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BBC iPlayer Bandwidth Explosion Bodes Ill For ISPs
penfold69 writes "Dave Tomlinson is one of the network gurus at PlusNET PLC, a Tier-2 ISP in the UK. He recently put up a blog post about the ramifications of the BBC iPlayer for the ISP industry in the UK. The post makes some very interesting reading regarding the bandwidth usage triggered by the iPlayer, and raises timely questions about the Net Neutrality debate. The Register also picked up on this story with a good review of who is going to have to pay for all this legal video streaming."
Could we do a better job if we could cache intelligently and do p2p and whatever else made sense in the absence of copyright restraints on the setup?
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
I always thought that BBC had Multicast-BGP arrangement with the participant ISPs? Isn't this perfect application for multicast? It would be nice if bandwidth would only be consumed once, and duplicated at branching points, not unicast from BBC's network to all customers individually.
Skimming the article I couldn't find info on whether this is archived-videos type service like Youtube, or for streaming the same over-the-air broadcast that you could pick on normal TV - assuming the latter since the charts talk about "BBCW_1", (assuming these are channels).
And sometimes demand drives supply.
Speaking as an American, where all our telecoms basically conspire to screw the consumer and offer substandard bandwidth, I long for the day when the demand for bandwidth surpasses the ability of their crappy networks to handle it, sparking an all out bandwidth arms race amongst providers desperate to cater to the needs to demanding consumers. I dream of the slug-like cable and phone companies being driven under by agile local providers...It will get to the point where small networks will be able to compete, because the advantages of a giant infrastructure are of limited use in a local environment.
So pardon me if I don't give a crap if the little ISPs are feeling the pinch. If they'd used a little foresight, they'd have plenty of free bandwidth.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Something "new" on the net => ISPs moan.
I'll admit I flipped over the article only briefly, but it does look like they know where their bandwidth is going.
Now I'm left to wonder why they haven't implemented caching servers for all the popular media sites they log. It seems like in one month it would rather pay for itself.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Most advertise "unlimited bandwidth" or "unlimited transfer". Now that fine-print isn't going to save them.
Live by the marketing hype, die by the same.
Regards,
Website Hosting
I'll pay... or more to the point, I have paid.
"unlimited" was part of the title of my service plan; so, unlimited bits at the contract rate or I get to sue!
There is no neutrality issue; what we are debating is greed(or incompetence coupled with back tracking and lying) in newspeak!
The post makes some very interesting reading regarding the bandwidth usage triggered by the iPlayer
It really wasn't that interesting. He mostly just shows you a bunch of network traffic graphs.
raises timely questions about the Net Neutrality debate.
His argument basically boils down to "Waaa! Customers are actually using their internet connections! The BBC has lots of money, give some of it to us! Waaa!".
This particular ISP may be bitching and moaning but frankly that's because they're discovering they can't compete. Virgin Media (Cable) recently announced a UK-wide upgrade for all of it's customers. My currently 4MB connection is going up to 10MB. I don't hear the any bitching from them, and they clearly wouldn't be doing it if bandwidth was really a problem.
Push the cost off on the end-user and the ISP will benefit. All kidding aside, this would be a pretty huge non-issue if they sucked it up and went to fiber like they have been told to do time and time again. The problem here is capping bandwidth usage in areas where it was previously uncapped encourages users NOT to use a high-bandwidth service like iPlayer which is bad for the BBC's business model as well as many other downloading/streaming sites. Places which allow you to download music and movies legally for pay(iTunes for example)stand to take a huge business cut because people will only download the bear minimum.
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
The BBC pay their ISP, the consumers pay theirs, everyone in between negotiates traffic prices between themselves. Where exactly is the problem?
The only issue I can see is that dishonest ISPs want to keep charging their customers the "Unlimted* Fast** internet for the low low price of $X a month!", whilst either denying them the service being advertised by throttling some traffic, or charging the server side twice, once for the real cost and once for "access to consumers".
It's greed and weaseling out of advertised services, pure and simple.
I've just had an upgrade from Virgin Media to 20Mbps. I do get that speed, too. Trouble is, after I've downloaded a gig or two, I get throttled back to 5Mbps until midnight. Virgin reserve the right to tweak these parameters at their own convenience. I guess that is the future we have to get used to.
I don't really understand where this penny per minute comes from. Ok, the ISPs need to "order more pipes" but wouldn't the move to DOCSIS 3.0 solve this bandwidth problem?
To me, the story attached sounds like the ISPs who didn't move along with the changes fast enough got screwed.
Charge the user reasonable-and-actual costs plus a small profit per GB, perhaps with different charges for peak- and off-peak times.
That should keep the ISPs happy and make people think about the resources they are utilizing.
Just don't gorge the customer.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The reality is that that "extra penny a minute" that they "eat" is because they didn't PLAN on you using the bandwidth that
the ISPs promised you and then seriously overbooked for a major profit. It's not that the claims weren't true on the networking
solutions being better overall- it's that greedy people didn't implement what they claimed and pocketed the extra, we can't seem
to get people to move to things like IP Multicast to shed most of that load, and things like the aforementioned.
I don't go boo-hoo for the ISPs. They knew this was going to eventually happen. They didn't prepare for it. They had the
chance to do the right thing and they didn't- and still aren't. All in the name of large profits- something that nobody can
sustain for long, ever. Nobody gets rich quick save by stealing or dumb luck. Once people start remembering that concept
perhaps sanity will resume...naaahhh...we would never have that, now would we?
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The idea that everything must be monetized to have value is irksome and tiring. This fallacy permeates the article and is, in my opinion, why the article sometimes misses the mark.
I think it's also interesting to note that the main point of the article is "ISPs, who are in the business of selling connectivity and bandwidth, are doomed because the demand for connectivity and bandwidth is large and getting larger." Imagine how silly it would be to say "grocery stores, who are in the business of selling food, are doomed because the demand for food is large and getting larger."
The fact that demand is increasing would be a good sign for most industries. (Perhaps the ISPs view it as a bad thing only because they are so accustomed to over-selling their networks and not having customers actually use what they pay for?) This is not the death knell for ISPs, this is an opportunity for them to compete, expand, and sell more of their product. Until they wake up and understand this, they will keep complaining and deliver shoddy service, I guess. But make no mistake: the consumer thirst for high-bandwidth Internet applications is a good thing.
Crap, I missed Bandwidth Explosion Bodes I and II. Were they any good? Are they available on a Mac?
Are they some kind of guitar hero/FPS mashup?
More music, fewer hits
At least in my area, customers are ALREADY paying, for service they don't even get.
Looked at your Comcast bill lately? I was HOW MUCH???
Tried to download a legal P2P file? Yeah, right.
It's funny how much I and l look alike. At least in my browser.
I have been concerned about this issue since 2002, when I was a cable internet installer and I happened to think one day, "everyone's going to need fibre to the home if all the media companies start streaming things on the net... who's going to pay for that!".
Personally, even though I no longer work for an ISP, I don't believe that ISPs should be left holding the bag when it comes to upgrading their networks, becuase a whole whack of other compaines want to make money by streaming add laden videos. That's totally and completely unfair.
Even today most web pages are cluttered with ads that serve no other purpose than to suck up bandwidth and slow down load times (really, use a text browser and see for yourself how fast the internet CAN be...), which only serves to make ISPs look bad. Take out the garbage (aka ads that hardly anyone actually responds to) and the net as whole would be faster. Take out the video, software, and music downloads too and we've a blazingly fast internet.
If it were possible to create a secondary network that worked seemlessly for day to day actions, like HTML/XML/Forms web surfing, 2MB email and ftp tranfers, and another for the hardcore traffic then ISPs could pay for the day to day network and media companies could pay for the hardcore network. That would be fair.
If I pay someone $10 to dig a rock out of the ground, that rock is going to cost at least $10.
.1gb, you charge them $101 a year.
.5gb.
If a lot of people want the rock, then it may go for $2000. If there are many similar rocks around the world, as soon as prices get too high, other people will start digging up rocks.
So... why does it cost "X" to send 1gb of data?
Is it the underlying physical cost to install the hardware and the salaries of the employees that support and maintain them.
Or is it the scarcity demand?
I.e. Say a cable costs $100 to install, and $100 a year to maintain and can carry 100gb of data.
Then you must charge at least $101 a year.
If you have one user, using
If you have 100 users, using 1gb of data, you charge them $1.10 a year.
If you have 200 users, then you start gambling but can charge them $.55 a year.
Most of the time, you can deliver 1gb to those 200 users because they are on at different times.
Occasionally, if they are all on, you degrade to
It seems to me that a lot of this is about superior caching models.
I can either transmit 100 gb this way.
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
--- 20gb user
or this way
ssss should be spaces but the lameness filter would not allow them.
root..local cache
---20gb ---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
---20gb ---- user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
ssssssss---- 20gb user
etc. 3 more times.
The local cache's and very short lines should be relatively inexpensive.
So-- what am I missing-- where am I wrong?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Anyone who's sat down and looked at their ISP's Fair Use policy will realise that they just aren't set up to provide the speeds they advertise at anything like a decent capacity. Talk of downloads replacing movies is hilarious when your ISP throws a strop when you download more than 5GB (less than one SD DVD!) in a single evening. Seriously, all the bluster about amazing high-speed ADSL networks is completely overstated by the ISPs. They can perhaps provide the advertised speeds of 2Mbps as a peak for a small amount of their customer base at a given time, but the mean network traffic probably only equates to about 128kbps per customer.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well let's flip it around. The ISPs are complaining about the minority who consume massively, when there's no rule against massive consumption? What about the majority of users who are paying for the full buffet but then only consuming the bandwidth equivalent of a light snack? The reality here is that the ISPs want to be able to charge a flat rate to people who underconsume, while charging per GB to people who overconsume, and they shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways. If ISPs want to introduce a consumption-based pricing model, then the cost of access for people who use relatively little bandwidth should go down overall, and somehow I don't see that happening. I have little sympathy for a group of companies that are actively trying to get the best of both worlds at their customers' expense.
I expect we'll see a lot of hybrid models that are really crappy deals for consumers. For example, Bell Sympatico recently introduced bandwidth fees on top of their already uncompetitive monthly prices. Needless to say, the price per GB ($1.50 per) over your plan's cap is also exceptionally high compared to other offerings in the market. If you go to their support site, you can see such hilarious questions as "How much Internet is included in my plan?" Remember, it's not a dumptruck, it's a series of tubes! Perhaps it's no coincidence that I'm switching from Bell to an ISP with monthly rates, bandwidth caps and overage fees that are actually reasonable.
If the ISPs are having trouble reinvesting all those collosal profits in infrastructure then how about we take the BBC problem to its logical conclusion and use the license payers money to fund a nationalised network. I'm only half joking here too. Our government already proved they aren't scared to take other ailing parts of critical structure, like banks, back to their bosom.
The TV license fee is rather similar to most peoples yearly broadband subscription, and previously the BBC has funded distribution as well as content creation out of this budget (Think of a network of very big and very expensive UHF transmitters).
The UK is a small enough island to do it.
Or perhaps these whining ISP's can stop paying the CEOs 3M bonuses and put that money back where it belongs before someone takes their toys away.
I hope the ISPs are logging everything, to conform to requirements about monitoring for terrorist activity ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
so whats the issue? there more than enough bandwidth thanks to the dot com boom and relatively cheap costs of adding more capacity
http://www.telegeography.com/products/gb/pdf/Executive_Summary.pdf
seems some companies are trying to make it appear as bandwidth is a limited resource thats in short supply...
"who is going to have to pay for all this legal video streaming?"
Are we not already paying for our streaming after we sign up for service? I know I get a bill every month for about $50.
Is it really my fault that my ISP hasn't planned their business model to properly support their claims?
What's with the people that run these companies that somehow think that it's a privilege to pay for their service?
To be perfectly honest, I'm looking forward to the day when the wireless market really starts opening up and these land line based companies can no longer compete.
What about public wireless mesh networks? Has anyone put any thought into this kind of development? I would really like to find and get involved in the local development of such a project.
Seems like it can't quite make up its mind what it thinks.
Charge us for what we use.
And then compete on the price you sell us the bandwidth/quota for.
My Journal
Overselling network capacity has been going on since networks were invented. It happens in Cell Phones (which is why emergency personnel often can't use cell phones at a major event) & long distance (at least pre-internet... The telco did not have nearly as many lines going to the long-distance switches as they had to their subscribers).
If there's a change in the usage assumptions underlying the overselling ratio, then the ISPs are going to have to increase capacity. And, that's going to cost money. That money is going to have to come from some place, and there are only 3 potential sources:
(1) The ISP's customer
(2) The remote end
(3) The government
If the answer is (2), then you are, rapidly, going to see free high-bandwidth services disappear, as those service's costs are going to increase. If the answer is either (1) or (2), then at least the customer is going to have to bear an economic cost when he does something that imposes a cost on the ISP. That feedback mechanism, basic in economics, will keep him from wasting bandwidth. If the answer is (3), then both the user and the remote end freeload, each has an incentive to waste bandwidth, which will drive up the cost to the government.
Note that in any of the three options, the customer, in the end, pays -- the only question is who he pays it to: the ISP directly, the ISP through the remote end, or to the ISP, filtered through the tax system. (Actually, under the tax system, he may share that cost with people who don't use the internet at all.)
For every individual who uses iPlayer (or any other streaming application), the provider must send the same packets which that person receives. In basic terms, what comes out has to go in. So it seems to me that the cost to the BBC of sending this data: the £8.8 million quoted in the article, should be the same as the ISP costs for us receiving it. If the ISP pays more, then they just have a worse cost-per-megabyte deal than the BBC, and I don't beleive that.
Unless these figures that the ISPs are quoting have been independently audited, I would say this is just a precursor to the ISPs looking for an excuse to put their prices up.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Firstly, non-UK slashdotters should realise that PlusNet is a pretty lame ISP by most peoples standards, and doesn't have a huge number of users, so can't be taken as a reliable data point.
Secondly, the whole philosophy behind IPlayer is fundamentally flawed. I am a linux user, who pays the three-figure license fee every year. How dare they say I can't use BBC content I have already paid for how I like? I understand that Auntie gets a significant amount of revenue selling its content to overseas networks - but this is unrelated to the Internet. You can't regulate Jonny American downloading the latest episodes of Dr. Who but you can certainly regulate how much an American TV network must pay to show it. The Beeb is listening too much to traditional media types who don't fully grasp how the internet works. They don't understand to have a public TV service (a fantastic thing in my opinion, and most Britons agree with me) you must allow unrestricted downloads. Britons downloading BBC content are simply utilising what they already pay for. Foreigners downloading the content are extending the reach of British culture. Forcing it through a proprietary system is ridiculous.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
There are essentially two problems plaguing the UK, the first is that we don't have particularly good last-mile infrastructure, specifically everyone is on copper lines and as such we're looking at a limit of around 24mbps with ADSL2 if you're lucky enough to be close to the exchange. For us to achieve faster speeds investment is going to be needed to replace all that copper with fibre, that solves the issue of a possible max speed issue that's going to hit the UK hard a few years down the road as other nations advanced their connection speeds and we hit a brick wall.
The second issue is the UK's internet backbone, it's simply not up to scratch and doesn't meet todays requirements in terms of bandwidth. Many people laugh when there are articles about how the internet is going to run out of spare bandwidth, but the fact is in the UK it's happening, the whole reason ISPs over the past few years have gone from true unlimited to heavily capped is because bandwidth is having to be rationed, there just isn't enough room on the backbone for everyone's requirements in an unlimited world.
As such, the UK also needs investment in it's internet backbone and whilst BT is bringing implementing 21CN, whilst I don't know the technical details it seems a mere band-aid fix as some people in the industry have commented that there will still be similar bandwidth caps as today.
It's not an unsolvable problem, on the contrary the solution is there - Japan with a population double that of the UK quite happily handles 100mbps connections to end users with the requirement for caps and their internet backbone falling over as a result. There are plenty of other examples like Sweden, however some may argue that as Sweden only has around 1/10th the UK's population that they don't have enough end users to clog the pipes up, hence why Japan is a much better example. South Korea is a decent example also at around 5/6ths of the UK's population. The core issue is politics and who's going to give up short term profits temporarily for vastly improved long term profits.
The UK simply needs investment in it's internet infrastructure, but it needs everyone work together. BT are semi-interested in updating their backbone but quite rightly they think why should they when it's ISPs and content providers that are going to make the money off of it? The fact is that a one off investment (to ensure net neutrality) by the major players is required - BT, ISPs, the Goverment and yes, possibly even the BBC and other major content providers.
It's all very well ISPs complaining it's costing them a fortune currently, but when they're not willing to give up that money to BT for infrastructure improvements then they can't realistically expect a solution.
One final point is that it doesn't help the goverment wasting ISP's time and money with their threats about getting rid of file sharers. It's all very well the goverment, ISPs and BT whining about the problems the UK has with internet access, but when they're all doing nothing about the problems, or in the governments case, making the problem worse then they can quite frankly shut up and put up. The only downside to that is, it's us, the end users that suffer.
Maybe they shouldn't have sold the world bandwidth they couldn't deliver, then tried to cover up the fact with (un)Fair Usage policies on those who expected to get the service and speed they paid for!
I'm sorry, (ISP), but it's your own damn fault you sold too much to too many people. In every other business throughout the world, selling a service or product you KNOW can't deliver is called Fraud. I hope they hang you all out to dry.
Let the CEO's soak up the cost; they decided on the Snake Oil policy.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
So they spelled it wrong in the title. They're movies of... er... an "educational" persuasion: Bandwidth Explosion Bodies 1-3 (downloadable through your local USENET or bittorrent client).
It's a real problem because the UK infrastructure architecture is plain bizarre.
There are two types of ISPs,
BT / Virgin / Easynet + a few others who have unbundled kit in exchanges and their own pipes to exchanges
Everyone else who resells capacity from the above, who pays a fixed price for capacity irrespective of where in the country it came from.
All that capacity goes back to telehouse where LINX is and all the content and internet exchange takes place.
There is no peering at the local exchanges, or apart from London or Manchester.
So when a two BBC users with the P2P iplayer service but different ISPs, all the traffic goes to London and back again. Even if it's the same ISP the ISP doesn't see it until it leaves the resellers pipes in London at which point it gets shipped back down the pipe it came from. When I downloaded a programme on my laptop that was already on my desktop PC I got a download rate of 500Mbits as it streamed across my internal gigabit LAN - if we had peering at the exchanges and decent ADSL uplinks we should be able to do that within metropolitan areas.
Now this may work itself out - there aren't any really long distances in the UK, so we should be able to run 10Gbit ethernet backhaul between exchanges relatively quickly and cheaply for unbundled providers, but to really do it well we need peering in every major city between the majority of ISPs rather than the current model where every ISP ships all their traffic to London.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Think of the network as a whole. The streaming servers are towards the center, they have lots of bandwidth and very fast connections. The viewers are out towards the edges. They have less bandwidth, and most of it in the download direction only.
Now, you want to get video from the center to those edges. At each branch point, the bandwidth lessens, but the number of clients increases. If you use multi-cast, this is fine, but since we're using point-to-point connections, this makes everything slow. The ISPs on the edge rapidly run out of space on the lines.
P2P doesn't help this because now all those edge people are just putting more back in, further choking the ISP sections.
Wireless makes the problem even worse. Right now, I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody on my segment. With wireless, I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody in the immediate area. Scale it up and now I'm sharing bandwidth with everybody in the whole town. What about public wireless mesh networks? Mesh networks are even worse. With a wireless mesh network, everything is repeated wirelessly, hopping from node to node. This is not too bad if you assume that every node has multiple wireless signals and are highly directional, but since each node only has one wireless signal that is probably broadcast and not directed in any particular direction, now every single transmission takes up 3 or 4 times the bandwidth along the way, since forwarding a packet means repeating it and preventing the original sender of it from talking while you repeat the packet he just sent you...
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The last I looked, most people in the UK have a bandwidth cap for each month. If people are merely using the bandwidth they are entitled to, and paying a premium if they go over the cap (or they get cut off), I'm wondering what the problem is here?
Dear god, some of you lot are retarded. The point is that when factoring in pricing, ISPs have to allow for a significant amount of unused usage per customer which is then used by the heavy customers. If they didn't you lot would all have to pay a stupid amount for connectivity.
Although, you wouldn't, you'd just sign up for the cheaper unlimited option and then come here and moan when they disconnect/rate limit you.
Do some research before blurting.
What the BBC is trying to do has been available in the Netherlands for years: every program that's been broadcast is available here: http://www.uitzendinggemist.nl/
The site is responsive and works great, without any technical rarities.
Here's a concept: How about the people who use the bandwidth pay for it? Well, unless their ISP was stupid enough to advertise "unlimited data transfer", but then that's the ISP's own damn fault.
http://outcampaign.org/
So then what for example, movie distributors get pissed because they aren't able to sell you as many digital movie downloads as you are willing to purchase? Will they get mad at ISPs for forcing people to use brick & mortar options, causing studios to give more of the profit to the middle-man? The internet is used for commerce, and bandwidth-intensive "commodities" will only become more popular. The PS3, XBox 360 and Wii are all using the internet for content distribution, not to mention multiplayer gaming. With the next generation of consoles, will that go down? Does MS plan on giving up on its movie download service too? How about Unbox? Things seem only to be moving into a more bandwidth-intensive direction, and people want to make money. Will it be consumers vs ISPs or will it be content distributors vs ISPs?
Twinstiq, game news
Akamai.
Content Delivery Networks.
CDN, duh!
In other news, I have a few hundred channels available on my DSL set-top box and on my computer through Videolan, oh my fscking god how do they do this? Yeah, it's multiplexed, and VOD is cached somewhere between me and the ISP's offices, GENIUSES.
The Finnish state broadcaster YLE has something similar, except, I guess, better. All the aired programmes are available for one month after the initial broadcast on areena.yle.fi. The streaming system is Windows Media, but it works with VLC and GStreamer (I'm on Ubuntu right now and it worked as soon as I installed the required GStreamer codecs that Totem requested - plug and play). You can save the streamed video if your player supports it (VLC does) so there's no DRM. However, since the servers seem to only stream as fast as is required for real-time viewing, recording the programmes is like recording something off regular television.
If you aren't paying for it. ( yes that was sarcasm ).
Besides, comcast will just throttle it anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I suspect that we'll probably see a temporary reappearance of volume-based pricing for broadband; the current "all you can eat" plans don't make much sense in the days of 100 Mbps last mile connections and vast on-line video offerings. Still, for the average user, prices probably won't be going up since I think $50-$100/month is kind of the limit.
We may also see increases in the prices charged to content providers like BBC.
Business models like Joost, however, are probably going to fail. People may be willing to pay to redistribute free content, but they probably won't want to pay to redistribute corporate ads.
There is a really cool cheap alternative for distributing high quality media that can't be throttled by ISP's, that is 100% compatable with all players, and isn't usually filled with DRM. It's called the Compact Disc. There's also a version that stores video as well.
The BBC trialled a multicast video distribution system quite a few years ago with many of the educational institutions in the UK participating. Unfortunately most of the time it simply didn't work. Incompatible multicast configuration between the parties involved, or no multicast support at all in some networks (many home broadband routers simply can't do it) shot this project dead. The trial was halted not that long ago.
I have very little sympathy for some of the ISPs out there. Many of them simply didn't show interest in the BBC multicast trial. Almost all of them at some point or other have shoveled awful cheap "free" home routers to the public as part of their broadband sign-up incentives.
IPv6 will also give the ISPs an interesting headache I'm sure. Hardly any of these "free" home routers do that either.
is that if you can imatate the p2p software then you can create an underground p2p system that looks exactly like ligitimate p2p activity.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Actually, it's *exactly* like a kilowatt-hour. Plants have certain power capacities, and they run 24/7. They deal with changes in consumption by spreading out the risk, having many customers and pooling power production with neighboring systems on the grid, hoping that as numbers go up the instantaneous usage tends more toward the time-average. You don't hear customers complaining they can't draw the max amperage their house's wiring will take, because they understood that if everyone did that, there'd be brownouts.
Now as household usage trends upward, or more households are added to a municipality, production has to expand. But you don't pay for this. You pay for the electricity you use, and they figure out how to get it to you. Sounds like a perfect model for bandwidth.
here's an idea. someone needs to invent a way to push moving pictures over the aether, in the air! That would be fantastic if it could be done, just think of it, no more of that new fangled "telephone" wires stuff needed going to every house! Think of the vision there..it's like..a tele presence or something! It's magic! Telepresence Vision, the new name!
I think multicast would work well for non-live downloads as well, especially in conjunction with P2P. If the BBC server had a continuous running Multicast stream, then the iPlayer could start downloading at wherever it was in the stream, and then only use P2P to pick up the few stray packets that it missed (due to the fact that there are no resends in a multicast session).
To deal with different speed connections, they could have multiple streams each running at some lowest-common-denominator speed, and staggered in time. That way someone on a 500kbps line would connect to only a single stream, but someone on a 3Mbsp connection, would connect to 6 of them. And of course, they could dynamically increase and decrease the number of streams for a particular show depending on relative demand.
The total bandwidth used by BBC wouldn't be much more than they would be using by seeding a torrent, the amount of congestion in the last mile would be much less than occurs with P2P, and the overall network bandwidth would be greatly reduced compared to individual downloads.
Of course this doesn't work well with video-on-demand, but then again neither does P2P because both give chunks of the file out of order. However, if most of the downloads were automatic due to people subscribing to certain feeds, it would work great.
Realtime streaming sucks. It is inefficient to transmit the same 10 gigabytes separately to multiple nearby destinations. It would be ok if we had staggeringly abundant bandwidth at every hop of the network, but we don't. Yes, it's convenient, but if you demand that convenience, be prepared to pay for it. And don't get slimy and try to get someone else to pay for the consequences of your choice.
If you relax the constraint that it must be realtime, things get a lot better. Multicast is one way. Sharing local caches (keeping in mind that you might have to wait for it to get filled) is another. The only downside is that you might not get to watch the video until the day after you decide you want it. Boo hoo. Tivo and other DVR users seem to be ok with that.
Short term fix: ISPs should deploy squids or something like that. (Hard disk space is dirt fucking cheap, and large ISPs, even if they consider themselves "enterprise class" businesses, can use cheapo consumer hardware for this. Why? Because RAIDs make this stuff reliable enough, and the consequences of a failure are: oh the horror, a cache miss.) Media providers should make damned sure that their gigabyte requests are cacheable.
Longer-term solution: There should be a standard for timeshifted multicast files, so that media providers (e.g. BBC) and media players (e.g. iPlayer, MythTV, etc) can use it. You want the next episode of some show? Fine. After checking and midding on the nearby cache, you go to their server and say so. After a period, probably depending on number of pending requests and their ages, it finally gets multicast. (And of course the ISP's cache will grab a copy too.) A few days later, it's in your local storage. Is it something popular? Fine, maybe you'll get it right away.
What this evolves/devolves into, is essentially the same model as cable TV, except with more dynamic scheduling. Anything you can do with cable TV, you can do this way too, except better.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Release all content to the P2P networks, without DRM, and without watermarks, in an unencumbered format. UK citizens have already bought and paid for this content. Its re-release to the Internet could be the UK's gift of goodwill to the world, and could set a standard for American and other global entertainment outlets to explore.
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nuff said. Grow up. Services cost money. No one's screwing you over.
ISPs lease you a line, sometimes private, sometimes shared. Most businesses, especially those that do video streaming, etc. get a private (non-shared line) and in their contract with the ISPs their bandwidth is guaranteed. Most consumers have shared lines but their bandwidth isn't guaranteed, it just usually is available because most subscribers don't use up their available bandwidth on their leased lines. ISPs sell a company or private individual a line with x available bandwidth of x' available throughput on the line. The line will always have the same capacity but because they oversubscribe they can get away with selling 20 4mbps/384kbps lines per say a DS3 (so near double the throughput of the line itself). If everyone used the their connections the downstream would be completely saturated but the upstream would still be ok, and then consumers would be in outrage over not getting their money's worth. But consumers are already not getting their money's worth because most of them don't use the entirety of their line, and on top of that are getting nickle and dimed for every bit over X bytes/month on an already overpriced 'net connection. This is roughly equivalent to a transportation service selling 150-200 seats on a 75 seat vehicle and then expecting the people who frequently use their service to pay more and/or turning away everyone that doesn't get on the vehicle. Either way the company is at fault and they need to pay for their mistakes, not their customers.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
We have unlimited usage like most countries, but like most countries it's not unlimited. Now that's fair enough in a way when one person is downloading 1TB a month, but if everyone is downloading 5GB per month using iPlayer that is "fair usage" because it's normal usage.
Utah has a subsidised, all fiber network, UTOPIA! It definately has a speed advantage http://www.utopianet.org/why/meter.html at 50Mbps For $59.95/month!!1! http://www.mstar.net/offerings/fastestnet.php All you need is a sizeable municipal bond you too could have this geek boondogle. Fine print - Some providers resever the right to throtle trafic if a few gigs a month is exceeded. BUT for the low low price of 10$ A gig you can have more. You just cant win folks
Ah, "bodes "ILL" This is why sans serif fonts should never be used for lower case headlines.
The ISPs better stop wasting their time with plans for throttling and metering, as the successful ISPs are going to be the ones that see that bandwidth needs are only going to increase, and pressure will soon be put on them not just from the content consumers, but the content providers as well who have a lot more clout-- legal, political and financial. It's quite possible that in time most people will watch their nightly TV programs via internet stream rather than cable channel (which itself has need for increased bandwidth for HD signals). YouTube could go HD, and of course we all can't wait for higher quality ads all over web pages. Advertisers will NOT be happy if the cost of the pipe goes up, and "tiered" services just won't cut it-- you can't have people choosing NOT to watch the latest DRM protected HD internet content because the requisite bandwidth requires the next tier and consequently a lot of extra $$$. The content providers want to make it as easy as possible for you to see their adverts, and tiering them out of peoples price range isn't any way to do that.
No, successful cable companies will probably need to look for new modem technologies that can multiplex the network traffic over multiple cable channels and better utilize the wire for network delivery, rather than trying to squeeze a penny out here and there by dumbing down the services with artificial delays. That, and more fiber. The ones that do that will succeed, while the others will get squeezed out by alternatives that will become available-- better WiFi coverage or a new Googlified 700MHZ technology perhaps.
And, since several cable companies are being grabbed up by media companies (Time Warner comes to mind), many ISPs themselves are going to see the bandwidth need firsthand. It is the wave of the future, and the sooner an ISP stops whining about it and starts upgrading their gear in anticipation, the more likely they'll be around in 10 years...
(Emphasis mine)
Thus, it costs an ISP 30 cents to transmit a half-hour TV show. It seems like passing on this cost to the consumer, at a 1.5X markup, is very acceptable.
I live in the US, and I pay about $50 a month for cable TV, and another $22 for Netflix. If my ISP were to charge me 1.5 cents per minute, it would mean that my combined cable TV and Netflix bills would be worth 80 hours of Internet-delivered video per month.
This 80 hours works out to be about 2.6 hours of TV per day, which is well in line with my viewing habits. Besides, I'll be able to get any programming I want, instead of being limited to the networks that my cable operator chooses for me.
No, I will not work for your startup