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."

Comments

Well, the ISPs are going to have to decide ...

[ScrewMaster]

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.

It's not rocket science

[CarpetShark]

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.

Re:It's not rocket science

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Re:It's not rocket science

[Shishak]

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.

Re:It's not rocket science

[FireFury03]

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.

Imminent Demise of the Internet Predicted

[PhoenixHack]

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...

Re:tag: imminentdeathofthenetpredicted

[Oddscurity]

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."

My alternative...

[Panaflex]

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.

The internet is alive

[NewtonCorp]

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.