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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.'"
It's not exactly a technically innovative idea, but i like it a whole hell of a lot better than the "solution" most broadband companies seem to be deciding on, which is "more caps and more fees!"
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Do you? No, I don't think you do, not with existing video techniques. If block downloads were of a format that used end to end compression instead of stream compression, you could gain additional savings by requiring the user to download the whole file. As it is, prerecorded video streams already buffer enough to fill the MTU on the network, meaning that any ability to transfer it faster will still result in the same net amount of bytes going across the network. Wake me up when we have practical end-to-end compression techniques for video...
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.