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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."
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.
How many times have "experts" predicted the imminent death of the Internet?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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, 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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
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.
The Army Reserve used to advertise:
Then, it became:
Then, it became:
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)
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.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Doing a quick look around at the local market...
p eid=35&kt=323&gclid=COyx-ev4gY4CFQ0eEgoddkfJOw
http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/products.asp?ty
£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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
:-), how about it?
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
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?
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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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
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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.
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).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
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...
100 Mbit for what medium? Cat5? So, tell me again, how many repeaters are you going to place per mile?