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Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
nicholasjay writes "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent."
...my ISP starts punishing me for using the Internet to do legal things that the Internet was designed for?
destroy Slashdot?
It's well on the way - /. just isn't as relevant as it was years back.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Yes. Clearly Netflix will 'destroy the internet'.
"won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world"
I'm moving outside the US next year and I really would love not to have to jump through hoops to keep using Netflix.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Well, that bandwidth is what I pay my ISP for...
The internet exists to be used.
If people use more bandwidth, then providers will adjust prices, install new capacity, and then it will be fine.
I'm more concerned about IP addresses (which is not much) than I am about capacity issues.
If bandwidth cost to netflix increases, then they will slow down bandwidth (so maybe it takes 60 seconds to start a movie instead of 10 seconds). Or maybe they offer a lower bandwidth option.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
First, they've known this was coming for ages. P2P have been around well over a decade and everybody knew people were downloading movies and TV shows and watching them on their computer. It's just hitting bigtime mainstream now and Netflix was the first commercial entity which did it right.
Second, the 'Will Porn/Youtube/Torrents/P2P/Netflix/etc Destroy The Internet?" articles have been around for ages. The providers adapt, the technology adapts.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
... and that is 20% of the internet's bandwidth no longer available to email spammers, too.
win-win
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
destroy ? arent we fucking PAYING for the bandwidth we are using ? so, in short, arent we using MORE of the product the isps are delivering, and they are making more money ?
if they are not INVESTING that money to provide MORE products, therefore supplying the demand, that means they are going totally contrary to the logic of 'free market'.
and excuse me, but that is not us consumers' problem. its their stupidity.
Read radical news here
..the problem is that ISPs have been selling us the "bandwidth" to do this kind of activity for years. Bandwidth is in quotes because "back in the day" if you actually used the bandwidth you were paying for, they suspended your account as the likely reason for a residential user to draw any serious transfer was piracy.
Now there are lots of legitimate "every day" uses that draw the massive bandwidth that ISPs have been using as a big magic number when selling service, and the ISPs can't (or can't for long) handle it.
There are a few solutions I see:
- implement rediculously low caps. You get 15mbps .. but can only download 60GB a month
- upgrade infrastructure, and have consumers pay for the product they are actually getting (that is, if you paid for 15mbps, you can use 15mbps 24/7 if you want).
- take the media industry approach of lobbying and suing everything that moves
And I think we know which two are most likely :(
Remember when the internet bubble burst? People were pumping ooodles of money into fiber optic companies saying, "no matter who wins the internet race the infrastructure companies will be minting money. Remember the shovel makers made money in the gold rush than the prospectors." And when the bubble burst we had thousands and thousands of miles of fiber cables with the unused "dark" fiber strands out numbering the used strands by a huge factor. People were touting numbers as high as 1: 99 lit:dark ratio. So it should be possible to bring them on line and increase the internet bandwidth by orders of magnitude without too much of additional investment. Or so pontificating pundits were prognosticating.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We must encourage our ISPs to go out and buy Sandvine's DPI hardware and encourage them to immediately throttle and slow data streaming from Netflix!
Oh hey, my ISP is offering their own video streaming service...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most ISP's in the US already have a (high) data cap. Whatever you do under that, they will not care. If there were (or are) any ISP's with "unlimited" bandwidth then they will have to change policy also to have some kind of data cap, because they do not get "unlimited" bandwidth from the people they purchase internet connectivity from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The average person has a 60gb cap in Canada. People have quickly found out that they can blow through 1/2 to 3/4's of their monthly cap in a weekend. I'm sure it'll be more interesting as winter rolls around, we like snow, hockey, and all that. But curling up to watch a movie or 4 when it's -40C and snowing out is much better fun. Especially if there's a 30% chance you're going to spend 3hrs shoveling.
But sandvine is a blight on the internet. You can happily hear about all the horror stories(look on dslreports.com) that they've inflicted on Canadians, as ISP's use their equipment to throttle just about everything. Bell enjoys using them after the last mile, before switching to outside networks, even when you're on another ISP. So regardless of what happens, you're still being throttled by bell. Rogers like using it to throttle everywhere, that they think the consumption might be too high, or where growth is outpacing their delayed upgrades.
Om, nomnomnom...
The Internet wasn't "designed for" delivering DVDs. It can certainly handle it, but you should pay for the bandwidth and volume you actually use. High bandwith requirements and high data volume = you should pay more.
i have netflix and the streaming selection is pretty bad compared to the DVD selection. the reason is that they haven't struck deals with most content creators yet.
my cable bill is $130 a month for TV/DVR/Internet/phone and from what i've read approximately $30 of that goes to the content creators. for netflix to offer all the content there is they will probably have to raise their prices as they strike new deals for more content, especially if it will include movies and new TV shows that just played the night before.
if i wanted to dump cable i'd have to pay more for a la carte internet and more to AT&T to increase my cell phone plan to unlimited minutes. it would kill the entire deal since it makes more sense to just pay $10 a month for a DVR
and this theory is based on just he financials of striking content deals. netflix will have to pay a lot more in bandwidth costs as the amount of content increases.
i don't understand the entire streaming fad. it's only around because the cable companies are always a few years behind. with digital/HD cable what you watch on your cable box is essentially streaming except it's a lot more efficient than netflix's TCP/IP over the internet version. the cable companies just need to update their software and service selection
It's interesting that Netflix's success which is seen as a possible downfall of the internet is happening at a time where the industry giants are pushing for cloud-based computing where everything would be done remotely from servers with no localized software.
Never.
Netflix is not Bittorent and has a well defined source which is a commercial entity. So the ISP knows after who it needs to go. Further to this, as it is not P2P traffic Netflix itself has no choice but to grow its infrastructure if it is to retain its service level. Otherwise it will congest its links to ISPs and kill its own service offering.
So Netflix will have to start building its network infrastructure and peer with ISPs close to the user across the US and the globe.
We have already been through this. Before it was Google/Youtube destroying the Internet. Well it did not. Simply Google now has a backbone which can put most tier 1s to shame and peers with anyone anywhere.
Most importantly, the number of links and peerings will increase so the end result will be GOOD for the Internet as it will become more resilient (Assuming ISPs use local/distributed peering not just for Netflix but for the other peering).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I don't find Netflix's selection too bad, personally - then again, I watch a lot of documentaries (seriously, it's got Cosmos AND Ken Burn's Civil War, what more do you need?). As far as the selection being bad, that's not really Netflix's fault so much as it's the content owners.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
...my ISP starts punishing me for using the Internet to do legal things that the Internet was designed for?
Don't you know that you're not supposed to use products for what they're supposed to be used for?
Oh noes! They're taking the bandwidth! Except everyone's being paid, and its still cheaper all around per movie than using the mail. The cable companies are being paid for internet access, the entertainment owners are paid for the right to distribute the content, all the equipment is more than being paid for - and everyone is making a profit.
The fact that it's using 20% of the bandwidth isn't alarming either - a movie is a lot of web pages/email/etc., but everyone involved can afford to keep the equipment running, and do a little infrastructure expansion to get more customers needs met, all to make more profit.
This isn't the end either - the moment some form of mass entertainment can be created that legitimately requires more bandwidth, and a service provider can successfully provide that bandwidth to unseat the other service providers, then they will do that, and will likely use several times more bits per second - and by then it will be even cheaper relative to the gasoline used for mail service.
The real alarm is that this process is making other forms of entertainment less relatively appealing to the masses. The cable companies don't like playing the role of bulk service providers in a realm they prefer to be premium content providers in - and thanks to monopoly powers, they're considering providing a non-neutral-net internet service in the name of "saving bandwidth" to fight Netflix's little game.
Ryan Fenton
This. No movies from the last 5, or sometimes 10 years. The quality of Netflix "HD" content is almost, but not, as good as a DVD. The non-HD content looks really bad even on just a 46" HD TV, which isn't huge by today's standards. Pretty disappointing.
If they ever fix this -- have current movies at good quality -- then the bandwidth required will be HUGE. That could take some adjusting.
Yeah, all teh tubes will clog up and then all the crap (read /b/) will start pouring out.
As a collective "we", yes we're paying for it.
But you're not "unity100 of Borg".
At some point, some of us are going to realize "we" as individuals are paying for the bandwidth usage of others. You look at your ISP bill and realize half of what you're paying (say, $360/year - whatever it is, it's a lot of money out of your pocket) is going to fund someone else's movie marathons. Or maybe it's you enjoying the subsidized streaming video, and I'm deciding to have a chat with my ISP about why I'm shelling out $60/mo for a fraction of a fraction of the bandwidth you're paying the same for.
Hence "net neutrality" - and why it will fail.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
So you mean the ISP companies may have to forgo the multimillion dollar bonuses for c-level executives for a bit and make capital investments in their network with some of their profits? .
(and canada)
There's a few good movies. Moon, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Aliens, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Full Metal Jacket, Serenity (and The show, Firefly). There is a huge amount of B movies though.
SSC
Excuse my trolling for karma here, but there's a good comment below that article that's worth noting (which I only remembered because I saw this article when it was first posted a while ago).
Farhad, Allow me to make one clarification on the Sandvine report cited. While the growth of Netflix has certainly been dramatic, it does not (yet) account for 90% of Internet traffic on any of the networks included in our study. Rather, As you noted correctly, we did see Netflix accounting for approximately 20% of downstream traffic in North America.
The confusion on the 90% stat probably resulted from a misreading of one of the graphs featured in our “Spotlight On: Netflix” on page 15 of our Fall Global Internet Phenomena report. The graph was accompanied with the caption “An average day for Netflix on this network, peaking at 9:30pm” This particular graph (taken from a single network in Canada) shows Netflix traffic throughout the day as a relative percentage of the peak amount of Netflix traffic. In this case, the peak was reached at 9:30pm, so the curve at that point has a value of 100%. The rest of the curve shows how Netflix traffic varies: so we see that at midnight the level of Netflix is approximately 42% of what it was at 9:30pm. In hindsight, I think we probably could have explained this better in our report.
Our Network Analytics product produces these “Time of Day” graphs so that network operators can understand how subscriber usage of various applications, services, or categories of application vary throughout a typical day. Thanks again for the interesting article.
Sincerely, Tom Donnelly, EVP Marketing, Sandvine
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
This makes the "Piracy is destroying the Movie industry" argument null and void if you ask me, as it is evident that more people will stream movies legally than download them illegally...
No, streaming netflix often does NOT have the huge classic movies. It does have some really good stuff on it though, and stuff that changes, so you sometimes do find the big movies. It's got a lot of TV shows (HD quality often) very frequently, a lot of children's material, and also a lot of (for lack of a better word) eclectic stuff on it. I've watched a ton of Werner Herzog films (may not be your thing, but I enjoyed seeing them).
But no, if you're looking to rewatch only blockbusters on streaming, it's probably not for you.
Stop saying bandwidth hogs will destroy the internet.
If you want more bandwidth in the backbone you connect another one of the already laid out fibers or you put a few more fibers into the ground.
Torrents didn't destroy the internet, and neither did youtube or any other of the previous high bandwidth services. This is not a problem.
Perhaps the solution is for ISPs to stop lying about how much bandwidth they can provide? Seriously, they charge Netflix and me to stream movies to me, if they can't provide the amount of bandwidth they're promising, then they need to do something about it.
Unfortunately that something is going to target the consumer because the government lacks the balls to tell a corporation to go fuck itself and compete for business.
I know I'm always streaming Kipper at my house. The dog with the slipper, that's Kipper.
Yes, using the Internet for transporting data between machines will destroy it. We must avoid using the Internet in order to save it so that it will be there for future generations to not use!
As TFA implies, selection has improved greatly over the past year or two.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Streaming Netflix has NOTHING last time I used it on my Roku box. I only found some of the worst b-rated movies and documentaries and a tiny amount of semi-new releases. No Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark...nothing.
I have over 200 items in my instant queue - admittedly there are a lot of kids' shows in there, but there are also a lot of good movies. Foreign movies, documentaries, tv series, etc. Sure, the latest movies and blockbusters aren't there, but there's always something decent (IMHO) available, and the new ones I just get them to send a disc. I really like the streaming service and watch more on there than discs these days. I've already seen Star Wars & Raiders, so I'm not too pressed about having them instantly available.
We knew that we were headed in this direction; Services moving onto the internet, digital delivery, etc. Netflix aren't they only ones, we have YouTube, Hulu, Steam, OnLive!, PSN, Xbox/Windows Live!, every device has some form of app store and streaming video playback. Devices such as the Boxee Box are being built solely for that purpose. If you have any type of clue, you'll know that future applications of internet connectivity will be more bandwidth intensive.
We've been paying our ISPs, phone companies, and cable companies, who, like any other business, is changing to meet new demands and competing to stay relevant. These companies continue to reinvest in their own infrastructure and researching more efficient delivery to meet the demands of consumers. I mean, they're not just sitting around in the middle of this revolution with their thumb up their arse. Right?
Twinstiq, game news
Exactly.
MPAA: Pirates are destroying us! People download movies for nothing!
Lawyers: SUE! SUE!
People: Hey, we'll pay if we can stream them online.
ISPs: WAAH! You're using all our bandwidth!
Lawyers: CHARGE HUGE FEES! SUE!
People: Why don't you ISPs and MPAA folks get together and use all that government money we gave you to invest in more bandwidth, allowing you both to make even more money and keep your customers happy?
Lawyers: I don't see how WE can make money off that. KEEP THE GOV'T HANDOUTS! SUE THE CUSTOMER!
With the very small cap we have in Canada, for instance I just got upgraded from "30GB combined" to "40GB combined", forget viewing movies...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I have a feeling Vint Cerf is going to show up and start apologizing again for limiting us to that small pool of addresses.
coding is life
All they need is a few file servers colocated at major ISPs to handle the most popular movies - this is way cheaper than serving the same enormous files repeatedly around the world. Make a deal with Akamai - problem solved. Or hell just acquire them.
Im just gonna build my own INTERNET. who's with me?
Just as any major shock to a system (biological, mechanical, electrical, social, spiritual) may destroy it if the system doesn't adapt to the stimulus.
I wonder what could be done to help "the internet" adapt to the massive bandwidth consumption that Netflix stimulates.... hmmmmm....
bad enough their stupid flash ads required spanning disks to stream. bad enough that nothing else would load on the page because their stupid flash ad had another five minutes to run at 2 mbps bandwidth.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Just like the automobile destroyed the oil industry... Seriously who makes this shit up?
Sure, if you don't mind sub-par video quality even with their quasi hi-def Netflix is fine (even IF there is STILL a lot of missing content).
When they can stream to me a TV show at 720p with 4-5Mb/s using variable bit rate I'll be happy. Until then I'm not.
I suspect the problem is that ISPs set themselves up for failure by offering unlimited packages. They were so intent on getting subscribers that they didn't think about the implications of heavy usage. And they probably never thought people would be hitting caps in such large numbers.
In the early days of broadband they were probably milking users; people were paying $50 a month for maybe $10 of usage. But now the tables have turned and ISPs aren't raking in what they used to. And honestly, it's entirely possible they're in a situation where they can't realistically upgrade their infrastructure to sustain the increased load.
ISPs probably should have gone with a utility style model from day one. That would mean paying for what you use like every other utility, electricity, water gas and even telephone. And they could have tiered it based on speed, much like a higher fuel octane is more expensive. And this way caps would be a non-issue because heavy downloaders would already be paying for heavy usage.
Of course, this model would also enable ISPs to sneak in rate increases more easily. But really, it seems like a more logical model to me. But at this point I don't see it going over well. And more concerning, if ISPs were to implement this we would all start paying more from the get go.
even the kids selection isn't that good
most of the good pixar movies aren't there. no disney tv shows like little einsteins. it's ok for my 3 year old who hasn't fully memorized all the episodes yet, but for older kids you need cable/dvd or vod
Most ISPs have a monthly usage cap.
Best Slashdot Co
UP, Benjamin Button, Distrcit 9, Paranormal Activity, Zombieland, Moon, Weeds, Lie to me, all came out over 5 years ago? Really? I must have slept in my time machine bed by mistake again.
Good-bye
... did Netflix up the throttling enough to get eat up that much bandwidth. I still get can't a damn movie to stream to my PS3 with decent resolution and/or stopping to re-buffer every 2 minutes.
You go to the big (and maybe even small) ISPs and say "We'll provide you with hardware to store Netflix movies. When customers request movies that are on there, it'll come from those, rather than our servers. We pay all the hardware costs, you save on bandwidth."
Akamai does just this. They peer with all sorts of people to get their cache engines in ISPs. At the university I work at, they came to us. The deal was they'd provide the computers (3 servers last I checked) and a switch. We set up our networking to go to those first. Net effect is when you ask for something that has been cached on there, you get it locally, rather than from one of their server farms. Keeps their bandwidth costs down, our bandwidth costs down, and increases speed. Now not everything is stored there, they host a lot of shit. I don't know how their computers decide what to keep where. Some popular things (like Microsoft updates) I think get auto cached, others I think it is based on demand. However even with just a fraction of their content cached, it makes a big difference in bandwidth.
Netflix may need to start doing the same. I mean video is the ultimate in things that could be multi-cast, except that we want it on demand. Well cache engines work well for that. Since the video never changes or gets updated you push it out when you get it, and then those serve it up to people as often as they want it.
fuck back when I lived in Ontario they had a "sewer tax".. that's right you pay for the frigging sewer underneath your house in addition to your normal yearly federal and provisional tax
What, you think that pipeline is maintained for free? You think they treat your shit and dispose of it for free?
Where I live the sewers are included as a line-item in the water bill, but that’s just semantics. You’re paying for it one way or another.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is what the "Net Neutrality" debate is really all about. All of the other things that have been held up as "Net Neutrality" are red herring thrown out by the telecom companies to muddy the water and stall meaningful debate (and I think their strategy is working very well indeed).
Everyone has seen the high bandwidth requirements coming for at least a decade. The telecom companies have seized on this as their moment to secure their dynasty. They absolutely will not upgrade the infrastructure to support the future until they have guarantees (codified in law, if they have their way) that they can continue raping their customers in perpetuity.
Or perhaps you really believed what your corporate overlords told you: that the election that just happened had to do with "fiscal responsibility" and nothing at all to do with deregulation, lower corporate taxes, and the repeal of laws that are unpopular with corporations.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
My ISP makes a point of saying it - "Streaming movies and TV shows". Right there in it's spiel. All the networks are rigged to favour it - our Last Mile is asynchronous, giving us more downstream than upstream, because they want us to be good little consumers and download content, not upload it.
And now people are making scared noises because it finally worked and people started doing it? And not just scared noises, deploying technical measures to counteract it? My ISP will throttle your connection if you download more than 750MB during "peak" hours ; exactly the time you'd want to be watching a movie. Good luck with that if the stream bandwidth exceeds your new bandwidth limit, which is very likely if it's an HD stream.
While I'm glad they are taking measures to prevent my connection grinding to a halt, I'm rather disappointed that they aren't upgrading their Last Mile enough to support it - especially as they make such a fuss about being "fibre optic" (to the cabinet, not the home, shame).
Streaming Netflix has NOTHING last time I used it on my Roku box. I only found some of the worst b-rated movies and documentaries and a tiny amount of semi-new releases. No Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark...nothing.
1. It is getting better. Roku also has a new Netflix interface that makes things way easier to find.
2. Selection is WAY better than basic cable, which comes in at at least twice the price.
Has Farhad Manjoo ever written a good tech article? I have yet to see one.
My Company - Red Cedar Technology
Your intrepid reported, reporting from 1910...
Many people are reporting the growing difficulty of navigating their horses and buggies through the town streets due to the growing presence of noisy and fast moving motor cars made by Henry Ford. Predictions are that because of this obnoxious growth in motor cards that our highways will become completely unusable within 10 years!
Al Gore created the internet, and he is obviously the only one that can destroy it.
Does your electrical company increase your rates or move to a higher tier if you run appliances all day long? What about your water company?
I can't tell if this question is deliberately naive, intended to be ironic, or if it's straight.
My electric company charges more if I use more kilowatt hours. My water company charges more if I use more gallons. They don't "change their rates", because they already have a rate that's proportional to the amount of product I use. It is the equivalent of an ISP charging a price per GB downloaded.
I've never heard of an electric company with an "unlimited electricity, no cap to usage" rate.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The Internet bubble burst like a decade ago. You might notice things have gotten a bit faster. Back then, I had just gotten broadband, and was in one of the few areas you could. I had 256kbit DSL. That was nearly the fastest you could get, 512kbit was all that was available for a consumer line. Now, a decade later, I have 50mbit cable. My net speed has gotten 100x as fast.
Also then recall that far more people have broadband now. When I got it, I was one of the very select few. Most people who had Internet, were dialup. What's more, the Internet still wasn't a big thing, it was exploding, but there were still plenty of people not on yet. So not only has the speed grown, but the number of people who are on and the number of people who are on at a high speed.
That came from somewhere. Part of it is better technology that does more per fiber, part of it is using more fiber.
You are remembering something for 10 years ago and thinking it applies today, which is not at all true with technology. I'm not saying there still isn't dark fiber, or improvements to be made and so on, but that there was tons of it a decade ago means nothing.
The U.S. is something like 38th in broadband speed.
"Quel est le problème?"
:T:R:A:N:S:
You clearly have not looked at it lately. There is a very robust selection of content. Yes the independent content is large--best way for them to distribute really--however there is also a very large selection of current, recently released to disc content as well. The library of instant streaming content is growing very quickly and at a rate that makes me believe that Netflix could very well switch to primarily if not completely, streaming deliver. Ironically between my wife and I my Blu-ray player is being used more for delivering Netflix streaming than it is for actually playing discs.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
seriously, four billion addresses is almost enough for every man, woman and child on the planet (in 1969) to have one.
You don't honestly believe we would have more computers than people, do you?!!!
Plus, this whole electronic data processing thing is just a fad...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
On the other hand... The A Team, Twilight, Twilight 2, Transformers, Transformers 2, Gi Joe....
No.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
You don't honestly believe we would have more computers than people, do you?!!!
Why not, a lot of people have a couple of mobile phones already, even (or perhaps especially) in poorer countries and it won't be long before all mobile phones connect to the internet.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I hope it will force ISPs to uncap their packages. No point in having a Netstream account and try to steam when you have a pathetic 20GB (or so) limit.
You don't honestly believe we would have more computers than people, do you?!!! .
If I've learned anything from Terminator and The Matrix then yes...yes I do
Vinaka Jo
considering the number of remote terms i have open at the moment - that would be would be a very short sighted comment
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
they'll just charge you a lot more money.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
And people wonder why the economy is going to shit. The US is going from Silicon Valley, the high tech center of the world to riding the short bus on the information superhighway. But hey, it helps this quarter's profits...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have 3 people in my home and 37 computers. I have a total of 37 IP addresses inside my lan, every one of those things are a computer. the 4 BLuray players are all computers. the Two big TV's are computers, the Apple TV's are computers, the 6 NAS boxes, the 2 Crestron processors, the 4 chumbys, etc......
I only need 1 to the world because I can use NAT. Some wackjobs think NAT is evil... I think they are wackjobs. I do not WANT most of my computers to EVER be directly on the internet. Even if I was given 10,000 Internet IP's I would still NAT and I guarantee most businesses will as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This article is an outright lie. I've measured bandwidth at my own house, and I've found that 95% of all internet traffic comes from adult entertainment sites. Netflix isn't even a blip on the graph.
If it's not dead, dying, or sucks, the "new school" slashdot crowd just isn't interested. Observe how often attacking posts (i.e. posts on the offensive) get modded straight up to +5, regardless of usefulness, relevance, or let alone truth. Use the words "dead", "dying", "sucks", or "failed" for bonus points. Over-exaggeration is king, similar to what we see on TV nowadays. Over-exxageration gets you noticed.
The sad reality is that attacks are valued much more on slashdot than they used to be, and I can only attribute this to demographics. Slashdot is no longer a niche community of enthusiast geeks, merely looking to expand their knowledge by observing what others have to say. Today it's more like a high-school cafeteria where the ultimate objective is "look at me".
Amazing how people will actually pay for content provided to them the way they want it, when they want it. Executives in the entertainment industry should be taking notes.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You clearly missed the point - he was highlighting how we got into this mess by letting the unexpected pace of technological advancement catch us unawares. Thomas Watson is often attributed with saying, in the 40's, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - he probably never said this but it's not a long stretch from people's attitudes. Even in the late 60's computers were big, slow and vastly expensive, there was no real expectation that they'd ever find a place outside of big business, academia or the military. Certainly nobody seriously predicted that within their lifetime you'd be able to carry two or three of the things around on your person with ease, or that they'd become so cheap we'd essentially be happy to replace them ever 12-24 months (ala smartphones).
Even in the early 90's, when I was tinkering with these things at school, attitudes were starting to change and people were seeing mass use of computers in business and even a place for home computers, there were still plenty of people who thought this was a fad, and even more who couldn't have envisioned how popular the internet would become within even ten, let alone 20 years. If we'd over-estimated in the first instance we would be fine right now, but if you'd been the guy over-estimating way back then, you'd have been laughed out of your job with comments similar to the GP post. hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Deep-packet inspection has to be made illegal globally or they will continue to push to exploit it.
Deep packet inspection should be made legal everywhere, so everybody is pushed into encrypting everything all the time. Global adoption of encryption is a far better protection from privacy invasions like deep packet inspection than a piece of paper. Innovation before legislation, please.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Netflix should implement the torrent tech for their streaming of files, while you watch as not only would it make sure that the content is ready for you should you wish to fast forward...but also make less of a demand on the internet, no? Unless they already do...if 5 people in the same area of the country are downloading to watch the same movie, only once do you need to stream it down as a whole, where the rest would be filled up using only that section of the internet's ip address to torrent the file.
Definitely, unless either underlying technology will be upgraded to accommodate higher bandwidth or NetFlix themselves expand their network strategically to provide better service to its subscribers and to save as all from undesirable browsing experience.
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ISPs will know who to shakedown for ever more cash. They will threaten to cut off access to Netflix (or just throttle them below HD capability) if they don't agree to spiraling fees, ala cable cos and tv networks.
I'm curious, and clearly ignorant as I'm confused about what the difference is between NATting and simply setting up a firewall properly. In both cases, machines you don't want exposed are safely tucked away and isolated. If you had globally unique IPs for every machine (presumably IPv6), you would at least have the easy option to open an external connection to any machine; with NAT, that option is missing.
Thus, in my no-doubt naïve understanding, NAT entails no unique benefits, but does entail unique limitations. So what am I missing? I'm honestly curious and hoping for a cogent argument explaining why NAT is better than a proper firewall.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
That requires at least some technical know-how that most people lack. For most people, the Netflix service will be "good enough", warts and all, the majority will go with it or something similar.
1990's: "Spam email is using up all the available bandwidth."
2000's: "P2P file-sharing is using up all the available bandwidth."
2010's: "Netflix is using up all the available bandwidth."
Somehow the internet survived and will continue to do so.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The punctuation in the summary is...wrong. What part of the text is the 'headline' to which the summary refers?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
The OP is asking if the per-KWh rate is higher if you use more power.
In fact, many electrical companies do charge a higher per-KWh rate if you use more electrical power. This is because they need to use heavier-duty equipment to provide you with that power. It may force them to upgrade the distribution center supplying you, or the lines to your building.
At some point it flips around though...if you use a very large amount of power they'll start charging less per KWh because their maintenance costs don't increase linearly with the increase in power consumption.
Quoth TFA:
How many people would pay $7.99 per month (Canadian) for the chance to watch Superbad whenever they wanted?
Er, Superbad (whatever that is) isn't the only thing available on Netflix.
TFA goes on to moan that in the early days it didn't have a lot of things that the author wanted to watch. Boo fucking hoo. What is this, a /. post? The standard "I personally wouldn't find this useful therefore I don't understand why anyone else would find it useful" crap is tiresome enough when you have to wade through post after post of it in /. comments, but for it to appear in TFA itself? Does this guy get paid to write this crap?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Most regions their is one cable infrastructure and one phone infrastucture. That limits incentive to upgrade hardware and services from the supply end.
Possibly new wires/cables. Definitely new switches/routers.
LAN. Much less cool than mis-reading it as VAN. 37 IP addresses in a van. now that would be cool.
When I chose my username, I knew my time would come.
...it's Netflix's users.
Unless Netflix has found a way to push feed to people that aren't asking for it. Is it spamming people with movie files now?
-- Alastair
Does your electrical company increase your rates or move to a higher tier if you run appliances all day long? What about your water company? I know in my area both of these apply.
Nope, my power company charges me LESS per kwh after I go over a certain number of kwh in a month.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Sure, you're paying for it anyway, but what's the point of the extra complexity you get from splitting it out?
Yes. I believe in most places in the world that's covered under your property taxes. In Ontario you pay property taxes, then pay more taxes on services.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well in Canada, all land is owned by the crown unless it's under a municipality, or claimed in some form. I own the land I'm on, in Ontario. Property taxes are meant to cover the yearly fees for services such as water/sewage/trash pickup/etc. In Ontario, you pay taxes and money for separate services.
Om, nomnomnom...
My wife and I watch a lot of Netflix download movies, anything new that's halfway good plus I watch the older science fiction ones in the afternoon she doesn't care that much about. The ISP is DSL but the movies are very watchable on a 42" screen. (some stutter occasionally.) Plus, I surf YouTube, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. daily. About four months ago, my nephew put a hi def Slingbox in our house for his overseas tour of duty and it is on for a few hours every day. Luckily he is 13 hours away so he watches mostly in the AM when we're at work, we found we can't do both at once. My ISP has not said one word about it nor has there been any indication that we're causing problems. Sure, occasionally a bird will land on the phone wire and burst into flames, but that's about it.
It has to be split out at some point anyway, to decide how much money the public works department gets to budget for sewer maintenance.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
This is even an argument for peak-hour surcharges, bulk-data/non-time-sensitive-delivery discounts, and the like make sense.
Without metered service you can easily run into the "tragedy of the commons."
The other solution is to design an infrastructure big enough to handle the expected demand and spread that cost over all users using some method other than pay-for-usage.
Oh wait, that's what we do now.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
people have been exclaiming "death of the net" from whatever the latest bandwidth consumption increase new tech has made available ever since the net was invented. I've been seeing it for 25 years personally. Each time, capacity increases to meet the demand. This will be no different.
I appreciate the reply. Some follow-up questions:
Not sure what you mean by this -- the internet-facing NAT router should ostensibly get an address unique to its ISP, ideally unique globally, but so would an IPv6 machine... which makes me think you mean something different?
Port-mapping, yes. But what if you want, say, two HTTP servers behind the NAT, and don't want users to have to know which port to specify? Some time back I had the bright idea of seeing if DNS included any port info -- make one name resolve to my.ip:port1, and the other to my.ip:port2, but no such luck (at least with what I was able to find). This is a serious question, so if you have any ideas, I'm all ears.
Personally, I see lots of negatives and no positives. And maybe I'm not alone, because there seems to be a great reluctance to switching over.
These are all very useful insights that hadn't occurred to me, and I bet you're right about these issues impeding adoption.
However, I can think of one positive, although it's a bit of a corner case. My router itself is behind my landlord's NAT, leaving me with zero access to my own subnet from outside:
Is there any way you know of by which I could access my machines from elsewhere on the net? Ideally, this would not include any dedicated server elsewhere maintaining some sort of tunnel to my machines.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I note you have no video game consoles, and so I assume further that you rarely play games on the internet, and moreover your 4 BluRay players suggets you rarely torrent either.
In short, it's no surprise you don't see the downsides of NAT. Meanwhile the rest of us who do required user level end-to-end net connectivity know that NAT is the devil and needs to die for the sake of the web. When you find yourself unable to use the latest applications and/or protocols, you will come to realize this too.
May the Maths Be with you!
According to what the ISPs have been claiming for the last several years, the Internet should have already ceased to function by now. In 07-08 I was seeing doomsday prophesies of the 2010 Internet apocalypse all over the place. It's all a bunch of exaggerated baloney designed to scare everyone into killing net neutrality. In any case they have absolutely no reason to complain. They offer a service which their customers pay for, and at a much higher price than most other countries I might add. Customers also pay a higher price for a connection with more bandwidth. Should be simple enough, right? All Netflix is doing is creating a massive demand for the service they offer. That should be a dream come true for them. Last time I checked they were making record profits, so surely they can upgrade their networks to keep up with demand, especially when the cost of network infrastructure is constantly dropping. Not as simple as that you say? Well then they should have anticipated this before they offered "unlimited" Internet access. Changing the rules now would basically amount to a bait-and-switch. If customers start getting mobile-phone style bill shock when they go over their bandwidth cap, sh*t will hit the fan. Unfortunately, any fat-cat executive is going to be miffed when they see an opportunity to nickel-and-dime that isn't being exploited for all it is worth.
That's fine but if they can't deliver 'unlimited' bandwidth then they need to stop offering 'unlimited' bandwidth.
Unbelievable.
I wouldn't believe in unlimited bandwidth either. Aside from the fact that such a thing does not and cannot exist, I feel sad for you (and for most) because you've drunk a bit too much of the "shared bandwidth problem" Kool-Aid in spite of the fact that you seem to oppose the common practices that today's ISPs are implementing. As such, I'll present you with a short list of points that more people should understand:
If you don't see what I'm getting at yet, let me give you an example.
You own a network that has a larger number of total segments than it does interconnects between those segments. Every node on the network is connected through 10 Gbps Ethernet. You want to transfer 15 exabytes of data between two nodes that are on the two logically "farthest" network segments. Will your network have a serious bandwidth problem?
Possible answers include:
This is where the problem really lies. The amount of data you transfer over a given period of time does not a bandwidth problem make. However, the time over which you transfer an arbitrary amount of data can, but it certainly doesn't have to.
Still, it is of course true that bandwidth constraints and overall transfer totals are certainly correlated, but---due to the irrefutable fact that the total number of bits running through a bus neither inhibits nor alters the bus's fundamental ability to transfer said bits at any given time (i.e. unlike power wires, ethernet cables and fiber don't "sag" under high load)---the practice of metering a fundamentally and quantitatively unlimited function of a network is unfair, fallacious, disingenuous, and patently retarded at best.
If the last mile ISPs want to solve their bandwidth problem, then need to stop billing people for what is a fundamentally unlimited resource and start billing them proportionately for what is.
...Then again, I suppose that selling an unlimited commodity like it's a precious one is a great way to make money.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
This is nonsense. Netflix uses CDNs, and I'll bet the big ISPs have peering agreements with these networks. I think they're all aching to get into the cell phone overage model and the cable companies obviously want to shut out their competition.
This was inevitable, and anyone paying close attention saw this coming a thousand miles away. Years ago, when I first heard talk of "the internet" being the upgrade for DVD, I kind of had to laugh. Because there's absolutely no way your ISP is going to let you buy Blu-Ray quality video online, on a regular basis.
Netflix, and other similar models (Apple TV, etc) have adopted what I think of as the proper internet video model: a replacement for rental and PPV. But even with Netflix's 3.8Mb/s for HD (basically 1/10th the quality of Blu-Ray), they're crazy huge compared to most other video sources. Sure, YouTube has been upping their standards to 2Mb/s and maybe more, but the limit on all currently available normal YouTube accounts (those not grandfathered into the "Director's" account, and those not owned by major media companies in partner with YouTube/Google) is 10 minutes. The average film runs over two hours.
And it's clear, already, that Netflix was a huge success, even before they did the online thing. They pretty much killed the meatspace DVD rental business, thanks to their streamlined mail system and all-you-can-eat pricing. They've become one the Post Office's largest clients, as a result.
ISPs can offer unlimited service based on the idea that there's no practical limit.. most people will never get close (and, for many, they'll simply dump those habitual outliers). A single film over Netflix will run around 3.2GB. While that's not insane by geek standards, it's crazy compared to most consumer uses: program updates (100MB, less than once a week), YouTube videos (150MB for an HD, 10min video.. usually much less), etc. They don't have anywhere near the bandwidth to support everyone hitting the limits all at once. But that's precisely what the Netflix model is encouraging... which makes it even worse, in some ways, than online purchases.
If I buy a video, it's larger, but I'm probably going to buy well in advance. So my download doesn't necessarily stop on anyone else's, and for that matter, a smart server could manage bandwidth to optimize costs. For Netflix, it's realtime playback. They buffer up, but if there are too many viewing at the same time (far more likely, given the realtime and "regular consumer" push), the streaming fails. Meanwhile, before that, Netflix is sucking up most what's available, and most likely, around the same after work -- prime time hours. Netflix could in theory help here by pushing videos to you ahead of time... unfortunately, most of the devices suppoting Netflix don't have a spare few GB to store the film.
-Dave Haynie
I remember the panic on Usenet back when this newfangled "World Wide Web" thing was gaining popularity about whether the Web (or Webcams, or streaming video) would destroy the Internet.
You never know for sure, of course, but I think 'teh Interwebs' are safe for now :)
That is how, and why, ISP transfer money across fiber ownership barriers.
ISP1 (say Comcast) charges ISP2 (say Cox) for every MB of data they have to carry for a customer of ISP2 requesting it.
It gets hairy when it is propagated across the entire network (bottlenecks represent lost revenue for some and windfall profits for some others) and then if ISP2 is also serving up data for a customer of ISP1.
The accounting rules are very simple.
Keeping track of every single packet that shuffled between source and destination is a logistical nightmare, but doable and done every second of everyday of every billing cycle.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Someone streaming one or 2 movies per day, one at a time VS someone downloading 8 movies, 2 games and 5 cd's at once from 300 peers 24/7...I think netflix would be the clear bandwith miser.
I don't think so. Where I live now, I have septic and well, so no such services. But at my old place, property taxes were just that... property taxes. Additional services were not taxes, but ... well, services. You had to pay for water in and poop out. And unlike electricity, water was actually very similar to internet charges. You didn't pay per liter/gallon, but if you hit a certain threshold, your price went up. I hit that exactly once, one year I had to fill and empty the pool (in ground, 45ft x 30ft) an unusual number of times.
I don't believe there's any place, at least in the USA, where property taxes also cover water and sewer service fees. They are, very much, a different kind of thing, with month going to markedly different places. And in my current place, I still pay property taxes ($12,000 a year or so, on 26 acres, most of it forest).
-Dave Haynie
capacity already in the ground...
In 2020 its going to be "3D TV is using up all of our capacity" and they STILL won't have used up everything that's buried NOW.
The problem is that we're forcing them to upgrade their processing equipment to handle the extra load THIRTY years before its past obsolete (and there's not a whole lot to break on a Switch.)
The accountants at NyNex (remember NyNex, before they merger with GE Telecommunications and became Verizon,) had figured that the equipment that they were buying in 1995 was going to be amortized over 10 years, that's 2005, (it was bought and paid for from the profits on ADSL [and you can kiss the money we paid in for decades for "infrastructure improvement" goodbye.])
Unfortunately, the switching equipment is not going to be enough to last until 2025. They'll have to upgrade ahead of schedule.
I say fuck the accountants.
They've been screwing us since the 1980s.
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SO many computer, so little knowledge if IPv6, routers and firewalls.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Its not Cerf's fault that we stuck with short sighted cretins for accountants (But I repeat myself.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
So the citizens are informed of what the are paying for.
Often they are two separate bureaus, with different rates. Often the sewer rate is tied to the water usage.
Contrary to group think, the US government does a really good job at keeping it's citizens informed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are a few place where the cost is in property taxes, but it is rare.
Interesting note, in almost all case, it would be cheaper if it was a tax instead of a fee.
They're not supposed to make a profit, so removing the billing, cut offs, and associated work would lower the price, considerably.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sure, you're paying for it anyway, but what's the point of the extra complexity you get from splitting it out?
Accountability modeled as distracting overhead. Sure worked great in the financial services industry.
I don't know if you meant this as a joke, but it's seventeen flavours of stupid. The whole point the invisible hand is that distributed self-interest produces effective economic decisions for the system as a whole when both sides of the transaction are voluntary and well informed.
Opaque billing is a method of outsourcing a command economy; consumerism is what you get when you bludgeon the free market with a seal club. The whole point of the net neutrality debate is whether we're going to legalize seal clubs.
For government run services, even when they split it out, there's plenty of scope for creative accounting, but at least it's a start.
At the same time, there's no business out there that doesn't have controls in place to safe-guard against entitlement freeloaders. When some telcos first offered unlimited long distance calling, a large population of deep-fryer invalids (who don't get out much) decided to turn their telephones into a permanent intercom system to exchange chicken recipes with their far-away siblings all day long.
I used to frequent a first rate all-you-can-eat dinner buffet in Montreal that initially catered to professionals willing to treat themselves to a refined atmosphere. Over time the patrons became larger and larger, and soon sweatshirts and belly cracks started to appear, when word got around that the determined obese could hoover $50 worth of food (none of it covered in batter) for the $25 price. Needless to say, the business model had to be changed, to the detriment of the population with reasonable notions of moderation.
Netflickers, are you the stuffed cheeks in sweatshirts piling on the cold salmon at the buffet table? Just asking.
I don't know how their computers decide what to keep where. Some popular things (like Microsoft updates) I think get auto cached, others I think it is based on demand.
Gee, I hope that MSFT put on their thinking caps and did their homework when they were designing their "signing" algorithms.
'Cause I shudder to think what might happen if the locally-cached Akamai version of a security update were not [for what ever reason] quite the same as the official MSFT version.
Dittoes for hardware drivers, which very often are NOT signed in any way: Break into the Akamai server, upload your version of whatever, then pwn the user systems immediately upon downloading.
And don't think for a second that the Chinese Red Army and the Russian Army aren't devoting beaucoup $$$s & man-hours to precisely these kinds of attack vectors.
Bottom line: It's one thing to be caching relatively harmless stuff, like JPGs and MPGs and WAVs and GIFs and TXTs, but caching EXEs is a whole 'nother can of worms...
On the other hand... The A Team, Twilight, Twilight 2, Transformers, Transformers 2, Gi Joe....
If you're saying that Twilight is not available on Watch Instantly I consider that a plus.
The enforcement of consumer products, enabling resolutions (to enforce existing law), and the enforcement of anti-trust law all belong to the White House--Tea Party be damned.
I don't suppose you could explain your post a bit better? Reading it over, I get a lot of opinion, but nothing informative to work with... :(
You can easily protects your network. It's even easier then IPv4 and NATs
Okay; how? Purely firewall settings? I have zero IPv6 experience, but have read around a little bit.
The fact that he claims it's impossible to 'end up on the internet by accident' using IPv4 should be setting off alarm bells.
Well, private addresses (192.168.x.x, etc) are by definition private; how would an external computer initiate a connection to a machine inside a NATted subnet, without the router providing port forwarding? This is not rhetorical; I am interested in the answer.
Meanwhile, IPv6 addresses are, from what I've read, mostly designed to be globally unique and thus globally routable, which I think is what PRMan was describing in his post. With such addresses, you'd have to explicitly configure your router/firewall to lock down local machines, no? Or is there some mechanism enabled by default to prevent local IPv6 machines from being accessed from outside the local network? Again, I'm not asking rhetorically.
(I did find that apparently IPv6 includes explicitly private address blocks [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network#Private_IPv6_addresses] -- perhaps this is what you were meaning?)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I'm sure tracking stateful connections for 10 thousand clients with only 60000 usable ports would be wonderful for performance and reliability.
Most importantly: it's got Firefly (and Serenity), it's got Dr. Who, it's got Red Dwarf, it's got Futurama (original series and movies), it's got Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's got Battlestar Galactica, it's got most of the Stargate serieses, it's got Invader Zim, it's got Monk (for the obsessive-compulsives in the audience), and a large chunk of the Funimation anime catalog. What more could anyone from Slashdot want? :)
Just checked on the titles your parent named. Still no streaming of Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I've found lots to watch on my Wii streaming channel including Michael Palin Pole-To-Pole and District 9. But many blockbuster movies are still missing.
NAT is a poor solution for what should (and can) be done with a firewall.
If you dont want your computers to be exposed to the world, run a firewall that can block anything that needs to be blocked and do it just as good as NAT can.
The idea that internet bandwidth is a fixed level and cannot be increased is pure nonsense. Greater demand for bandwidth results in more bandwidth capacity being created. This is how a free market works.
How about stuff I DON'T already have on Blu-Ray/DVD?
-Dave Haynie
Hmm, what good is a video rental service (whether streaming or not) when you already own everything you might want to watch? That is a tricky question! :)
Note that a Netflix account always includes access to their much larger selection of physical DVDs and Blu-Rays.
But the point is that they don't only just have older stuff for streaming. Of last year's Hugo nominees, they have the winner (Moon) as well as three of the four runners-up (District 9, Star Trek, Up). The only one they're missing is Avatar--and that one you can have them mail to you.
Reminds me a lot of back when ISPs used to sell more slots then they had available and during peak hours you would play the game of knocking eachother out of slots. It was a glorious fun game. Getting disconnected in the middle of a download or game. That was back before they had resume too, which means you had to start alll 4mb all over again. Analogy could be made between Black Tuesday and banks overloaning what they don't have. It's not hard to see what will happen.
This is a stupid roundabout game. ISPs are definitely dumb as bricks for the most part unless they're forced to do something that takes money. I hope the FCC is smart enough to make a connection between what happened and what has happened.
Ahh, I see - you've never heard of a Firewall. Google it.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3