Slashdot Mirror
Why the Olympics Didn't Melt the Internet
perlow tips his blog entry over at ZDNet on why the Internet didn't melt when millions of users streamed 480i video for a week. The short answer is Limelight Networks of Tempe, Arizona. "[W]hy the Internet didn't 'melt' is quite simple — [Limelight is] completely 'off the cloud.' In other words, unlike Akamai and similar content caching providers, their system isn't deployed over the public Internet... Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide... so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP's main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP's internal network. In most cases, you're never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video."
don't worry, you can still watch the highlights or if you're in the USA they're here
OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
1. Timezones: The majority of content was encoded outside of the timezone for North America where the traffic was targeted so there was a huge opportunity to store and forward the content, in this case on limelight although it could have been handled by any of the major CDNs such as Akamai or Highwinds
2. I think there was a lot of last second optimizations done at the ISPs to make sure that fingers didn't point at them.
the original article was really speaking to the live streams which cannot be cached beyond a few seconds. Lets pull up the statistics.
http://nbcumv.com/release_detail.nbc/sports-20080814000000-olympicsontrackto.html
22 million streams served, 4 million of which were live streams, and additional 3 million stream served via the mobile platform and other VOD outlets.
Its going to break a lot of records. But i think that the original article and the OP here missed the point totally. If an event of this magnitude can go off with hardly a hitch, then why is it exactly that we need (the ISPs need) traffic shaping, bandwidth caps, and throttling? The ISPs among others have been saying for years that the internet is going to melt under the load of video, and using it as an excuse to add these technologies. The article on ZDnet asks the question.. is it really and we will find out in a few days (article was prior to the olympics). The real question remains that if 22 million videos at an average of 20 minutes per video and an average bitrate of 700kb weren't enough (3.5Million hours of content) in ADDITION to whatever people are doing everyday then 'why do we need traffic shaping and bandwidth management?'
But the major events, the ones that generate huge advertising revenue in the US, are still not streamed, in full or live. That includes gymnastics, women's beach volleyball (man's favorite spectator sport?), swimming (unless you count -- gag! -- synchronized swimming, but most slashdotters probably don't consider that a real sport anyways) and most of the track and field events. They've got some select stuff up once it's already happened, like after Michael Phelps already got his golds, but it's not live. Still, I'm kind of surprised that most of the basketball games are streamed -- you would think they'd want those television ad dollars, too?