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Vint Cerf Says Fix the Net With More Pipe
CWmike writes "While ISPs may fret about Netflix, Hulu and other streaming media services saturating their bandwidth, Internet forefather Vint Cerf has a simple answer for this potential problem: Increase bandwidth exponentially. With sufficient bandwidth, streaming video services of prerecorded content wouldn't be necessary, said the now-technology evangelist at Google. With sufficient throughput, the entire file of a movie or television show could be downloaded in a fraction of the time that it would take to stream the content. Cerf, speaking at Juniper Network's Nextwork conference, spoke about the company's decision to outfit Kansas City with fiber-optic connections that Google claims will be 100 times faster than today's services. The purpose of the project was 'to demonstrate what happens when you have gigabit speeds available,' Cerf said. 'Some pretty dramatic applications are possible.' One obvious application is greater access to high-definition video, he explained. 'When you are watching video today, streaming is a very common practice. At gigabit speeds, a video file [can be transferred] faster than you can watch it,' he said. 'So rather than [receiving] the bits out in a synchronous way, instead you could download the hour's worth of video in 15 seconds and watch it at your leisure.' He adds: 'It actually puts less stress on the network to have the higher speed of operation.'"
Give her more pipe!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
'So rather than [receiving] the bits out in a synchronous way, instead you could download the hour's worth of video in 15 seconds and watch it at your leisure.' He adds: 'It actually puts less stress on the network to have the higher speed of operation.'
Sure, it naturally would stand to reason that the operations (like streaming video) that currently require 100% utilization on today's network might only require a fraction of that on tomorrow's much faster network. The problem is, tomorrow we won't be happy with the same old video we used to stream, we are going to want a super high-def version with 8 channel stereo sound and in-line twitter commentary plus it will have to update our facebook status every time we pause it to go to the bathroom... And then we will be back to streaming at 100% capacity again, wondering when the next leap in networking will let us do block downloads again.
Seriously, Vint Cerf? This is the best idea you can muster? This is the same problem/solution cycle the internet has been locked in for its entire existence.
Doesn't he mean more tubes?
But people will just want to stream 1080p and then 2K and then 4K video so any increase in bandwidth will just get eaten up, just the same as it always has. And can somebody explain to me why downloading a video in 1 gigantic burst is better than streaming it at a more steady rate? Surely the same amount of data gets transferred either way -- packet headers and things might account for a small overhead, but that's nothing compared to the actual video data. Like I say, I might be missing something.
I can already download flv type files faster than youtube lets me have them. They're throttling.
For now "exponentially more pipe" will remain of a pipe dream though. There's still physics and the current state of technology pissing in that soup. Not to mention economics.
(It's today.)
It's all about control not user experience.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Too bad Cogent doesn't do IPv6. Oh, they claim they do, but you can't reach half of the IPv6 internet, because they refuse to peer with Hurricane Electric (which is a huge portion of the IPv6 internet). They've also had similar peering disputes with other ISPs over IPv4.
Seriously, Cogent might be cheap, but they also suck as an ISP and are one of the major causes of dispute among backbones.
Sure, every time someone downloads a TV show or movie and only watches the first 10 minutes, all the extra bandwidth utilized down download the other 90% was completely wasted, stealing resources from all the other people who are also downloading stuff they'll never watch. Next, someone will have the idea that it would be a great feature if your browser pre-fetched all the other episodes for the same season or additional sequel/prequel movies, just in case you may want to watch them later. I guess the end game would be your computer constantly scouring the net and downloading every scrap of information it can find in case you may want to review it at some future point. Adding bandwidth is never a BAD idea, however it should obviate the need for these types of practices, not encourage them.
The Wii won't be able to hold an entire downloaded movie --- unless one makes putting in a blank 8GB SD card before watching --- I don't think that will go over well, nor do I think the copyright holders will like the idea of a single monolithic file being made available.
The problem isn't merely a technical one...
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
How much will all this cost and who is going to pay for it? What are the numbers for the last mile, the single residential household? The hardware requirements for in-home distribution?
it would likely still be more efficient to download the movie in larger blocks than trying to stream it out, not to mention the fact it'll probably improve quality (got fed up with netflix popping up that loading bar while watching a couple of shows last night)
Listen to the man, he knows of that which he speaks.
More bandwidth may not solve all the problems, but it'll sure as hell solve some of them.
I don't know how many of you still remember the dialup days, or even used dial-up. When the schoolkids got home, they'd start hitting AOL and you'd notice the lag.
It's not as bad now, what with me having a 25/25Mbps line. But there's still a very wide range of criminal acts that I'd perform to have my own 1 Gbps line.
One of the key beenfits of streaming is that the reciever can decide where to begin playback, it means that you save bandwidth and more importantly money by only serving the end user the data they need.
With the number of videos being watched at any point in time on the web you would need a seriously fat pipe to be able to handle all that burst traffic resulting from people downloading every video they wanted to look at, can you imagine what youtube browsing would be like...
Download 2 gig video, watch 5 seconds, nope no titties..
Download 3 gig video, watch 5 seconds, nope no titties..
Download 2.5 gig video, watch 5 seconds, nope no titties..
Download 256K video, watch 5 seconds, wahaeeey titties! Watch the rest of it....
Not happening here. I live in a suburb of a suburb, in a mostly elderly neighborhood. Yea, i'll see this in 50 years.
I never understood why that guy got derided so hard for that comment. I think tubes is a perfectly acceptable way for an old man to understand the internet. That's politics for ya: anything to take our minds off of the real issues.
..is a series of tubes! (and it's also made of cats)
But people will just want to stream 1080p and then 2K
There isn't much difference here: 2K is 2048x1080, which is less than 7% bigger than standard 1080p.
and then 4K video
We can solve that once 4K video cameras become affordable for home use.
And can somebody explain to me why downloading a video in 1 gigantic burst is better than streaming it at a more steady rate?
If the entire work is cached locally, fast forward and rewind don't require a round trip to a server, and they don't require transcoding to create a new keyframe at the seek point. Nor will re-watching a video require sending it again.
The content providers could burst you the video today, if they wanted to. They don't want to. They want to guarantee that their digital content will never sit at rest on your system where you might possibly duplicate it. Giving everyone more bandwidth will not change this fact. But at least you'll be able to stream video using a smaller fraction of your available bandwidth.
It may not DL an entire movie, but it could grab a significant chunk of it and let you watch it without jitter or pixelation, and then DL the next chunk when you have a few minutes of video from the previous chunk.
The copyright holders are going to whine and moan no matter how it's done, so the best thing is to ignore them and do it the right way. It's just as easy to capture a streamed movie as it is one that arrive as a single piece. The thing they need to get over is that once people can rely on having a resource available to them on the net, there's less motivation for them to hoard it on a local drive. If movies only cost a couple dollars, were stored on some upstream server farm that would shoot it down to me on demand, I'd buy a hell of a lot more movies. I'd bet that many other people would, too.
unfortunately there is no way this will happen. There are too many important competing interests which act at the beaurocratic/governance level which are anti-bandwidth.
MPAA/RIAA don't want people to stream quickly because they fear content being stolen
CIA/FBI don't want increased bandwidth because they need(or think they need) to be able to monitor and index all communication (TIA)
ATT/Verizon and other telecoms don't want to because it represents a cost that will interfere with their milking of customers
Comcast doesn't want it because it will interfere with their control over content
Everyone just wants to stay status quo or worse. This will never happen.
I work for a small ISP in a mid-sized city, and I'd love to see more bandwidth everywhere. However, we can't get gigabit access for our company for a practical cost, much less deliver it to end users. There are real costs involved in running a physical plant that just don't scale up at this time.
In any case, the "download an hour of video in 15 seconds" is somewhat impractical in any case; downloading an hours worth of anything in 15 seconds requires 240 times the bandwidth over streaming it. Over-the-air HD video is up to 19 megabits per second, so the equivalent download would require a 4.6 gigabit/second link (at the end-user side; the server side would have to be many times that). It would also require some type of storage device that can handle 570 megabytes per second, which is an order of magnitude faster than current hard drives.
Also, what is the point of downloading an hour of video in less than an hour? It isn't like you can watch it faster. A decent streaming system should allow you to fast-forward and such, so that shouldn't be an excuse. Let's work on bandwidth for true HD-level streaming first.
Sometime ago, a company had the right idea. Basically, get the monopoly from the home to the greenbox, or even to the CO. Than provide hook-ups for other companies. That one monopoly is what Google, et. al. need to do. If they get that started and push cities and states for the FIBER MONOPOLY on just that piece, than others will provide the connectivity. And if they want to limit the bandwidth or speed, then google and the partners can provide links back to their sites. Basically, bypass ATT, Verizon, Qwest, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Use a carrier pigeon :
Australia's problems with high-speed Internet can be summed up in one word: Margaret.
Margaret is a carrier pigeon that raced the nation's biggest broadband service to send a 700 megabit file over a distance of 132 km (82 miles) -- a televised contest that Margaret, with a memory stick taped to her leg, won easily.
Why should ISPs invest in infrastructure outlay when they can just raise rates on "bandwidth hogs"?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The biggest problem with this is that streaming allows for content publishers to control distribution (more or less). Allowing an entire work to be stored on a hard drive just begs to be ripped and stored permanently.
I hate the MPAA as much as the next guy. Just saying that even if the bandwidth was there, no way that the powers that hold the keys would allow it.
We don't live in Shouldland.
The Wii won't be able to hold an entire downloaded movie
That's easily solved too. Increase storage... exponentially!
Out of curiousity, who will pay for this increased bandwidth/pipe? It seems that laying fiber everywhere across the country is either going to take government subsidies or be cost prohibitive if you are outside of metropolitan areas.
The second question would be is whether or not that increased bandwidth is the most efficient way to stream video? Dish network and DirectTV seem to do a pretty good job with video, now. Wouldn't it make more sense to have an internet connection from a satellite provider where you could order video on demand (or even a cable provider). It would then go direct to your tv, dvr or pc?
The Internet is limited only by the capacity of the transmission medium and the memory of the switching equipment. I really wish more people understood this. Need more capacity? Upgrade infrastructure. Problem solved.
In a market economy, we could choose our own ISP by who offered the best service and speed based on price. Unfortunately deregulation has created a duopoly.
They're using their grammar skills there.
There's a reason video service stream video out in chunks: bandwidth costs money and connections are contended.
- If somebody loads your video but only play the first 15 seconds (of an hour long clip) and you've only served them 30 seconds of video, your wastage is low. If you pump it out as fast as you can, you've wasted 59 minutes, 45 seconds of video in bandwidth. Even imagining that tomorrow's bandwidth prices were near-nothing what they are today, this is the sort of overhead companies can easily cut by dripping out content in chunks.
- Servers and networks have throughput limits. Even if you get a googlbit pipe, you're still limited by the hardware. If you're pushing out a video from RAM to three users, using all your CPU and most of your network, what happens when users four through ten come along? Chunking lowers the "there and then" I/O demands.
- It's not even a good idea for users. The average user doesn't need something to stream out that fast either - there's no benefit for most people to have the end of a clip before they're through the opening credits. You can still seek with progressive chunks.
I expect more from Cerf. This is very simple network economics.
But the business model is to get them signed up and under contract,
then allow service levels to deteriorate or remove services,
Then charge more for those services or to restore bandwidth,
Profit!
No network rework or buildout will ever occur without a huge increase in profits....
But you have to remember that the biggest roadblock to next-gen entertainment is big content and cable companies, whose aging business models are threatened by anything innovative. Cable companies may whine about bandwidth, but really, everybody knows it's about their core cable TV business. These industries have demonstrated time and time again that they will drag the entire economy and innovation itself down with them before they will reinvent themselves to change with the times.
Imagine how much more bandwidth they could oversell! Just imagine the possibilities! It's a win-win!
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Websites update faster than the local talking head can keep up.
While doing housework, it's far more difficult to use a website than to use MSNBC.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. Removing artificial rate limits imposed by streaming, and moving to full speed burst (subject only to QoS) allows for networks to achieve much greater overall throughput in the real world.
When we say an example link carries 1Gbps, what we are saying is that 1Gb can move through that link in any 1s interval. Each new 1s interval is an opportunity for another 1Gb of transfer. Data transfer falling short of that Gb is wasted capacity. That transfer must be pushed forward into the next 1s interval.
Moving to a full burst model reduces wasted capacity by ensuring the network is not artificially underutilized based on current and future transfer demands, rather than artificially pushing those transfer demands into a future interval which may then become swamped with more requests, causing transfer demands to exceed supply.
Applications and systems are most efficient when they complete the task as quickly as possible then release resources back to the system, as systems have no way of knowing determinately what chaotic demand profile might arise in the near future.
Overall broadband usage follows a slower moving wave pattern. Individual usage at any point in the system at any interval is highly variable. This is why large transfer demands must be executed as fast (wall time) as possible during times of lower utilization so they don't spill over into another interval.
Similar arguments have been brought against the transfer caps being rolled out by ISPs. Data transfer at non-peak times is not detrimental to the network as the network is in effect "producing" transfer capacity (at line speed) which nobody is using. Unused capacity in any interval is wasted. There is no "rollover plan" for data transfer.
Rate caps degrade performance by causing artificially unnecessary congestion in future high-demand intervals.
The sensible solution is to schedule transfer as soon as possible when capacity is available. Pushing it forward is the domain of bureaucrats and management types who do not understand network engineering.
How do we know they just won't pocket the money like last time?
http://www.newnetworks.com/BroadbandScandalIntro.htm/
I made it through the wilderness
Somehow I made it through
Didn't know how lost I was
Until I found you
I was beat incomplete
I'd been had, I was sad and blue
But you made me feel
Yeah, you made me feel
Shiny and new
Chorus:
Like a virgin
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
When your heart beats (after first time, with your heartbeat)
Next to mine
Gonna give you all my love, boy
My fear is fading fast
Been saving it all for you
cause only love can last
You're so fine and you're mine
Make me strong, yeah you make me bold
Oh your love thawed out
Yeah, your love thawed out
What was scared and cold
MADONNA IS THE BEST!
Too bad for the Wii. Why should the rest of us suffer because they though 512MB of internal storage was enough?
regardless of whether it streams or downloads in one chunk, it's still going to take me 100 minutes to watch the average film
For one thing, you don't have to spend those 100 minutes in front of a continuous Internet connection. If you can download a 100 minute movie in five minutes, you can choose the movie, download it, hop on the bus/plane, and watch it. I don't see the fact that home Internet is far cheaper than cellular Internet or especially in-flight Internet changing any time in the mid-term future.
For another, watching a 100 minute movie doesn't necessarily take 100 minutes. A video player supporting time-stretching will let you watch the whole movie on 1.2x speed. This works especially well for slow-paced movies where little is going on.
Thanks for the nfo buddy. Care to pony up the cash? Who is going to pay for the upgrades? Also, there is a push for cloud (big push for music). Cloud should increase bandwidth use. And don't forget the push for mobile internet. Vint, care to take a stab at the engineering issues?
Increase the food supply exponentially. "increase bandwidth exponentially" is a prescription, not a solution.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
By the time any ISP is convinced to increase bandwidth exponentially, the Wii will be collecting dust.. Furthermore, nothing is stopping nintendo from allowing external storage on the Wii, except ofcourse Nintendo (us modders have 500GB HDD's hooked up).
With network capacities like these ... DDoS attack volumes would scale to fit the available bandwidth.
why aren't more people thinking along these lines?
1Gb symetrical residential service in Hong Kong for US$29 per month. Yes, a congested city, but what about parts of NYC etc. No coherent policy toward utility services. We left it up to the incumbents and we are years behind.
1. Data will always expand to fill drives no matter what size.
That data will be 90 percent porn. Higher capacities mean higher def. - ASCII in the old days to 3D High Def Stereo today.
2. Throughput will always expand to saturate the bus bandwidth.
That data will be 90 percent porn also. Higher capacities always meant higher def. From ASCII to gif and flv to 3D High Def Stereo.
Butts expand to fit the chairs they are in. This is what you get when watching porn all day.
--
BMO
Well, the internet probably does need more bandwidth to support Netflix.
And I'm not a fan of QoS to get better streaming video either. But is Cerf giving up on fixing the problems with streaming (and any realtime internet work) that we know about, bufferbloat? I heard about that from Jim Gettys (thanks to a tweet from John Carmack). Here's a two-page intro in IEEE magazine or a (more interesting IMHO) PDF slide presentation with nice graphs and there is other advice and documents and code on that bufferbloat website.
See, the problem with streaming isn't just bandwidth, it's latency, and the variability thereof. We always measure and marketers talk about bandwidth, but only rarely if ever about latency. Thus ISPs don't optimize for it as a rule. The result? You get these occassional 6-second lags and other phenomena and little economic incentive to track them or fix them. (And certain data ISPs are at least mildly incented to look the other way since it protects their VOIP/PSTN revenues).
How about ISPs actually implement ECN to deal with it? How about router manufacturers design for this (or we all switch to OpenWRT?) How about we techies develop tools to help consumers monitor line quality latency (ping times) over time? How about consumers actually learn to care about latency or we educate them? It's not "too complicated" for consumers to understand; consumers can differentiate between velocity ("what's your car's fastest speed?") and acceleration ("how quickly can it go from 0 to 60?") so I'm sure we could get them to understand bandwidth versus latency. It's just not well measured/monitored right now. (I think we need a better phrase/metric that captures the notion of latency like the "0 to 60" one for cars.)
If you want to help develop measures of latency, use Bismark (or vote for it in the FCC open apps competition) or come up with an open source ping-until-quit tool that logs timestamps for long time periods and displays the results graphically and/or competitively. Better yet, make a phone app that does this and hooks it to google/whoever's maps and shares the data so fellow consumers can see which areas of the phone company networks really suck. (I'm open to hearing about other tools. I used to use a freeware one but it went payware and the best tools I know of are DSLReports's SmokePing and their other tools.)
100x greater bandwidth may make recorded video faster, but it won't solve core problems with realtime (streaming or video conferencing) video faster, nor web conferencing, nor necessarily online gaming. I sure as hell don't want the internet's quality to become as lousy as cell phones and that's what'll happen over time if we don't keep ISPs we pay the big bucks to focused on fixing the problems.
--LP
This must be the most retarded post ever. It's like reading a headline that says "Beef expert says raising more cattle will help with the beef shortage."
I would love the Dept. of Transporation to listen to the man...... and the cop that pulled me over last week. I was just trying to free up some road.
'So rather than [receiving] the bits out in a synchronous way, instead you could download the hour's worth of video in 15 seconds and watch it at your leisure.' Instead people will be downloading a new movie every 15 seconds.
...he didn't wedge in a comment about how IPv6 would also save the Internet while he was on a roll...
Instead you could download the hour's worth of video in 15 seconds and watch it at your leisure.
That is the exact opposite of what money bag content owners want. They want page hits and ads constantly refreshing into eyeballs.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
...because with streaming, I only have to wait about 5 seconds before I can start watching the movie.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
so, increase download capacity to incredible speed and download the whole thing in 15 seconds? then watch at your leisure?
Some big internet guy was recently suggesting such a solution.. I read about it on this webforum for nerds, stuff that matters
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Yeah, and a vanilla PSX wouldn't be able to hold an entire downloaded movie today, either. What's your point? Are you seriously under the impression that ISPs everywhere will see this article, think "well, guess we'd better go ahead with it, then", flip some switch somewhere, and hey presto, everyone on the internet suddenly has a gigabit link in their homes at... oh, no later than this evening, perhaps?
Best case scenario — completely ignoring lazy ISPs who are making a nice tidy profit thanks to local monopolies they've engineered and therefore have absolutely no reason to upgrade their infrastructure — people who still remember the Wii will be fondly telling their grandchildren about it while numerous generations of consoles ("numerous" in the double-digits) have come and gone by the time even a simple majority of the ISPs in the world have made the first steps towards this. So exactly why are you harping on the Wii, again?
last I heard is that the last mile was the bottleneck in bandwidth and that for the most part backbones where under used and even parts of them dark.
Nothing prevents the streaming data being delivered now from being retained as a local file, except the wishes of the content owners.
Internet Guru says to fix problems with the net add more pipes, let me rephrase that Internet Guru says fix problems with the net by adding capacity like ISPs should've the WHOLE DAMN TIME. ISPs should've been investing some of the money they get/ extort (and yes I say extort with some of the ISP horror stories I've heard) in actually upping their capacity. It's sad that they dare to complain when people actually use the service they pay for, shock horror.
... because usage expands to consume all available resources, then we're back to whining about lack of bandwidth again.
There is however a tiny problem, most of the network giants are swamped and have barely been able to keep up with new hardware orders. I work in the new data center deployment group for a major company, and a large chunk of our new build projects and upgrade projects are being delayed by six months because the network giants can't keep up with our hardware orders. Heck were even giving them a six months to a years advanced notice before we start our project planning. This is especially so for 10g equipment. To top it off the price of the equipment is barely going down, if it doesn't get cheaper the telcos won't touch it.
Increasing available bandwidth != increasing the food supply to fight hunger. Increasing the amount of available content is like increasing the food supply to fight hunger--without a means of distribution, that food won't reach those who need or want it.
Increasing bandwidth is like improving the food distribution infrastructure. There's already more than enough content out there for everyone (just like there's already enough foods, though people create new recipies every day), but things get bottled up trying to get that content to the end users. Cerf's idea is spot on, but like most great ideas, implementation will be thousands of times harder than talking about it.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
there's no way AT&T/Verizon/Warner/comcast would willingly spend money to do that since that hurt profits.
You do housework staring at a TV?
She mostly just listens with her cordless headphones plugged into the cable box, but when she hears descriptions of an interesting picture being shown, she takes a short break to glance at the TV. To her, it's not pure audio but audio with occasional stills and video.
did you even bother to look?
She isn't skilled enough at surfing the Internet to know where to start looking.
When it is decentralized none of these entities has much to say about what flows since they have no control.
I'm thinking there are several other problems that will not be solved entirely by expoential bandwidth expansion;
- Bufferbloat is crippling streaming for a lot of us. Read up. This could be solved with a few clicks, unless it actually won't solve it, and then of course we have to reconsider network design
- Some ISP systems, for instance, cable and DSL (woops, that pretty much includes ALL U.S. systems, my bad), can't be scaled up exponentially. So the solution is either Gigabit Ethernet or fiber. Vint has essentially stated that the solution is for the incumbents to discard their entire physical plants and rebuild all the way to the home. That's bound to be a big hit with the boards of several companies.
- And then the advantages of streaming are lost. For instance, DRM. Well, to the providers, DRM is an advantage.
- Further advantages of streaming would include multicasting, which isn't done because of several technical problems that I don't think an exponential bandwidth increase solves. Routing is the problem.
- Storage is an issue that raises the DRM question as well as finding a use for the copious capacity we have now. But this is just shifting the burden to local storage, and well, I betcha we find out we need to manage multi-terabyte astorage to keep all the shows we want to watch 'someday' until we do watch them. As a previous poster pointed out, we will want our 4320p/8.1 audio with concurrent Twitter and IMDb feeds, which raises bandwidth nmeeds and storage needs, and well, we've used up all our copious capacities, everywhere.
- FTTH is not without problems. Hack down the cable and see how fun it is to splice. And then the adapter, since you won't be plugging fiber into your laptop. The bottlenecks just move.
Still, I'm all for an ISP to start building a next-gen network, delivering Gigabit speed to users. This will need the support of the backbone providers, since they will have to support capacity increases as well, and that requires more than just changing the PHY layer.
Right now, solving bufferbloat would nice
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
so 100 times more bandwidth, and the best thing you can think of is better quality video? how innovative. I'll go with "no". thanks for playing.
Actually, it would be, if the prefetch is done as a low-priority operation with spare bandwidth so as not to impact whatever your current interactive demands are, and you have sufficient local storage. This reduces latency once you decide to watch one of the other episodes. (Though, really, you probably don't want the system to prefetch all the other episodes; if it takes 15 seconds to download a one hour episode, for instance, there is really very little reason to prefetch more than the next episode if usage data suggests that viewers usually consume the show in a serial fashion.)
Local storage reduces latency (and setting a task to prefetch data when convenient so its available on demand can also mitigate issues with network availability on either end, which might be particularly important for mobile devices that occasionally, but not always, have access to the high speed connection, such a netbook that comes home to a hookup to the home gigaWAN being discussed, but the rest of the time travels and only has access to 3G or 4G networks, and perhaps not always even that.) Adding all the bandwidth in the world doesn't reduce the need to reduce latency. In fact, once you've dealt with the bandwidth problem, the latency problem is the next obvious target.
I didn't read all the comments, but did anyone else say "duh!"?
Devices change over time as well. If the expectation is that entire films get downloaded, then device makers (at least, the smart ones) will start panning their system configurations for such changes. By the time Cerf's vision becomes reality, I doubt there will be very many people still using a Wii to stream movies.
As to the fear of piracy from a single file, that can be largely mitigated (though no technology is hack-proof) by developing a system tying the file to a session ID, or some other means of expiring the file.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The problem is not bandwidth it's business model. most people get internet access from cable companies. The cable company business model is to sell tv channels. The media companies make revenue these channels
It people are steaming video the cable companies and media companies make far less money. thus the move toward bandwidth capping and charging to keep you from streaming.
If Google successfully rolls it out (as a "demonstration") starting in one locality and then expanding to others, it will hurt AT&T/Verizon/Warner/Comcast/etc's profits not to do it themselves, since otherwise they'll lose their customers in the areas where Google deploys it to Google.
Google decides "browser vendors aren't doing the things we'd like them to do", builds it own browser that focusses on the things that Google wants browsers to do, starts grabbing market share, and suddenly incumbent browser vendor start moving in the direction Google wants.
Next, Google decides "ISPs aren't doing the things we'd like them to do", and starts building its own consumer broadband network. Same basic strategy. Note that Google's deployment in Kansas City (KS and MO, both) is targetting availability starting 1Q 2012, with gigabit speeds, and pricing "at a competitive price to what people are paying for Internet access today".
Incumbent ISPs aren't going to be able to get many customers for megabit-range internet service if someone is offering price-competitive gigabit service in the same area. And if Kansas City goes well for Google, I wouldn't expect them to stop there.
I need a storage medium that is fast enough to write all the massive amounts of HD pornography that i'll be downloading...
Google buys Cox and makes the KC experiment national. Suck it, Comcast, TWC, and AT&T.
So that means that now all the Senators that are less than tech savvy will read that and think "so if we don't have the bandwidth, pirates won't pirate".
Seriously for a nation that once led the world in goods and services and had higher standards of living than most every other country in the world, we sure went to hell quick.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Shannon says there is plenty of room for more effecient use of the pipes we have already laid.
I'm a big fan of more bandwidth but really for video distribution the most effecient method is to use some sort of shared cache/CDN to store data closer to the user to signficantly reduce global consumption.
Anything not needing to be streamed live could be scheduled and downloaded as needed. The ability to know in advance which of 10 million people will want a file vs instant response on-demand is an extremely powerful idea opening huge opportunties for optimization.
An intelligent CDN could look to see who is requesting what where overlayed with network conditions and compute the most effecient distribution plan.
The same could be done using a P2P overlay but be centrally planned to make distribution both more effecient and faster.
Is what would generate the new traffic. The user would be able to stream in HD to a dozen people who would also be streaming in HD. HD video chat.
The video quality and voice quality is never quite good enough so there will be plenty of room to up the resolution and sound quality.
The reason we have our speeds throttled as a way to prevent congestion has always bothered me for this reason. Say Comcast/AT&T/Whoever has a 10 gig/s link up and running 24/7. At 4pm that link is moving about 5 gig/s and when everyone gets home at 5 or 6 the link saturates right up to 10 gig/s.
If I start downloading a game off steam at 4, shouldn't they want to leave my connection un-throttled so I can get it over and done with in a few minutes while their link is dead, instead of spreading it out to a time when the link fills from 6 to 9pm?
To put it more basically, how does letting your bandwidth sit idle solve the problem of not having enough bandwidth? /This is a Chewbaca. //Wookies on Endor
It may not DL an entire movie, but it could grab a significant chunk of it and let you watch it without jitter or pixelation, and then DL the next chunk when you have a few minutes of video from the previous chunk.
They have a name for this... it's called streaming...
I think the premise of the summary ignores trends. People love getting digital stuff wirelessly. They also love eliminating duplicate or overlapping monthly bills.
Just as wired telephones become fewer every year, I expect the demand for wired (or fibered) Internet to decrease each year wile demand for wireless services increase.
But high bandwidth wireless for everybody is very difficult and very expensive. We're already seeing the price increased and data caps that add negative feedback to wireless demand. Nevertheless, the public's enthusiasm for doing it wirelessly can't be extinguished.
Internet forefather Vint Cerf has a simple answer for this potential problem: Increase bandwidth exponentially
Yes, it is a conceptually simple solution. But economically and logistically it is incredibly difficult. There has to be a paying customer for that bandwidth and it isn't as simple as "build it and they will come". The long term solution for most bandwidth congestion is normally more bandwidth but that doesn't mean it is easy or cheap to do it.
I wish people would stop misusing the word "exponentially." It does not mean "rapidly increasing"; it has a precise mathematical definition. Misusing it leads to preposterous conclusions and makes the writer look ignorant.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Except the uplinks need more combined speed to cover the increase in usage....Guess he forgot that part.
*Han voice*
Sure, you can download that big old file kid, but whose going to store it? You?
*Luke voice*
You bet I could! I've get me a big old hard drive right here. We don't have to sit here and listen...
*Ben voice*
Shut up.
Anything is possible given time and money.
This guy here calling the previous poster a retard is actually the retard IMHO.
#1) 8 channel stereo....derp....derp...derp.... -10:Pedantic Asshole You know what the poster meant and simply "grammar nazi'd" him cause you couldn't find anything valid to argue. Now that I re-read your post I really don't even know why you responded in the first place. I don't see a valid arguing point at all. The poster mearly stated his opinion about his "imaginary world." I wouldn't even be responding to you if you hadn't played the 8 channel stereo card as your post is mostly rambling. I'm pretty sure you Trolled me.
#2) Rockoon was sleeping during History class or can't read a book. You HONESTLY are using the "640k should be enough for anybody" arguement? Historically mankind will devour any and all surplus of anything just because we can. Remember when we had 10MB hdd's? Those were great but we wanted bigger ones cause they just wouldn't hold everything we had. These days my 2TB drives are nearly filled. Electrical power is another great example. Some people think we can solve all of our power problems by adding more eco-power and nuke-power plants. Well in the short term they are right. But in 40 years we will see in the headlines again that we have maxed out our power and are facing certain doom if we don't conserve more. Speaking of that, there wouldn't even be a concept of conservation if we humans didn't naturally overconsume every damned thing that exists. Your final couple of sentences even reinforces the OP's point. If we have all this extra bandwidth laying around WE WILL find some use for it....perhaps that holographic TV you mentioned. But even if that doesn't happen in the near term think about this: You are correct, the jump from SD to HD wasn't exponential (and I don't think the OP really meant that, again -10 Pedantic) but take my household for instance. We live in the boonies. The only internet available is 3MB AT&T DSL or satellite (which I tried and it sucked). I am limited on the heaviest days to about 3 machines playing WoW and ONE streaming some Netflix for the kids. Heaven forbid someone should call on the Vonage VOIP. That requires the streaming or WoWing to be turned off. If I had 1GB bandwidth I could have a dozen friends over playing vid games AND a TV in every room streaming whatever it wants (this is where the OP's notion of growth comes from, we up the number of cores when overclocking doesn't cut it anymore). And with all that new cheap power I have since they threw up a windmill farm and new nuke plant down the road, I am gonna have all my PC's running (which I already do and I have 6-8 online at any one time with 4 having 700W+ power supplies) PLUS I can fire up a dedicated media server, a SAN, and maybe 2 or 3 of my old PC's to mine BitCoins if I wanted. Oh and a dedicated Tor node, Freenet node, and uTorrent download running 24/7 just cause I can. I'll probably need to cool all these servers as well so let me throw a dedicated A/C unit to each rack just to be sure. I hope you see where this "imaginary" growth is coming from. Give a man a bulldozer and he'll find a mountain to knock down...just because he can.
#3) "As far as twitter and facebook..." As far as what? You just called the guy an idiot and moved on. I postulate that YOU are the idiot. Do you not look around you? Do you not see what today's youth do with the tech they have? To simply dismiss and idea of a live twitter stream during a show is complete idiocy. Folks already sit around and text each other on thier cell phones while simultaneously watching a TV show. You think if they could banter on about it right through the TV they wouldn't? Hell CNN or Fox News (can't remember which) already has a live twitter ticker running sometimes at the bottom of the screen and it is quite clearly being used. If you saw an infuriating troll post some BS like you just did, wouldn't you want to be able to shout back...well eventually we will. Your casual dismissal is exactly the attitud
Restricted devices that are *not* successfully 'jailbroken' can do that. The device is doing the will of the manufacturer rather than the user, and thus the manufacturer colluding with the studios to prevent unlicensed retention and playback of content achieves some measure of success.
So long as there is a large consumer base *that you want to get rental revenue from* using devices they truly control, any scheme with long term storage seems unlikely to be *perceived* as reasonably protected against piracy next to a more constricted mechanism.
I do agree that DRM is a losing proposition as piracy obviously can and does happen. The streaming services are left uncompromised simply because there is no point in ripping content compressed for live streaming when you can rip much higher quality streams. Anyone thinking Netflix's restrictions around DRM are actually meaningful is foolish. However, studios will forever cling to best-efforts.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is only a problem for third world countries, such as the US.
In the developed world we already download full movies in sub-minute times...