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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.
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.
I don't think BitTorrent delivers bits in a way that they can be streamed. I believe you get random chunks. Could be wrong it has been awhile sense I used BitTorrent.
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.
"...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
The actual protocol is agnostic - the client can ask for whatever chunk he wants. Most clients follow a (seemingly) random pattern, but nowadays uTorrent has a button you can click to prioritize the first blocks, so that you can start watching the movie while it's still downloading.
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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
While here the service has actually improved over the years (which, as you say, is what you'd expect), I got a VPS in the Netherlands with 300GB/month and 1Gbps up/down (burst) for less than $3/month and now I do all my seeding from there (as well as using it for my email server, hosting some very low traffic websites, etc).
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