at all the slashdot articles about 'no'". </sarcasm>

    People, if you don't agree with a topic, post. Tagging stuff with "yes" or "no" is idiotic and pointless.

    1. Re:A big thanks to the taggers by nova_ostrich · · Score: 1

      But once the "yes" and "no" are there, you know someone will add "maybe", and that's pure comedy gold!

      --
      It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
  22. easy to delay by zmollusc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seeing as tv over the intarwebs will be plagued with DRM and propriatery code, why not have the shitty pointless advertising and tedious channel logo 'establishing shots' cached locally? Hey presto, a 80% reduction in traffic.

    --
    They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
  23. Wait, what? by TheWoozle · · Score: 1
    --
    Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
  24. A better question would be ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 1

    Will Internet TV Crash the Internet?

    Will CEOs with no vision cause the Internet to crash.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  25. Broadband Over Powerlines... by morari · · Score: 1

    That's what we need to deploy more widely. Forget all of these cable and telephone companies, let's further empower the electrical monopolies instead!

    --
    "He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
  26. not likely by NynexNinja · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The internet will never be heading for a "crash", all that will happen is broadband customers will have their packets throttled to whatever limit the upstream provider wants. This has already been happening for almost the last ten years. It's convenient for people who want the broadband providers to upgrade their bandwidth to reference this "crash" idea but it is impossible to ever actually happen due to the traffic shaping already in effect at most (if not all large) ISP's today.

  27. cisco predicts problem if no one buys their gear by timmarhy · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    wow, there's a shocker. tell me why we are giving these turds coverage again?

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
  28. What to do by John+Vai · · Score: 1, Funny

    If I were an isp I'd just send a truckload of war3zed pr0n dvds via standard mail to every customer so they stop pr0ning the bandwidth

    1. Re:What to do by zmollusc · · Score: 1

      Fantastic! Start issuing shares! Will they be on pallets? I have access to a forklift truck. What is a good day for you to start? Will there be package tracking info availible? Can i get a credit note for dups? Do you take visa?

      --
      They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
  29. Do the editors hold shares of LVLT? by Fastball · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is the second article recently where bandwidth shortage has been cited as a threat. Methinks someone scooped up shares of Level 3 Communications well below $5 during Thursday's selloff. It's the ultimate "hope" stock.

  30. Gloom and Doom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If these people really believe what they're saying, I pity them, especially if they are the same ones who said the internet was going to collapse due to other bandwidth or network problems, viruses and worms, or Y2K. Shit happens, but the people with a financial stake and ownership of the problem deal with it, the "analysts" and "experts" just pat themselves on the back even when they're proven wrong.

  31. The internet was going to collapse 11 years ago! by coryking · · Score: 1
    I thought the internet was going to collapse 11 years ago?

    Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. Here's why there soon will be only World Wide Web ghost pages
    Predicting the Internet's catastrophic colapse
  32. The internet is alive by NewtonCorp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Here in france, you can get 30meg for 30E.
    And it's no crappy bandwith.
    Because here there is a real competion between internet providers.
    The internet is pretty stable even with people uploading and downlonding (up cap is 1meg).

    The probleme is that internet service providers in the US and UK don't want spend money to put in fiber optics...

    In Japan, most of the people get a fiber to there home... And they get 100meg both ways (not 100% sure..) and they don't have problemes...

    The hole internet is going to collapse is FUD. It's only because service providers don't want to evolve.

    1. Re:The internet is alive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wish I could get that, in the UK, about the best deal is £14.99(22) that is'unlimited bandwidth' at a 2 meg download speed (with Throttling). This is because I live in a fairly rural area, so there is no cable, and have to rely on adsl coming down ancient, poorly maintained phonelines. In France, when I go and visit some friends there, they have something similar to what you describe, and they live an area roughly comparable to mine in the UK.

    2. Re:The internet is alive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah it's cheap but you do know that you *don't* have a real 30meg ?

      I leave a country next to yours, and each time I've tested
      your french adsl I've got 2meg for a one advertised at 8meg...

      here I pay a lot 50$ for a 5/1meg but I get what Ipaid for.....

    3. Re:The internet is alive by Jugalator · · Score: 1

      I agree, browsing from here at least, I'd find this a bit more believable if there was at least some *signs* to it going bad in the near future. To the contrary, I am just able to efficiently browse more streaming sites than ever, and I can easily download and upload alike at over 10 Mbps especially in P2P scenarios where I'm not reliant to a single server (for real -- the advertised speed is 100 Mbps), with no monthly caps either. *shrug*

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    4. Re:The internet is alive by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      This is correct.

      In Japan, my friend has had 100/100Mb fiber to her house for a couple of years. It is around 5000 yen (£22) a month. I gave it a try, and it's damn fast, even at peak times. In fact, it's hard to find ways to max it out other than P2P - sadly I my premium Usenet service is based in Europe and the US so that was limiting me to about 60Mb/sec.

      The main problem in the UK is that there is no competition. Most ADSL providers use BT systems, and are thus all subject to BT pricing and so can't really compete in any meaningful sense on anything other than what is jokingly referred to as "customer service". Actually, maybe it's not a joke, maybe they mean that the customer does the servicing themselves? Anyway, cable can effortlessly piss all over the BT offering, so no competition there.

      I suppose there is Local Loop Unbundled ADSL which avoids BT, but it's not available in most places and seems to be having major quality issues. Also, they often want you to ditch BT as your phone provider too, while at the same time being apparently unable to supply a relaible phone service themselves. They of course blame BT but it's really just that their staff are paid minimum wage and are so thick as to be immune to training, so consequently are unable to organise the perverbial piss-up in a brewery.

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  33. Bandwidth is not a limited resource by symbolset · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Available bandwidth is currently deliberately limited by the major incumbents. This manufactured scarcity drives the price up. There is more than enough dark fiber to meet our needs for decades to come.

    The incumbents are about to discover that people will only put up with this for so long before they mandate municipal information infrastructure. Fiber is the bridge to the global economy and building bridges is one of the justifications for government exist. If your state and local governments won't do it, mine will - and your kids will find it that much harder to compete with mine.

    Fiber is not made of some rare mineral. It is processed sand.

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    1. Re:Bandwidth is not a limited resource by Jerry+Beasters · · Score: 1

      Exactly, there is no reason why bandwidth must be so expensive. The fact is as of now we have more than enough bandwidth, it is the companies in charge that are limiting it and charging artificially large amounts of money for the little of it that they are actually providing.

    2. Re:Bandwidth is not a limited resource by phantomcircuit · · Score: 1

      Having available fiber doesn't mean anything. What is expensive is lighting up dark fiber.

      As an example my entire schools was wired for fiber in the 90s but we don't use it. Why? Because it would cost about $200,000 to buy all the networking equipment compared to about $100,000 to rewire the school with cat5 and buy the networking hardware for that (mostly consumer grade routers).

    3. Re:Bandwidth is not a limited resource by asleeplessmalice · · Score: 1
      Bandwidth is to sand as Software is to ... what, a pile of bits?

      The reality is that consumer bandwidth has two components:
      - local access (a 'natural monopoly', where it doesn't make economic sense to have 2+ 'new' high-bandwidth connections to a residence)
      - core transport, where dark fiber and aggregated bandwidth enables competition, i.e. a commodity. IPTV (multicast) and webTV (unicast) require some creative solutions to optimize network utilization and ensure that live feeds work, but nothing is going to slow the growth or crash the core networks for awhile.

      So the 'bandwidth problem' is local access, where the local providers usually act pretty rationally to maximize profit:
      - don't overbuild beyond the market demand, or you lose money
      - design for bandwidth peaks that are tolerable, and no more
      - try hard to minimize costs (e.g. customer support )
      - maximize your market coverage to increase the value of your network as an ad distribution channel
      - do what you can to influence regulatory policy in your favor

      no mysteries, no conspiracies, just capitalism.

      And while there is dark fiber in the core, the problem is laying new fiber to homes. Capital costs for that depend on distance from the CO, density, right-of-ways, etc etc, but are substantial - upwards of $1-3k per household for a reasonably dense suburb.

      So you are a carrier - you probably don't lay fiber unless you're pretty sure you'll get your investment back, which means that you bet on enough subscribers signing up for new services that need fiber. How many of your neighbors are going to pony up an extra $50/month just because their TV comes over fiber instead of cable?

    4. Re:Bandwidth is not a limited resource by mobby_6kl · · Score: 1
      If the fiber cable and the networking equipment is so cheap to buy and set up, why don't you connect a few towns yourself? Considering how overprised must be the monopolies' offerings, you could significantly undercut them while providing better service for the people, and still make a few millions so you could pay all the taxes you'll ever want.

      Fiber is not made of some rare mineral. It is processed sand.
      That alone is worth -1, Insightful. The quad-core Core 2? Processed sand. Cars? That's just processed iron ore, sand, and dead dinosaurs. Same goes for airplanes and helicopters.
    5. Re:Bandwidth is not a limited resource by symbolset · · Score: 1

      If you're with an incumbent provider, you're not going to like this bill(PDF). It may not get through on the first try, but the people will pass it by initiative if the legislature won't. There will be fiber to every home and business.

      If you're not... read the bill anyway. It'll warm your heart a little.

      For new construction not laying fiber to the premises is just negligent. You're in the trench anyway. Lay the fiber.

      So the 'bandwidth problem' is local access, where the local providers usually act pretty rationally to maximize profit:

      Exactly my point. Their profit margins have nothing to do with our need for critical infrastructure. They're milking the consumer for every buck they can get and leaving us further and further behind in the global economy every day. If they won't build us a silicon bridge to the markets of today and tomorrow then they had better get out of the way because we're going to build it without them.

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  34. That will be solved once peer-matching improves by karji · · Score: 4, Insightful

    BitTorrent and eMule could prioritize downloading from people on their ISP's subnet or from people with a low ping/traceroute or the same city.

    Live TV could solve its problem with multicasting.

    Google/YouTube, I don't know how they can solve problems their model creates.

  35. The real problem by sjames · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If indeed the internet is heading for a crash, it won't be IPTV's fault.

    If you want to blame someone, blame the backbone providers who can't (or more likely WON'T) find a way to get the cost of bandwidth into the single digits per meg per month for any reasonable bulk amount. They'll cite all sorts of reasons involving "five nines" availability and blah blah blah, but I would gladly accept 2 or 3 nines availability and be triple homed if I could get decent bandwidth for $9/Mbps/month (consider, even though 2 nines allows for 90 hours a year downtime, the odds of 3 fully seperate circuits all being down at the same time are small). They simply don't want to do that because they like charging way more for a service that mostly runs by itself once set up properly. It is, after all the way IP is designed to operate.

    It's a perfect example of a market failure.

    Were that a possability, ISPs wouldn't have to oversell by more than 10 to 1 to be profitable and so WOULD have the necessary bandwidth to handle IPTV with no worries at all. They would also have a LOT less incentive to cause bandwidth using applications to fail in a plausibly deniable way all the time.

    1. Re:The real problem by Fastolfe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Scaling up bandwidth isn't the final solution, though. As backbones scale up, so do end user connections. You're always going to have bottlenecks. If I'm downloading a DVD over the Internet, that bottleneck is usually my DSL connection. If a thousand people spontaneously decide to download the same DVD (assuming simple unicast), the bottleneck might be at the server's end.

      Unless you know of a way to transfer data infinitely fast, these bottlenecks will always exist and will always constrain bandwidth. The trick isn't an arm's race, it's deploying technologies like QoS to allow services to work as anticipated *despite* a congested link. When your 10Gbit SuperDSL line becomes fully utilized (aka congested) with a BitTorrent transfer, you want your 10Mbit IPTV stream to proceed without any packets getting delayed too severely, right? You have to prioritize. That's what QoS is for.

      Except the extreme net neutrality crowd doesn't want to allow that.

      This problem only exists because some people think the idea of congestion control is evil. (Or people think the idea of providers arbitrarily *degrading* service is evil, but the proposed solution also outlaws legitimate congestion control.) Scaling up bandwidth doesn't solve the problem because certain types of bandwidth-unconstrained services (such as BitTorrent or even a simple HTTP or FTP transfer) will attempt to use as much bandwidth as it can between the hosts. You're going to have a bottleneck (congestion) somewhere. "Infinite bandwidth" is silly. "Lots of idle bandwidth" is stupid and expensive.

    2. Re:The real problem by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I never said it's a final solution, but at this point with bandwidth being overcommitted 100:1, no amount of QoS will even come close to solving the problem. 6-8 Mbps down is adequate for most uses today but 80Kbps (your approximate share of the ISP's upstream bandwidth) is nowhere close. Today's 1Mbps up is not quite adequate (we might be better off with a 4/5 split). There is no Qos or congestion control that can make 80Kbps adequate even with multi-casting once phone service moves to VoIP (consider a 2 teen family) especially when people will inevitably want a webcam feed to go with it soon enough.

      Large scale content-neutral caching at the ISP level would help a lot for other sorts of content (and will STILL be useful even with $9/Mb upstream) but of course, you can't cache a real time videophone conversation.

      The one and only reason net-neutrality advocates object to QoS and congestion control is that they are WELL aware that ISPs will use it primarily to double dip and avoid getting more upstream even if the price drops. Further, they will blame poor application performance on any/everything BUT their own craptastic policies and will deny that they even know what QoS is.

      Further, since it's much easier to plausibly deny poor bandwidth than an outright null routing, you'll see content the isp doesn't like not quite disappearing (since that would be telling) but becoming so difficult to successfully access that most give up on it.

      It's also worth noting that QoS isn't a free lunch either. There isn't a well utilized router anywhere on the net that won't have to be upgraded significantly before it will have the raw power and buffer space needed to actually do QoS. The deeper a packet must be examined, the more silicon you must throw at it. Something has to count those egress tokens and the queued packets have to be put somewhere. There's a reason Cisco is such a big fan of QoS!

      A GOOD way to deploy QoS is on the client side. If MY box that *I* have root access on re-prioritizes traffic then I win. Even incoming bandwidth usage can be sorta managed by playing with window size in TCP.

      It might be that the problem of ISPs playing dirty with congestion control and QoS can be controlled by forcing them to advertise customer share of the upstream rather than the raw line speed. Where that varies by destination or protocol, they must advertise the smallest allocation. That way if they try to sell fast ethernet to the home but only allocate 2.5Kbps per customer, they are forced to advertise 2.5Kbps service and endure the competition (fairly) comparing them to a mid-'80s dialup service.

    3. Re:The real problem by Kjella · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You've fallen for the doublespeak of the anti-net neutrality advocates. I'm fully in favor of me deciding that my 10Mbit IPTV stream should be prioritized when my 10Gbit SuperDSL (what's this, year 2100?) is congested. In fact, they can send these preference upsteam so it doesn't just apply to the last link but throughout their whole network, obviously translated so I only manage my own bandwidth. So if my net bandwidth after bottlenecks is only 100Mbit, I can still give those 10Mbit priority (but obviously not 1GBit of traffic, I can't "steal" bandwidth from other users through the priority system).

      That's not what's happening though. Instead of asking me for my priorities (for which they'd get no money), they're going to the IPTV provider and says "Precious little stream you got there, you wouldn't want anything to happen to it would you?" to get protection money. They know that if consumers see two services, footube and bartube, where one works well and the other doesn't, they'll assume the other service is doing something wrong. In fact it'll be what they're not doing - they're not paying their protection money.

      You do realize that ISPs will have a profit motive to make the unprioritized bandwidth as crappy as possible, right? They want as many as possible to pay for prioritized bandwidth, double-dipping like hell. They know many of their customers are captive, but there's a limited amount of money they can charge anyway. Now they can exploit the competition between companies by charging them to retain that service or be sent off to hellhole net. It violates everything about the structure of the Internet where every website and service is available to me on equal terms, and it should be my choice what to prioritize. Not the ISP, and certainly not extortion fees.

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    4. Re:The real problem by jollyreaper · · Score: 1

      Scaling up bandwidth isn't the final solution, though. Sounds creepy, even without the german accent.
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    5. Re:The real problem by Luyseyal · · Score: 1

      Net Neutrality is mostly dead. With net neutrality going the way of the dodo, cable and dsl TV providers will simply ban other IPTV outlets on their high-speed networks. Other bandwidth hogs like Youtube will have to fork over the cash to get on the high speed network. Cable & DSL will use this cash to beef up their high-speed IPTV connections.

      Network neutrality might have allowed you to have competition in the TV market over your Internet connection. Imagine using/buying Time Warner IPTV over your AT&T DSL connection. Obviously, your broadband provider stands to make more money by locking down your TV choice to their TV offering.

      It won't be just TV though. It'll be VOIP, video on demand, and more. By offering a wide array of features at top dollar, they can fend off the FCC and FTC and effectively shut down all competition from over the Net.

      They will have their fiefdoms and we will have our illusion of choice between two providers (Cable or DSL) with two stacks of largely identical services, paid for by you, me, and Google.

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    6. Re:The real problem by Fastolfe · · Score: 1

      3rd-party CATV-quality IPTV over DSL can only work if the DSL provider tells its routers to prioritize your 3rd-party IPTV stream over your BitTorrent (or whatever) traffic. This will never happen with the status quo, and it will never happen in a truly neutral network. The only way it's going to work is if you give either side the thing that the other side doesn't want them to have. The ISP needs the technical capability of prioritizing packets, but they need to be prohibited from doing it arbitrarily or abusively. Allowing the user to CHOOSE what types of traffic to prioritize over what other types of traffic is a step in the right direction, but technology to do this doesn't exist yet. You can do bandwidth reservations and the like, but you can't propagate that over the public Internet because it will be abused. So you have to do it over private, dedicated network connections set up between IPTV content provider and DSL consumer, and who's going to pay for that? Re-enter the net neutrality debate...

    7. Re:The real problem by Fastolfe · · Score: 1

      There is no Qos or congestion control that can make 80Kbps adequate even with multi-casting once phone service moves to VoIP (consider a 2 teen family) especially when people will inevitably want a webcam feed to go with it soon enough.

      VoIP and webcam-style videoconferencing could work fine in bandwidth-constrained environments. Here it's the prioritization features of QoS, not bandwidth reservation, that makes the big difference. You delay BitTorrent packets to ensure that your VoIP packets arrive in a timely fashion. If you've reached the point where queuing is insufficient and you have to drop packets, it might be OK to drop VoIP and video packets alongside BitTorrent packets. VoIP and video recover with some degraded quality, and other services retransmit.

      Large scale content-neutral caching at the ISP level would help a lot for other sorts of content (and will STILL be useful even with $9/Mb upstream) but of course, you can't cache a real time videophone conversation.

      Agreed, and a good point. But we already have content-neutral caching technology in the form of caching HTTP proxies. But nobody likes proxies because occasionally they're perceived as being slow, and occasionally perceived as delivering stale content. So everybody shift-reloads and all applications add "no-cache" headers to explicitly forbid caching of their pages. Imagine the impact if every ISP had a reliable caching HTTP proxy farm for their customers, and all of their customers used it (kept it fresh)?

      The one and only reason net-neutrality advocates object to QoS and congestion control is that they are WELL aware that ISPs will use it primarily to double dip and avoid getting more upstream even if the price drops.

      ... There isn't a well utilized router anywhere on the net that won't have to be upgraded significantly before it will have the raw power and buffer space needed to actually do QoS.

      I think the double-dipping fear is semi-founded, but consider that you can't do QoS over the (untrusted) public Internet. It will be abused without mercy. If you have some 3rd-party IPTV service that wants CATV-quality service to its customers, and you want to use QoS to make that happen, you have to contract with the individual ISPs and get dedicated connections or, at the very least, arrangements to honor QoS flags from those sources. Who's going to pay for that?

      A GOOD way to deploy QoS is on the client side.

      By the time those IPTV packets have arrived at the customer's premises, it's already traversed the bottleneck (e.g. their DSL connection) and whatever "damage" that could potentially be done to those packets has already been done. QoS decisions must occur upstream of the congestion in order to be of any practical use, which means the ISP needs to be involved.

      I do agree, though, that QoS decisions should be made by the customer. If I want to have my IPTV packets prioritized over BitTorrent, it would be nice to be able to communicate that preference to my ISP's routers, which would then respect my wishes when the time came to choose. That way the ISP can't be accused of making these decisions secretly or without my input, or in such a way that its competitors are locked out regardless of my wishes. But this only covers that last hop. It does nothing to deal with congested uplinks to the ISP's peers. You need special arrangements with the content providers to guarantee prioritized handling. But, oops, that's not a neutral Internet anymore.

    8. Re:The real problem by sjames · · Score: 1

      By the time those IPTV packets have arrived at the customer's premises, it's already traversed the bottleneck (e.g. their DSL connection) and whatever "damage" that could potentially be done to those packets has already been done. QoS decisions must occur upstream of the congestion in order to be of any practical use, which means the ISP needs to be involved.

      That's why client side QoS is limited. It cannot throttle UDP traffic, but it can "wag the dog" for TCP connections by closing the window down to a packet or two and delaying ACKs to approximate the desired incoming packet rate.

      you have to contract with the individual ISPs and get dedicated connections or, at the very least, arrangements to honor QoS flags from those sources. Who's going to pay for that?

      That's a good question. Of course, many ISPs are currently claiming to provide a service adequate for CATV quality even though they not only won't but can't (with their current infrastructure) actually do it. Much cheaper upstream might be a godsend for them since they could then scale up capability before they get caught in their lies.

      The good news is that network hardware is consistantly decreasing in cost. Ten years ago, a GigE PCI card cost $1000 and today mainboards come with 2 or 3 built in. In the same time frame, switch fabrics have gotten 2 orders of magnitude faster for the same price. Nobody even sells hubs these days. Common managed switches often have some routing capability built in. If the telcos would drop their antiquated and way overpriced ATM and SONET in favor of Gig and 10Gig E new buildout would be Cheaper than it is now. For existing connections, a reletively small up front cost would easily expand capacity by a factor of 8 to 10.

      Since large carriers certainly seem to be willing to spend for new routers to let them double dip, we know they can afford to switch over. They could keep half of the savings and pass the rest along for a win-win. If the market was half functional they would already have been forced to do that just to survive.

    9. Re:The real problem by Fastolfe · · Score: 1

      That's why client side QoS is limited. It cannot throttle UDP traffic, but it can "wag the dog" for TCP connections by closing the window down to a packet or two and delaying ACKs to approximate the desired incoming packet rate.

      Until that problem is solved for all types of bandwidth-unconstrained traffic users are likely to see, it's not solved. So great, we can sort of do some hand waving with TCP and hopefully get it to not kill my IPTV stream, but what about other types of traffic? Users aren't going to say, "Ho-hum, my HBO is cutting out because I started up application XYZ. I should have known that would happen." They're going to say, "Dammit, my IPTV service from provider ABC is crap! Every time I start up XYZ it cuts out. My AT&T service doesn't do that."

      Of course, many ISPs are currently claiming to provide a service adequate for CATV quality even though they not only won't but can't

      I suspect something is getting lost in translation here. ISPs can do this if they are the ones providing the service. Since they own the network, they can do all sorts of QoS magic to guarantee bandwidth and latency for their IPTV services right to the customer's premises. There's absolutely no way they can guarantee CATV-quality IPTV for 3rd-party IPTV streams over the public Internet. I'd be interested in seeing the exact wording of this.

      Since large carriers certainly seem to be willing to spend for new routers to let them double dip ...

      I think this is the issue though, unless I'm grossly misunderstanding things. Major ISPs are willing to build out the infrastructure for a QoS-enabled path from content provider to end user. They just expect the content providers to cough up the money to do it. The ISPs aren't going to build out new infrastructure/lines for a trusted QoS path unless they're getting paid for it.

    10. Re:The real problem by Luyseyal · · Score: 1

      And not just your bittorrent -- everyone else's too since you're still constrained at the CO. I never suggested that the net neutrality version was very realistic for the short or medium term, at least barring legislation declaring a split between DSL and Cable infrastructure and information services. There would have to be federal legislation forcing customer-driven QoS to make it happen and even then, it'd still be crappy until better infrastructure could be slowly built out over 20 years.

      However, the machinations and greed involved in this whole story continue to amaze me.

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    11. Re:The real problem by sjames · · Score: 1

      It IS possible to provide CATV-quality service over the public internet IF networks are built up for it. Let's say I'm an ISP and want to do that for my customers. I provide symmetrical 100Mbps connections for them. I oversell 2:1 rather than 100:1 so I advertise truthfully (being that kinda company) 50Mbps burstable to 100. The IPTV company C is on another high quality provider B. As long as I and B take every opportunity to peer (and there are plenty out there) and B has built their network similarly, all of my customers will have HD-CATV quality IPTV from C.

      2:1 oversell is much more expensive to maintain, so perhaps I'd be more profitable at 3 or 4 to one and so would B. So, it's in My and B's best interest to look at doing multicast routing. We get C involved since it's their content that most needs multicasting. We do it BECAUSE we are high quality networks who face strong competition from other high quality networks and we want to do everything we can to be cost effective. The nice part is that we pay the up-front costs ourselves and as a result become more profitable without degrading our service at all (it even improves!).

      It's unfortunate that in a world of $30/meg/month backbone providers neither I nor B will actually provide network servics like the above 2 paragraphs. Even at the 4:1 oversell it would cost me $375/month/customer just for the upstream. Welcome to the world of 40 or 50 to one oversell and IPTV that doesn't work. If my portion of the upstream is only 90Kbps no amount of QoS will let me and all of my neighbors receive video on demand and have two VOIP conversations with video.

      Let's say the video is compressed to 1Mbps and the videophone to 64Kbps each. Even if the video on demand is provided by my ISP (and so doesn't count against the upstream at all) I am still trying to cram 128Kbps through an available 90Kbps. The videophone streams have already been compressed more than I would like, so they're going to be absolutely craptastic when QoS starts dropping packets for me. As soon as someone decides they want to watch a friend's new live TV show from outside my ISP's network, it all falls apart. Even if both conversations end, the live TV show won't squeeze doen to 90Kbps at all. In practice, that means we can watch it if all of our neighbors have gone out to eat or something AND don't have something downloading while they're out, but it will break up and go away without warning when some of them come home. ONLY more upstream bandwidth can solve that.

      I'm not at all saying that customer controlled QoS isn't useful in a well provisioned network, just that it will not make today's vastly oversold poorly provisioned networks work well enough. Ideally, each customer will send QoS requests to their gateway and it will propigate those requests to all of the provider's peering points much like BGP announcements propigate today. Even better, simpe maximum bitrate information propagates THROUGH the peering points all the way back to the originating gateways.

      One of the great discoveries of ethernet is that it is MUCH cheaper to overbuild capacity than it is to slavishly control bitrates end to end like SONET and ATM does. In fact, it tends to cost 10 times less, so if you build capacity to "only" twice what you actually need (to compensate for the introduced statistical uncertainty), it comes in at a fifth the price.

      The fundamental problem is that the backbone providers are providing exactly the opposite of what we need. We need many high bandwidth inexpensive links. IP is designed to tolerate frequent link failures and well designed IP applications and protocols can tolerate a fair bit of latency jitter in such an environment.

      In the U.S., what we GET is few expensive lower bandwidth links with 5 nines uptime and no jitter at all. We pay a LOT for the un-needed 5 nines and no jitter. What's happening is that transit is provided over circuits that were designed for a different application (switched voice communication) based on '70s technology

    12. Re:The real problem by Fastolfe · · Score: 1

      It IS possible to provide CATV-quality service over the public internet IF networks are built up for it. Let's say I'm an ISP and want to do that for my customers. I provide symmetrical 100Mbps connections for them. I oversell 2:1 rather than 100:1 so I advertise truthfully (being that kinda company) 50Mbps burstable to 100.

      Like I said in my earlier post, it doesn't matter how fat you make the connections. There will be a bottleneck somewhere along that path. So I have symmetrical 100Mbits to play with. I flip on HBO-over-IPTV and settle down to watch a movie. Back to the Future is on, and I think, "Hey, I'd like to see the sequels to that." So I fire up BitTorrent and start downloading these off of some random Internet site. This doesn't take very long at 100Mbits, but for the sake of argument let's say that it takes a full minute to download. During this entire time, BitTorrent is attempting to saturate my network connection with packets. It's doing what it was designed to do: give me the best possible download time. So after a few seconds, it's ramped up to nearly 100Mbits, at which point my network connection starts to become congested.

      Pop quiz: what happens next?

      Without QoS, all services are degraded equally, and I lose HBO for a while. This is not "CATV-quality" IPTV service. When I fire up BitTorrent on my cable modem today, I don't lose my TV signal. It doesn't matter how fast you make your connections or your uplinks. So long as you have applications that are geared toward saturating that connection, and no ability to prioritize, it simply can't be done. You might be able to get your end user connections up fast enough that most of your users simply won't be able to find enough data online to download to keep their connection saturated for more than a fraction of a second. You'd side-step the problem because your IPTV stream wouldn't be interrupted for long enough to matter, but this is an arm's race. With all of this bandwidth available to them, content providers will find ways of utilizing it, and then you'll be back where you started.

      Otherwise, I agree with most everything else that you're saying.

    13. Re:The real problem by sjames · · Score: 1

      All in all I agree that QoS is a useful thing so long as it's driven by the customer. It will work best if it can propagate to the originating router or even the server since the best time to drop a packet is before it hits the net. There will always be cases where one application really must have a minimum amount of bandwidth and others in the background that will be fine sharing the remainder amongst themselves. Plenty of apps don't have a handy throttle feature like rtorrent.

      I suppose the summary is that neither increased available bandwidth or QoS alone will solve all of the problems but both together could.

  36. The sky isn't falling by Ankh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In a well-known fairy tale a boy enjoyed the attention he got when he cried out there's a wolf in the village! - but after a while, people stopped listening to him, and when there was really a wolf, no-one believed him, and the wolf stole his shoes and socks and his ipod and ran off with them into the forest.

    The problem with people saying such-and-such will mean the certain end of so-and-so is that, like the boy in the story, they weaken our credulity. What is really meant here is that, if the growth of video downloading continues at the same rate, and no other changes happen, the current system will bog down. And maybe that's true.

    I remember a huge thread on Usenet lasting months and months, or so it seemed, Imminent death of the network predicted, and that was in the early 1980s.

    Yes, video delivery is something to take seriously. The distinction between downloading a movie for later viewing (I would probably want it to be error-free) and watching streaming video (compression is OK, and I'd want the network to drop packets if I got behind, which is part of what IPv6 quality of service is about) might be part of the solution here. Of course, as people get larger desktop screens with higher resolution, the demand even for static images is increasing. 640x480 doesn't cut it for most people today. And most computer users have stereo sound. Or play games in which network latency is significant. Violent games in which you pretend to be a wolf! And videoconferencing, TV-on-demand (as per original article, e.g. joost), and maybe soon 3d holographic pornography is coming.

    The music and video industry would do well to spend a fraction of their current legal bills on researching more efficient delivery. Maybe encouraging deployment of IPv6 multicast, for example, so a single stream can go to thousands of users. Or paid subscription p2p networks. Or cascading servers. For that matter, probably we-who-write-the-standards could help by defining cache protocols that can interoperate with advertising, and can reliably send back access logs, maybe anonymized. Video CEOs, I know you read slashdot :-), how about it?

    But, shouting "wolves stole my socks" or "the sky is falling" won't help. Although if either of those things does happen, make sure to put the video up on youtube, OK?

    --
    Live barefoot!
    free engravings/woodcuts
  37. Internet TV is already here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Uhm people... internet TV is already here. People watch series using BitTorrent regularly, and even entire movies (Sicko for example). It may not usually be called internet TV, but it is. It is here, now, this is no sci-fi anymore. And the internet still works. Perhaps the article is not the sci-fi of the "distopian future" kind but of the "alternate reality" kind?

  38. The solution is multi-casting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Multi-casting is a concept that's been around for over a decade. Instead of streaming the same exact data to customers scattered all over, you send a single stream to multiple major "distribution" points, and from those you then stream to the individual customer. However, you need to "schedule" the broadcasts. True on-demand is the big problem, so what you need to do is tier several "broadcasts" to timeslots, (like every 15 minutes). This way you can use the multi-cast technique rather than have a single different stream for each and every customer. Pausing and playback can be handled via file data caching.

  39. Try that math again with these figures by symbolset · · Score: 1

    100mbps (both up and down!) starting at $39.95/mo

    $30/meg is decent bandwidth, you can approach $10/meg for crap bandwidth but you do get what you pay for.

    Apparently not everywhere.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
    1. Re:Try that math again with these figures by Shishak · · Score: 1

      Yeah, try to use that '100 mbps' of bandwidth and see what happens.

      that is CONSUMER bandwidth, it is OVERCOMMITTED. It has to be. Probably 100:1 which means it is really 1mbps for $39.95

      I can guarantee that you can't run that 100mbps connection full rate, all day and not get shut off.

      With my GigE from Sprint & Level(3) I can, because it isn't consumer grade bandwidth. It is also not $0.3995/mb

      --
      Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
    2. Re:Try that math again with these figures by Doddman · · Score: 1

      That might be a case of they have 1 100mbps line and they rent it out. It doesn't say that you get 100mb line for $39.95.

      What happens when 1,000 people see that ad and sign up for it?

      --
      If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence.
    3. Re:Try that math again with these figures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've got a consumer grade connection. Officially it is a 10Mbps (combined: 10Mbps-download=upload) fiber connection for 39 EUR/month.

      But instead of the limited 10Mbps connection I can download at 26Mbps while simultaniously uploading at 11Mbps. And the usage logs over the last year show an (2 hour) average of 100kbps down and 127 kbps up (with the resp. max at 513 and 446 kbps).

      I haven't heard anything from the provider over the last 2 years (next subscription type is 80Mbps for twice the money). The same for the ADSL line I had before (and there I was filling the upload to the max 80% of the time).

      So there are still decent providers out there (if you are lucky enough to actually have a choice), just don't go with the cheapest ones. When I chose these providers the local cable provider still had something like a 50Gbyte/month cap (but was about 20% cheaper), they abolished those since then (but they try to actively censor and tried to shape torrents).

    4. Re:Try that math again with these figures by cheater512 · · Score: 1

      Yep. I'm in Australia with a isp on a truly unlimited account.

      Its more expensive but definitely worth it.
      They havent bitched at all in the many years we've been with them.

    5. Re:Try that math again with these figures by symbolset · · Score: 1

      I actually have used it. Latency is nice and low, reliability is high. You get fiber to the premises and run Ethernet to your house. Premise wiring is your own problem of course.

      The cheap account at $40/month is metered at 7GB traffic per month, additional at $1.50/GB. Other packages are available and there is a great competitive market full of other retail ISPs. Unmetered 100Mbps point to point is available for, I think, $100/mo. Faster speeds are available too.

      Backhaul is through the county public utility district and from there to the Bonneville Power Administration network so overcommitment of bandwidth is not an issue at all. Nice try, though.

      People need to stop listening to the incumbent providers lies: Density is key, last mile, bandwidth is limited, our quality is better so we deserve to be paid more. The stunning truth is that the biggest cost to a data provider isn't new networks. It isn't maintenance of existing networks. It isn't paying backhaul fees. It's printing and mailing the heinous 17 page bill they send every subscriber, processing the payments and paying the call center in some far off country to ignore their customer complaints.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    6. Re:Try that math again with these figures by ThePengwin · · Score: 1

      That kind of internet still exists in australia!!?!??

    7. Re:Try that math again with these figures by cheater512 · · Score: 1

      Yep. http://www.tpg.com.au/
      You want Business ADSL.

    8. Re:Try that math again with these figures by DarkAxi0m · · Score: 1

      i 2nd that, tpg is the only good ISP i can find in Australia

      they have 7 ADSL-2 Plans, from $30 to $120 (AU) all about $10 apart. All have the same speed, (as fast as you can't the last mile) just different Max MB download caps. When you reach the cap you just get throttled, but still no download limit.

      http://www.tpg.com.au/
      ive heard good things from internode too, but ive never been with them so yeah.


      oh btw if your in Australia, Stay Away from Bigpond aka telstra. They have adsl modems that you cant even setup port forwarding etc, every thing has to be done from telstra's end, more so a telstra tec has to come out each time, sit on the fone and wait for the settings to be put into the modem. At least you can just toss the 'free' modem and buy anything else.

    9. Re:Try that math again with these figures by ThePengwin · · Score: 1

      I am with internode and i say that their service is quite good. But thier plans have gone downhill a small bit with a 10% increase in the past few months. Also im in a very sad part of australia where i have ADSL2 installed (knowing the guy who installed it), yet not turned on. Its very annoying because the prices for adsl2 are much better than their ADSL1 equilivant.

  40. Just reboot it by Cannelloni · · Score: 1

    In case there is a crash every other day, I'd just call the Interwebs and ask the guys to reboot or reinstall it from the original floppy disks.

    --
    Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
  41. What happened to all that "Dark Fiber"? by SpryGuy · · Score: 2

    I seem to recall all this gnashing of teeth about all this wasted "dark fiber" that was laid as 2000 approached and the bubble was growing without bound, that went unused after the dot-com bust. Surely there's already tons of bandwidth lying around out there unused still? Or has that all been used up, quietly, without anyone saying anything about it? I find that difficult to believe.

    --

    - Spryguy
    There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
    1. Re:What happened to all that "Dark Fiber"? by Randseed · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Dark fiber is still out there, and your question is a very valid one. Here's a FAQ I turned up on it:

      Dark Fiber FAQ

  42. No surprise...no problem by JavaBear · · Score: 1

    It seems to me that we get the "The internet is on the verge of impending collapse" every other year, and so far the ISP's have managed to keep up with demand.
    Now, if we could just get rid of all that spam, we'd have enough bandwidth to last the rest of the decade...

  43. How about having ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    one internet for all the dozy brain-dead video/movie/mtv crap and another internet for people who do not need a daily/hourly/minutely dose of video garbage to get along?

  44. Bzzzz Ha Ha Ha Ha by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mmm- mm-mmm MAXX

    MAXX Hed Ed Ed

    MMmm mm

    MAX Headroom.

  45. Re:Effort already being applied to reduce user ... by pthor1231 · · Score: 1

    That link would be a bit more interesting if he wasn't trying to use a consumer, non-business line to do business work. If he was getting contacted by comcast for simply downloading alot of movies from a download service, or youtubing alot or something like that, then yeah, that story would irk me. But from his post, he clearly states he is doing work from his house. It almost makes me mad because he could slowing down my bandwidth by doing work on the same shared connection I'm on.

  46. Web Crash 2007 - all data lost by mkraft · · Score: 2, Funny

    According to ONN the Internet already crashed.

  47. It's ok... by geekinaseat · · Score: 2, Funny

    If it crashes, just reboot it.

  48. Sanity from Cringely? You don't say. by Kadin2048 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I normally avoid anything from Cringely, but in this case I think he's spot on:

    There are no good guys in this story. Misguided and incompetent regulation combined with utilities that found ways to game the system resulted in what had been the best communication system in the world becoming just so-so, though very profitable. We as consumers were consistently sold ideas that were impractical only to have those be replaced later by less-ambitious technologies that, in turn, were still under-delivered. Congress set mandates then provided little or no oversight. The FCC was (and probably still is) managed for the benefit of the companies and their lobbyists, not for you and me. And the upshot is that I could move to Japan and pay $14 per month for 100-megabit-per-second Internet service but I can't do that here and will probably never be able to.

    Despite this, the FCC says America has the highest broadband deployment rate in the world and President Bush has set a goal of having broadband available to every U.S. home by the end of this year. What have these guys been smoking? Nothing, actually, they simply redefined "broadband" as any Internet service with a download speed of 200 kilobits per second or better. That's less than one percent the target speed set in 1994 that we were supposed to have achieved by 2000 under regulations that still remain in place. This sounds like the telcos' modus operandi to a T. Recall a few years ago, when the FCC eliminated some surcharges, and they continued charging them to customers (as "cost recovery fees") until so many people got angry that the Federal government slapped them down? This is just the same thing, writ even larger.

    Although I'm sure there are most corrupt agencies somewhere in the government, I can't think of one that's more bald-facedly corrupt than the FCC. Until we can the whole business and replace it with an organization -- and people -- who have as their mandate the best interests of the citizens of the United States, rather than the telecommunications companies, we're never going to have a first-class communications infrastructure. And the longer we keep the current bunch of bent industry shills and political operatives in place, the worse of a backwater the U.S. will become.
    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  49. Oh no by Nizzt · · Score: 1

    What will we do? Buy more Cisco routers!

  50. email signatures used to be a threat 2 net by barwasp · · Score: 2, Insightful

    then came other 'threats': napster, gnutella, warez, Online radio, DIVX movies, bittorrent,
    Read my lips: Internet can take it

    As long as there is demand for more bandwidth, there is a cable guy happily selling it.

    Cisco's wish to have their customers buying more transmission hardware
    is comparable with Apple's wish for consumers buying more iPhones.

  51. They can't afford to light it by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The cost of the Internet is in the routers, not the fiber.

    1. Re:They can't afford to light it by iampiti · · Score: 1

      It was like 4 years ago but my networks teacher said the same as the parent: We were talking about the capacities of the optic fiber and he said that that wasn't the problem at all, that the problems were to route the ever increasing number of packets.

  52. Don't worry by reboot246 · · Score: 1

    The porn industry will keep the internet from crashing.

  53. Build your own networks by Casandro · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Build your own networks. The time of inefficient routing based on beancounter philosophies should finally be gone.
    It's a pitty when we complain about network speeds yet a packet to your neighbour is likely to travel though another city.

    Set up wireless routers creating meshed networks, and route your network based on common sense and not on what contracts you have with other companies. Build large chunks of networks and then internetwork them via longer radio-links, VPN-tunnels or even dark-fiber.

    Just think of it, there's 56 MBit WLAN out there which can reach about 20 MBit realistically. You have 3 channels in the b/g-Band and even more in the a one.

    1. Re:Build your own networks by qzulla · · Score: 1

      Or another country. I could be wrong but I *think* the *ca routers are in Canada?

      traceroute craigslist.com
      traceroute to craigslist.com (66.150.253.241), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
        1 10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1) 22.291 ms 1.638 ms 3.771 ms
        2 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 24.082 ms 1.962 ms 1.868 ms
        3 bras1-l0.skt2ca.sbcglobal.net (151.164.187.5) 31.73 ms * 22.548 ms
        4 dist1-vlan50.skt2ca.sbcglobal.net (68.120.211.66) 23.247 ms 19.488 ms 20.606 ms
        5 bb2-g1-3-0.skt2ca.sbcglobal.net (68.120.211.228) 20.441 ms 20.123 ms 21.189 ms
        6 151.164.95.235 (151.164.95.235) 26.528 ms 26.26 ms 25.091 ms
        7 te-3-4.car3.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.110.113) 27.405 ms 27.633 ms 26.697 ms
        8 ae-31-55.ebr1.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.102.158) 31.472 ms ae-32-56.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.102.190) 33.515 ms ae-31-51.ebr1.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.102.30) 35.493 ms
        9 ae-78.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.135.14) 27.486 ms 35.326 ms ae-68.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.135.10) 35.201 ms
      10 ae-2.ebr3.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.132.9) 29.445 ms 32.957 ms 36.197 ms
      11 ae-63-63.csw1.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.134.226) 31.439 ms 29.504 ms 34.391 ms
      12 ae-62-62.ebr2.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.134.209) 38.978 ms 39.736 ms ae-72-72.ebr2.sanjose1.level3.net (4.69.134.213) 36.049 ms
      13 ae-4-4.car2.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (4.69.133.157) 30.198 ms 30.304 ms 30.028 ms
      14 internap-ne.car2.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (4.71.44.6) 32.235 ms internap-ne.car2.sanfrancisco1.level3.net (4.78.242.18) 31.369 ms 33.854 ms
      15 border1.ge2-1-bbnet2.sfo002.pnap.net (63.251.63.65) 32.108 ms 32.049 ms 30.915 ms
      16 www.craigslist.org (66.150.253.241) 38.951 ms 30.614 ms 30.29 ms

      That is a LONG way to get about 90 miles.

      qz

  54. Multi-Pay-Per-View by DumbSwede · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view."

    Why can't multi-cast be pay-per-view? You download a key you pay for ahead of time and then decrypt what is streamed to everyone. Moreover you could download a broadcast and then pay later for a key to decrypt it. You could even have the cost for live events go down by how long the delay between the download and buying the key.

    Granted there will be piracy, but for live sporting events this would probably work very well as the pirates wouldn't be able to get the pirated material decrypted quick enough to post, nor post the crack and software for intercepting the broadcast in real-time quickly enough (though some computer savvy users may manage some of the latter).

    1. Re:Multi-Pay-Per-View by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was wondering how multicast can save the day. Its just ameliorating the whole thing. The current implementation in IP-Multicasting isnt anything magic bullet, it will just ensure that the bottleneck is not the source, but somewhere in the middle. Thats just "blame transferred". We need to rethink the way multicast is implemented in IP and that should get into the next internet standard. Do you see the reason why John Chambers gave a bright outlook for the forthcoming years?

  55. adaptec by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh, great, i was going to download a manual from adaptec's site, seems it's not working atm,. so i surf over to slashdot, first thing i read is "Will internet TV Crash the internet?"... well ppl have been watching tv over the net for quite some time now, worked fine until now, great job kids!! :)

  56. The "Internet"?!?!? by Blaede · · Score: 1

    Is that thing still around?

  57. Well duh by aarku · · Score: 1

    If you keep putting too many things into the tubes, the pressure inside will rise and eventually the tubes will explode. I don't know who got into their head that this meant the Internet will "crash" because mostly the tubes are stationary and it is the emails and videos that line up and flow inside of them. Moving things crash. Duh.

  58. First radio... by idries · · Score: 1

    ... and now Video Killed the Internet too??

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Killed_The_Radi o_Star

  59. Finally not a joke by KeepQuiet · · Score: 1

    1. Scare people that internet is going down (OMG! OMG!) 2. Sell software & hardware 3. Profit!

  60. US ISPs Suck by maz2331 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why is it that I hear about ISPs in Japan, Korea, and Europe offering bandwidths up to 100Mb/s for prices under $30/month and in the USA we're still stuck in 1999 pricing and speed-wise? Could it possibly be that the PHBs at the various ISP corporations are deliberately screwing us to avoid actually building out their backbone networks properly?? Just asking...

    1. Re:US ISPs Suck by stud9920 · · Score: 1

      Why is it that I hear about ISPs in Japan, Korea, and Europe offering bandwidths up to 100Mb/s for prices under $30/month and in the USA we're still stuck in 1999 pricing and speed-wise?
      Because tentacle porn and Scheisse porn compresses better so the 100MB/s usage is never actually reached.
    2. Re:US ISPs Suck by JCSoRocks · · Score: 1

      Everyone always asks the same of Cell networks too. The answer is simple - Geography. In case you hadn't notice, Japan is about the size of California, and Korea's not exactly huge either. Europe's individual countries are much smaller than the US as well. If you were an ISP and all you had to do to upgarde your entire network was to lay fiber in a densely populated area the size of California - it'd be easy. Everywhere you go with it you're covering gobs of users, new and existing. But that's not the way America is. If you want to link LA to New York you've got to cross 3,000 miles of mountains, desert and sparsely populated areas. Look at Alaska, it alone is the size of 2/3's of the rest of the US. You think there's a lot of money in running fiber all over the freaking woods up there? I've never seen a grizzly pay for broadband. In America it takes -
      A lot more money
      A lot more time
      And the ROI for running fiber / broadband through rural areas is next to nothing

      Don't get me wrong, I hate having a crappy Internet connection, but the reasons are pretty obvious. We live in a huge freaking country and a lot of it is pretty thinly populated.

      --
      You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
  61. Death of the Net, Again. Film at 11. by DynaSoar · · Score: 1

    It was claimed that spam would do it, as well as the sudden growth of the alt.binaries.* usenet newsgroups. I'm guessing that the massive increase in bandwidth useage due to the "junk" newsgroups that became the alt.* hierarchy were also blamed for the impending demise.

    Although they seem to be relatively neutral in most of their pubs, ABI appears to be throwing the industry a bone, with "an ASA investigation into adverts for its unlimited broadband service that as of 31 March 2007 only 1.09 percent of customers exceeded the fair usage policy limitation for its service," and saying it with a straight face.

    --
    "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
  62. From a networking company? by etnu · · Score: 1

    Wait everyone, a company that sells networking equipment is telling us that the Internet will BLOW UP if we don't buy more networking equipment! Also, everyone should buy bottled water because tap water is made out of poison.

  63. yes, it will. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    but it can be fixed for a time, with making video and audio streams from websites illeagel. or all isp's block all ports except port 80. lol

  64. It's that time by wintermute0758 · · Score: 0

    Hrm, apparently it's that time of the month for the "Will X be the death of Y?!?!" article.

  65. how to sell the Huge Fucking Router by viking80 · · Score: 4, Funny

    A team at Cisco decided to build a big router. This was all the engineers wet dream, and management didn't really think it was any need for anything this big. But since this was in the middle of the .com boom, the team got the green light. Engineering called it the "Big Fucking Router" or BFR, and marketing called it "Big Fast Router".

    The 12000 or the GSR was introduced in 1996(?) it was wildly successful, and generated 1 billion dollars in sales the first year, and went up from there.

    As a result, when the engineers introduced their next wet dream, the HFR or "Huge Fucking Router", the argument was "We can build it faster and bigger than anyone will need, and by the time it is introduced it will hit the market window perfect, and with great success"

    The HFR, or CRS-1 is a 100Tbps router. (500 developers for 4 years or $500M).

    Only problem: the boom is over, and few are buying.
    Solution: Create doomsday scenario that only the HFR can cure.

    Just some multiplication: A Youtube stream is 100kbps, so the HFR can handle a billion of these. That is more than there are internet users in the world.

    --
    don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
  66. I don't think so... by turing_m · · Score: 1

    "Read my lips: Internet can take it"

    The internet's not going to take it, anymore. It's got the right to choose and, there's no way it'll lose it! This is its life, this is its song!
    --
    If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
  67. It's due to lack of a "Save" button by aeschenkarnos · · Score: 1
    Sites like YouTube etc generally lack a "Save" button. In fact they go to considerable effort to prevent users from locally saving copies of the videos to distribute. The result of this is that not only does each viewer have to download an individual copy of the video, but if a viewer wants to watch the video again, they must re-download the video. This has got to be driving up the bandwidth costs for everyone.

    Granted, there are ways around this, but they tend to be too technical for the average YouTube viewer to understand, and/or too complicated for them to bother with, and are subject to constant attempts by the content providers to defeat them.

    1. Re:It's due to lack of a "Save" button by DragonTHC · · Score: 1

      it's called a browser cache. Your browser knows it's downloaded that video already and uses the cached version!

      DUH!

      --
      They're using their grammar skills there.
  68. That has already been answered by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "How many of your neighbors are going to pony up an extra $50/month just because their TV comes over fiber instead of cable?"

    Well, I have Fiber to my house in suburban washington, and despite what you're claiming, fiber costs are exactly equal to cable for IP access, but with significantly higher bandwidth, and TV is $20/month cheaper.

    So not to be a jerk, but the reality blows your made-up numbers out of the water. The demand is there for more bandwidth, it's cheaper, somebody has to front the capital costs. You can make a decent argument that this should be public infrastructure, but the problem with that is that this would give the kooks in society a claim that the internet should be censored (for the children, or whatever other cause they give as an excuse).

    The question is how we get all those rural areas hooked up to fiber.

  69. Buffering, please wait... by Joce640k · · Score: 1

    I predict that all that will happen is that most people will see enough "Buffering, please wait..." messages to give it up as a bad job. At that point we'll all heave a sigh of relief and say "it was a stupid idea anyway" - which it is.

    Whoever thinks that letting mom put Hi-Def Internet TV on in the kitchen while she's feeding the kids instead of plugging in a $50 USB digital TV receiver please raise your hand.

    Anybody...anybody?

    {...sound of crickets...}

    Can the BBC honestly serve up enough real time HiDef data streams for the whole world (or even just the UK)? With DRM and everything? They're going to need a honking big server for that (I don't think they even exist).

    --
    No sig today...
  70. The router upgrade cycle... by Money+for+Nothin' · · Score: 1

    Dot-com boom
    Cisco: This Interwebnet is big! You need our routers to handle the traffic!
    Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!!

    ca. 2002
    Cisco: The routers we sold you before aren't powerful enough for web 2.0, and soon everybody will be doing everything over the Intertubes. You need Router XP for all that traffic. Oh, and stay tuned for Router Vista edition.
    Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!

    Today
    Cisco: Video big! Big videos! Router XP is puny for video; you need big frames and more memory! Come get Router Vista!
    Big institutions & telecoms: LOL, OK!

  71. And yet they.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And yet they let OJ on MN1.com's IPTV show for four days in a row for a hour each of the days..... Guess that any one can have an IPTV show now days.

  72. Cisco in trouble? by White+Flame · · Score: 1

    Whenever I see an established company throwing out an advertising/PR campaign around no real particular change, I always wonder how much financial trouble the company is in that warrants putting forth such effort to try to drive up sales right now.

  73. The Real Question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just my 2 cents, but....

    I think the real question here is whether or not the telecommunications companies faulty/misleading/corrupt/criminal/idiotic business practices are catching up to them. We all are well aware that one has to pay for the bandwidth they use, so, as logic follows the companies which sell us that bandwidth should have the reasonable capabilities to deliver on that purchased bandwidth. (which by extension is also why the whole "we need to charge the major internet services (Google, youtube, ect) more money because they use more bandwidth, is a bunch of crap) The problem is that for years the telecom companies have been massively overselling their bandwidth and hording as much of the profits as they could while skimping out on building their infrastructure to match demand. Its an similar to building a weak bridge to up your profit margin and then crying "poor me" when more than a few people use it and it collapses. From what I hear even when the feds gave them billions of dollars of taxpayer money to bolster their infrastructures they ran it through some destined to fail projects and pocketed the profits. I'm not one for involving the feds in anything when it can be avoided but there needs to be some regulation/punishment structure in place to prevent this abuse. Something that would cut into their precious profit margins, like fines for not delivering their posted bandwidth limits and severe fines for downtime (90-95% of the time, to give them a reasonable amount of leeway for bandwidth spikes/hardware upgrades/). The other option, which is preferable but more difficult, introduce real competition into the market while at the same time wiping out early termination fees. Basically the best way I can describe it is magically allowing a bandwidth customer to choose from a wide array of providers without some local monopoly interfering in any way.

  74. Nope. by WheelDweller · · Score: 1

    Do you guys remember back in the early 90's when bandwidth started to climb? I kept seeing jobs for Cisco. First a "silicon architect", then a little more for integrators, then A WORLD OF JOBS from floor-sweeper to product spokesmen. And the net got a little faster.

    See, since the government has very little control over the net, it's able to grow and expand where it needs to. When the spike comes, bet-your-bottom-dollar there'll be brownouts. But sure as a hundred worlds, when the smoke clears the bandwidth will be found. That's the beauty of capitalism.

    No worries. Just opportunities. A couple of bad-traffic days, but so what? More jobs, more workers, more net!

    Why do people seem to assume the worst of something that has been growing faster every month since about 1990, anyway. And while the bandwidth is clogged, the demand will slow, but it's not life support, guys! :>

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    --- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
  75. 19.2Kbps Modems Will Crash the PSTN by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 1

    Every time telcos (and lately cablecos) want more money and less regulation for their Internet cartel, they whine that bandwidth demand will destroy the Internet. Lately they want to doublecharge popular websites (like Google) to carry their traffic, even when they are not the website's actual ISP. They really want to censor political and other comms that could threaten their power or money control, like AT&T just did to Pearl Jam. So they lie about needing to prioritize their favorite packets (therefore deprioritize or drop the packets they dislike). Rather than just adding more bandwidth, which is what we pay for, which would give them more product to sell (if at a lower price per bps), and which would solve all their routing problems better than more computation on switching ever could.

    When people started putting 19.2Kbps modems on our POTS lines to the PSTN, telcos like Verizon (then still NYNEX) would try to charge us for "data modems" on special "data lines" with "data connectors" (like V.32 serial cables). Because otherwise they'd have to ensure the Central Office clocks were properly synced as master/slave, as required by law. Enough geeks (like me, in NYC's photo district) fought their BS with engineering truth, and they stopped lying. Until 56.6Kbps modems came around, and they tried it again.

    They will always try it, except when (someday, maybe) there's real competition rather than the industrywide collusion. And real geeks will always stop them.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  76. Solution Super Extreme Accelerated Dial-Up by ls354 · · Score: 0

    I have the solution Super Extreme Accelerated Dial-Up aka "SEAD", the internet like you have never seen. Full 56k not 53K you can know experience low latency from 400ms down to 350ms. Call me if interested @ 1 800 pay more

  77. It happend to me, "OMG" call Geek Squad by ls354 · · Score: 0

    So I was using the internet's the other day and out of no reason the internet's crash, I got a "Windows has recover from a serious error" OMG. This maybe true cuz Ted Stevens says the internet is like a series of tubes OMG.

  78. dollars and sense by bigtreeman · · Score: 1

    Well you've put a fairly realistic price on the situation
    the problem is bulk bandwidth cost fueled by high profit levels.
    Bandwidth as a commodity has to become a lot cheaper
    and continue getting cheaper on a logarithmic scale.
    Maybe pricing by quality/time could be more realistic than quantity.
    This might encourage off-peak usage or bursty downloads instead of
    live video to fill holes in demand.

    --
    Go well
  79. Did I just make a wrong turn somewhere? by jcjewell · · Score: 1

    I thought I was on Slashdot.

    I'm utterly amazed that this thread didn't somehow involve porn.

  80. wasn't the answer by airdrummer · · Score: 0

    42?

  81. This is why 'net neutrality' is a stupid idea by kinglitho · · Score: 1

    Forget about arguing whether the internet will "crash." Forget the stories about all the "dark fiber" that's out there. When customers have a choice among copper, co-ax, fiber, and power line internet connections the free market will control the price through competition.

    Customers and content providers alike will migrate to the choice that works best for their needs. Any ISP who tries to increase revenues through double dipping will be the loser.

    Tell the regulators to get out of the way, and watch the best/cheapest/highest bandwidth service result!

  82. a different kind of crash by wikinerd · · Score: 1

    Internet TV will cause the Internet to crash, but not for lack of bandwidth, but for lack of critical thought. Text media give you time to think critically if you do have this ability, but video hinders critical thought, especially when the content providers want to spread propaganda instead of informing the public. That's why TV is full of stupidity.

  83. UDP caching? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's what you need and what you don't get. You can get caching services that will cache *some* UDP protocols but not all because the caching system must know what bits being asked *now* are identical to the bits it has already stored. And that requires knowing the protocol and working out a method to add meta-information otherwise missing.

    If you don't do that, someone could look at half the movie and all you get is the half movie unless you disable or clear the cache and then you're downloading the whole movie again.

  84. WebTV? by gravis777 · · Score: 1

    I had to read the summery a couple of times before I realized that they were talking about TV on the web, not WebTV. I was wondering how 500,000 boxes with 56k modems were expected to choke the internet, or for that matter, download high bandwidth multimedia material.

  85. storage is cheap by Sloppy · · Score: 1

    Install caches, dammit.

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    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  86. bandwidth capability and expense by MikeFM · · Score: 1

    I think the root issue is that at every level of the Internet bandwidth capability isn't growing to expected needs and because of that, and pure greed, it isn't possible for ISPs to offer true unlimited accounts or true broadband speeds comparable to our friends in Japan and similar places.

    A lot of this comes down to a couple factors here in the US.

    A) The people supplying our networks don't want us to have true broadband. These people provide television, telecommunications, etc and they have a conflict of interests with being a basic network provider.

    B) It worked a lot better for our network providers to take huge amounts of tax dollars and never deliver anything. They made lots of money and delivered very little. A perfect example of big government and big business at work.

    C) Our network providers and government have been making an effort to take away the right of non-profits, co-ops, and municipalities to offer network services at better speeds and prices. They don't want competition - especially not competition that could bring up questions about why our spent tax dollars didn't deliver anything useful or that would put at risk big business tv and phones.

    D) ISPs are stupid and have largely chosen not to provide local versions of popular network apps and web services. They haven't even worked with content providers to provide local caching of content. If 100 customers on your local network a day are downloading pretty much the same content from YouTube then that is an easy place to cut bandwidth usage. Instead of fighting BitTorrent why not host a file sharing site on the local network. Most ISPs don't even provide a standard web cache any more. Doh.

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    At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    1. Re:bandwidth capability and expense by ScrewMaster · · Score: 1

      Big business is expected to be dishonest, which is why regulation is important. And, actually, big government and big business did work well enough together for a long time. I mean, AT&T did build a hell of a phone network over the past century, with the Feds keeping a close eye on them, and enforcing standards. The problem now is that Feds have not only fallen asleep at the switch ... they've sold the damn thing! And for a song at that.

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      The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    2. Re:bandwidth capability and expense by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      I think they've got to many mixed interests now. It's became a case of the fox guarding the hen house.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.