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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.'"

3 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Makes sense... by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    '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.'

    You mean actually have the file stored on your PC? OH, yeah, that'll go down well with the MAFIAA.

    --
    No sig today...
  2. Re:Makes sense... by jeffmeden · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  3. Re:Makes sense... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh you crazy nerds and your "solutions". It's as though you believe that the internet is a system for transferring data rather than extracting rents...

    Some people...