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Netflix and Google Make Land Grab On Edge of Internet
An anonymous reader writes "In an end-run around slow Internet backbone providers, Netflix and Google (plus a dozen more large content giants) are in a bitter fight to deploy servers and dominate the consumer edge of the Internet. This Wired article provides some of the first graphics of this fight and how it is changing the underlying Internet infrastructure. The source of the article (DeepField blog post) also has some pretty interesting commentary."
As the article notes, from an internet-topology standpoint this isn't that new, dating back to Akamai-type CDNs starting in the 1990s. The idea is that you mirror your content inside several of the major edge networks, so e.g. Comcast users get served from the Comcast-local mirror. You then update the mirror whenever there's new content, but every single user doesn't have to re-fetch that video over the public internet to Comcast's network.
The main difference is that some of the large content providers are building out their own private CDNs, so Google is setting up its own edge-network mirrors instead of contracting out to Akamai. That's not a major technical change, but could have some important implications for competition.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you look at the upper right corner of the building in TFA's picture, you can see the shadow of the old Bell System logo.
Seems a bit dramatic. Google and Netflix use enough bandwidth that they can set up their own CDN. End of Story. If a small competitor comes along, they won't have the money to set up their own CDN, but LLNW, Akamai, and Level3 won't turn them down.
From the blog:
Our most recent data finds that more than 70% of all Internet traffic (on average) comes from just 150 CDN, hosting, cloud and content companies.
For many Internet users it is essentially now Television Mark 2.
Use BitTorrent? I'm sure they could wrap some DRM in there too. Having consumer to consumer video streaming would be handy. Also allows for extreme localisation. If my neighbour has been watching something I want...
Does this provide any leverage to help insure net neutrality by taking some power away from the core backbones, or is it moot since ISPs still reign supreme by providing that last mile connectivity?
Better known as 318230.
Won't they be recording this traffic on their servers. If anything the story down plays the problem. And you're downplaying it even more.
i.e. putting servers into ISPs to save on everyone's bandwidth bill. Not so much a land grab, just a way of mutually reducing costs.
Huh?
...is that if content is mirrored inside your provider's network, it's frequently unmetered and thus doesn't count towards your monthly bandwidth limit...
The Internet has an edge? How can that be, the world is a sphere. (And theres no real final frontier of the internet in space yet,.
I don't like it when healthy competition between two companies in a capitalist system is described as a "bitter fight" or "war", "battle", etc. It's sensationalist journalism and it completely mischaracterizes the nature of the healthy competition which is necessary for innovation to occur.
Google has been at it for years. They've been buying up dark fiber and peering directly with regional and even local-only players in markets across the US for something like 6 years. This article makes it sound like there's something new about that. I guess it would be like saying Gmail is new. It's not.
"...it could possibly bring down subscription rates for high speed internet, subsidized by the content providers."
I would like to visit his planet. It sounds nice.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
This could help companies like Netflix get high definition video to consumers, and it could possibly bring down subscription rates for high speed internet, subsidized by the content providers.
BWHAHAHAHA!
Thanks for that, I needed a good laugh.
That's not a major technical change, but could have some important implications for competition.
Yes, specifically that it'll fragment the entire network and potentially destroy interoperability across it. The internet would no longer be a unified global network. Network neutrality is the key to preventing this, but as we've seen, corporations don't want that: They want to turn the internet into a largely read-only media... just a better version of television.
A classic example of how this is shaping up is with Comcast, the Great Evil of the USA internet: They recently instituted a 250GB transfer limit, and then exempted Hulu from it, which they bought out. Netflix, a competing service at a lower price is now sitting out in the cold. Let's run some numbers and see how much of a problem this is. The average person watches 2.7 hours of TV per day; and it remains the single largest leisure activity in the United States. The average Netflix stream (based on my experience), is about 350KB/s. So that comes out to about 3.24GB per person, per day -- or 98.82 per month (the average length of a month). Now the number of people per household is a bit shaky, since there aren't any current numbers, but it's around 2.6 people per. So the average household will consume 257 GB per month if they used Netflix.
How strange that the bandwith cap is almost exactly the same number eh? Make no mistake -- this is a war between big business, and the only losers will be you and me. This is what happens when you let people into public positions who entertain the notion that capitalism runs best when it isn't regulated. Every infrastructure service in this country runs better with regulation, and the internet (telecommunications) is not an exception. Every time we let the private sector take over, we get crap like Standard Oil, AT&T (pre-breakup), Microsoft, etc. And now we have Montsano eating up our food supply (literally).
If network neutrality isn't given the force of law in the next two years, then two things are going to happen: Either we start building tunneled networks so all traffic through the last mile ISPs is encrypted and cannot be shaped, modified, or tampered with except in terms of bandwidth and latency as a whole... or we abandon the internet and start a new network that has no last mile restrictions (read: wireless, read: pirate radio).
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This isn't what this article is about, but this story reminds me that I would love to see some corporation, say Google, challenge the growing hegemony of telecoms and cable TV companies owning the Internet.
If we're going to go through all the trouble of building an Internet to replace TV and land line telephones (among other things) then it doesn't make any sense to hand the whole thing over to telecoms and cable companies.
Remember how all of a sudden all those small local ISPs just up and disappeared? We once had tons of choices for Internet connectivity, now we've got a choice of maybe three corporations, all of whom hate us.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So Netflix is starting to use its army of Flying Cloud Monkeys as a Content Delivery Network? No wonder the DVDs weren't making it to my mailbox!
..., and it could possibly bring down subscription rates for high speed internet, ...
Yeah, I don't see that statement as being true. Large web companies will only provide their on-site servers to large ISPs. The large ISPs have no reason to or history of reducing their subscription rates. If the servers were provided to smaller ISPs (such as GWI), then they could lower their rates and become more competitive. Maybe if the servers were provided to tier 2 peering networks, they could pass on the savings to small ISPs? I don't know enough about tiers or peering to know if that's a possibility.
that is all this is really saying. If they were making their Customers happy and standing up for their interests like net neutrality then they would not be moving to protect their businesses.
New buzzword coming "the clouds", it differs from "the cloud". Now you can cut costs and increase productivity by combining all of your current distributed loads and resources into a distributed system. Your were distributed before and you'll still be distributed after but now you are in "the clouds" so it will be cheaper and easier to maintain.
Wait, Google and Netflix aren't relying on the cloud? They are in-housing their content distribution? They're buying/owning hardware?
Don;t they realize how stupid they are being? Don't they realize that everybody is using the cloud now.
Boy are they going to be embarrassed when they realize their mistake.
Since when did Netflix send people CDs?
That's largely because you cannot acheive a search listing as a leaf node. If you don't point outward from you site you are judged to have no value.
This becomes a black-body radiation problem, New conent can go onto the radiant surface anywhere, but it gets lost in the geography becasue if that new content isn't part of a site containing a massive number of outbound links (usually ads and the "natrual link farm" of, say, youtube video pages having links to other youtube video pages) then your site is "beneath notice".
So as users are added to the net in general, their content can only be recognized if it is in a "big" site.
A "big" site is, of course, a place that is super easy to get lost within, so the problem becomes "lather-rinse-repeat" for each content subdomain.
The calm, quiet voice that only speaks when it has something to say, must therefore remain unheard for the din of people shouting for attention.
There's an XKCD commic (isn't there always) where the "two pundits" (Ender's siblings) from Ender's Game get the treatment they -would- -really- receive on the internet as opposed to the rarified treatment required for the plot point(s) to work. 8-)
The internet -must- fracture becasue valuable content is opposed by hucksterism. It won't colapse but "sites" will evolve into subnets, in the darknet sense, jsut to recover the signal-to-noise ratio needed for discourse.
That leaves the vast majority of people "just watching" for any context or content. So yes, TV mark 2.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
We need to have bandwith pricing based on pipe size and not bits delivered per time period.
Of course since that would make every link symmetric there would be no chash-flow pressure.
Which is why internet connectivity should be a public good monopoly and not a competetive business.
The model itself, which was created once people started "charging for site access" and then the bandwith providers decided they wanted a piece of that action, is unsustainable because the Dance of the Sugar-Plumb CDN Providers requires the gateway agreements to churn if any money is to be made, but that churn is "considered harmful" to the gateway owners...
Yep, your capitalism dollar at work.
Restore the advertising ban on the internet, so that everything has to be pure content.
What a world! 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Yawn. USA != World.
instead of having Akamai, or level3 record it for them? I'm confused what are on about? Seems like a non story to me. Big high bandwidth company moves some of it's bandwidth to the edges.
I'd bet that each netflix end doesn't have the full catalog, but just the most popular 500 things or something like that. They may even be doing something like that 1-2 second "start loading the movie but call it instant" on the most popular 10-15 is because they can get 5-10 requests for it in the same second and start all of those clients at the same time to save disk bandwidth.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
...and it sucks. This development is no more annoying or significant than Akamai deploying content caching servers back in 1999. Seriously, how is this news? Right, I get it. Data centers and peering points only have so much real estate to let out. And we all know that no one anywhere, ever, will build another data center or peering point ever again. Sheesh. Move on.