Video Usage Creates Traffic Jam Worries 257
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has an article talking about worries over the increase in video downloads in the last year. Free video hosting and the popularity of iTunes is blamed for this phenomenon." From the article: "This is far from an academic issue. Whether the new companies can deliver on their promises could have a profound effect on how the Internet operates--and it could hit consumers in the pocketbook. Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls, which can be garbled by any network congestion, are increasingly common. Serious online hiccups could be as irritating, and potentially economically damaging, as persistent L.A. traffic jams."
I have a solutions (Score:4, Funny)
I call my solution POTS and I have submitted a patent to cover it.
We've been here before. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:We've been here before. (Score:4, Insightful)
And itunes for Gods sake! What the hell? Do vod-casts (or whatever the sheep call them) really account for a significant amount of traffic? I doubt it.
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
Re:We've been here before. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a specious argument. This is possibly because you don't know how the system works, so I'm willing to give you both the benefit of the doubt and a [very] short explanation. The fiber going to the door is not a contiguous piece with the fiber leaving the POP. In addition, fiber is typically shared between multiple subscribers. They only have so much bandwidth available to the POP, and it costs them money to get more. Plus, they have to throttle people to avoid segment oversaturation. The system can handle whatever speed, sure, but they only give you a piece of it, so that other people can have a piece, too. (It would be nice to see a more intelligent system that would let you have more bandwidth when no one else is using it, though.)
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
I'm on a good quality 100Mbit internet connection and I rarely see download speeds over 2 Megabytes a second. A typical download is usually 200-400Kbytes/sec
Jason.
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
I was actually impressed to see that a download flash game at nick.com hit over 6Mb/s incomming. You can have the biggest download pipe in the world, but it won't change how sites send the packets to you. There are more limitations then just your internet connection
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
All the FTTH that I've messed with (working for a telephone company, not a "telecom" that just resells other's st
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
"Blamed" as if this is a bad thing. This is a natural occurance in the "everything gets fatter" pipe of today's computing power and bandwidth. Processors are faster, RAM is cheaper, megabit is giving way to gigabit, broadband is becoming more ubiquitos. Speed/storage is cheaper, and will continue to get cheaper.
Let us not all forget the AMAZING release of v.92 56kbps modems. Whoa! 56k is almost double 36.6!
Psha, I say.
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
My cable modem bandwidth has more than tripled in the past two years and I expect it to continue.
That's funny, because my Comcast cable internet service currently is still slower than the service I had through its ancestor @Home 7 or 8 years ago. And I pay extra for the faster package. Go figure.
If this isn't an indicator of the sorry state broadband here in the U.S., I'm not sure what is.
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
Why do you call users of video podcast "sheep"?
I'm into the networking-yaddayadda since 19 years and I have seen a few good things come and quite a few good things go, but being able to download e.g. daily news effortlessly and to watching them on the train is something I hope will stay and expect to change TV and radio broadcast as we know it.
Meeeh,
k2r
Re:We've been here before. (Score:3, Informative)
I'd certainly hope not, seeing that it's estimated that Bit-torrent accounts for about two thirds of all traffic on the internet.
We're in the 21st century FFS! Let's light up some of that dark fiber or whatever, not come up with bullshit excuses for raising prices and lowering QoS. If myself as a high school student can afford to have a gigabit network setup within the house, I don'
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
I remember when AOL joined the Internet and everyone hated them because they had doubled the population and supposedly halved the overall intelligence.
I remember when.... damn am I old. I had a birthday this week and I'm almost thirty. Man, I need a freaking nap already.
Anyways, uh, These People Need To Get Stuffed. Internet2 is on its way and it is faster
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
Internet2 is not something that Comcast is going to offer you access to in a few years. It's a collaborative network acc
Re:We've been here before. (Score:2)
It's early, so perhaps I didn't quite express myself effectively.... To be honest, I would expect that in the end either I2 gets its funding cut / goes bankrupt, or becomes another backbone- like system much like the origin
Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds little more than the usual doomsday stuff. In the US there is plenty of unused fiber that covers the entire country. Even companies like Google are interested in tapping this resource. This isn't so much a problem as it is an opportunity for a company to fullfill the demand.
http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:2)
You sicko, why are using cold dead fingers to...oh wait...I get it now...nevermind.
Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:2)
Wait till you have kids. Let's say, two sons and one daughter. And you still have the same pipe you now have. And you want to VoIP with a colleague because you're working home today. And let's, for the sake of argument, say that they are in puberty.
Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:2)
Exactly.
TFS (Business and entertainment content worth billions of dollars now flows over ordinary ISP networks. Internet voice calls,) reminds me that you get what you pay for. A business, whose existence or business at least partially rested on the internet would pay for a reliable connection and make sure their customers got a reliable service. That then gets tiered down into the low cost/free offerings. This happens at pres
Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:2)
Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:5, Funny)
You can shout that till your throat is horse, no one will listen.
Re:Dark Fiber Untapped Resource (Score:2)
Doc Searl
neccessity is the mother of invention (Score:3, Insightful)
RSS/Atom Jam (Score:2)
And there is even more comming! As an web developer who works on Atom implementation I see also big risk with coming RSS/Atom support in Windows Vista and all those RSS/Atom-enabled devices and browsers and aggregators...
I can imagine a users with the Windows that downloads automatically (without user's awareness) hundreds of feeds from all over the web every day... This is not "per-click" view but continuous (most of the time useless) feed updates...
If you watched
Tiered Internet .... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure tiered Internet is a bad thing (Score:2)
Bandwidth is a limited resource, and there's a need for providers to be able to allocate that resource (or at least do resource planning) based on known factors. At first, they were assuming that everyone they gave "unlimited" access to would spend a couple hours a day surfing. Now it's looking more and more like they should assume that everyone will be dow
Re:I'm not sure tiered Internet is a bad thing (Score:2)
On the server side of things, I pay for metered bandwith, which I monitor daily. However, I pay about $100 for 2TB of transfer at 100Mbs, and that's with a server. That's approximately 6Mbs constant for the entire month. I don't think most people have any idea of how much (little) they download.
They aren't worried about traffic "jams" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all about control, and the fear of losing it.
Re:Yep (Score:2)
So is everything you have ever read on
About your sig (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They aren't worried about traffic "jams" (Score:2)
Re:They aren't worried about traffic "jams" (Score:3, Insightful)
Cache server (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cache server (Score:2)
But this idea only works when people are getting the same data, obviously. It won't work for voice ove
Re:Cache server (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that proxy use is smart on the part of the ISP to manage their bandwidth usage. Unfortunately, I don't think a proxy server will solve for the bandwidth issue this time. The entertainment companies want their content protected (ala DRM) meaning that each video will be a unique file and serves no purpose being cached on a proxy server. These requirements are at odds with easing network traffic by using cache servers.
I have to wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is exactally why I do not subscribe to the VOIP bandwagon yet. ComCast's service is so hit-or-miss sometimes, I can't trust a phone service on it. Hell, I can't even trust an uninterrupted game of Q2 deathmatch. Mind you, this isn't exclusive to ComCast. It's a trend propogating through all broadband ISPs as they meet a level they can't serve.
Asterisk is very very close. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm in the process of getting some IAX2 servers in place in our data center so I can use some leaner codecs, the trick here is that in practice this is all transcoding...I'm doing the equivalent of wav -> mp3 on all of that audio in real-ti
Anybody else read this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm paraniod, but it's a perfectly healthy attitude to have in this country.
Re:Anybody else read this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Anybody else read this... (Score:2)
I'm gonna go out on a limb and have to agree with Dvorak: this needs to be government mandated if we are to see fast
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
In a related story, high tech companies are concerned that they may lose money in the event of a power outage.
Let the info blitz begin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let the info blitz begin (Score:4, Insightful)
Networks and roads (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a really interesting analogy. It's taken us (the U.S.) fifty years to figure out that if you build more, and higher-capacity, roads, it alleviates congestion temporarily but ultimately results in...more traffic and more congestion. Does something similar apply to networks? Adding more bandwidth may be expensive, but unlike roads, (i) usage is easy to monitor and thus charge for, increasing companies' incentive to invest, and (ii) the many damaging externalities (i.e., costs like air pollution that traditionally aren't factored into the "price" of roads and cars) seem to be absent for computer networks.
Re:Networks and roads (Score:2)
I'm genuine interested in that idea. It sounds plausible, like some of the reasons why one guy riding his breaks can cause a standstill three miles back, but maybe you can elaborate?
Re:Networks and roads (Score:2)
The idea here is one of supply and demand: if the cost is too high, people will find a way to use resources more efficiently. When there is so much traffic that the morning commute is up to two hours, people will find ways to make it easier. Ride public transportation, share rides, telecommute, use small cars, ride bicycles, walk, etc.
But you build up the infrastructure to accommodate, two things can happen. First, better infr
Re:Networks and roads (Score:2, Insightful)
From my own experience around several cities, roughly 25% of all congestion comes from the fact that the exits are too narrow. When you build out your freeway to 10 lanes, and your exits are one lane each, you're going to have complete standstills when three lanes of cars try to cram their way into that exit. Once one lane stops, people will use
Re:Networks and roads (Score:2)
Ah, I see you're also familiar with the Gowanus Expressway in lovely NYC.
Thanks for the reply. Plus infinity billion informative.
Re:Networks and roads (Score:3)
Because if you build a freeway, you have to add spurs (on/off ramps) to connect with existing roads. These then opens up large tracts of land for developers to build homes and businesses, as the freeway now allows a shorter commute time between commercial and residential areas. Home-owners need cars, and you end up with more tra
Re:Networks and roads (Score:3)
Sure - RFC 1925 [rfc-archive.org] Section 2.9 of Networking Truths.
Re:Networks and roads (Score:2)
This is nonsense. When is the last time your boss said you didn't need to go to work because traffic was going to be bad? People time-shift their travel to accomidate undersized highways, they don't eliminate it. The idea that increasing capacity to meet demand can't work is rediculous. I don't know how it
Re:Networks and roads (Score:2)
The choke isn't at the backbone, it is near the edges, where the primary overselling occurs. DSL is oversold at high ratios, and when the DSLAM
Quality of Service (Score:3, Insightful)
Podcasts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Podcasts (Score:2)
This is the perfect application for this technology.
Re:Podcasts (Score:2)
Assuming that you haven't already, it sounds like it's time that your customer "upgrade" to a plan that allows for higher bandwidth. I'm sure that it's all in the ToS.
Get more bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
If service providers feel they actually have a reason to be concerned about the matter, then they should see it as an opportunity to sell more server class bandwidth to customers. Assuming they're not undercutting themselves (???), they should be able to use the sales to increase their bandwidth infrastructure to meet the needs.
Honestly, I think the question is, who is raising the concerns in the article and why? The answer seems to be, "the service providers" and "so they can sell the idea of tiered service". Will they just get over it? No one is buying the tiered service idea.
One of the (many) disadvantages of DRM (Score:2)
Thus, a switch to legal downloads (with the assumption of accompanying DRM) will cause massive bandwidth problems near the source of the content, because DRM forces a centralized distribution topology.
(The one exception is if a content provider distributed many content servers all over the Internet which would perform en
Wrong side of problem to worry about (Score:3, Insightful)
If Application X (games mostly) was too much for your system, what did you do ?
Try to improve on the application engine, request code rewrites and wait for patches ?
Duuh, nope. YOU GOT UP AND BOUGHT A FASTER MACHINE.
If you knew NY traffic was going to be awfull, do buy a faster car ?
NOPE. Actually, you could SELL the car.
And you will use the subway, or in case you can't, get a cab.
Or, if you're the mayor, put a huge "car usage price" and get the freaking streets empty (and the city rich) at the same time.
So... is your ISP (you being a big company) having problems with your traffic ?
Well... get a better "pipe" plan, or switch ISPs.
AS LONG AS YOU ASK FOR MORE BANDWIDTH, and you do it for "long term", somebody, somewhere is going to be more than happy to provide it for you.
So the answer is not "limit usage", but "build better roads".
If only people would pay for bandwidth, right? (Score:2)
It's not as if there is any shortage of dark fibre lying about and wav
OK, I get it. (Score:2)
ISPs' rhetoric is increasingly strident about content from outside providers raising the costs of their networks," said Jupiter Research analyst Joe Laszlo. "But I haven't seen hard data that suggests the volume of legitimate video is coming close to swamping ISP networks yet.
I think I understand. ISPs (whatever THAT means) are annoyed that they will have to... how do I put this... Provide Internet Service? Shocking.
Simple Solution... (Score:2)
Of course, with the current problem of corporations runnign everything, fat chance of that happening anytime soon.
Multicasting to the rescue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:2)
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:2)
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:2)
There are more complex tricks, but they're probably not worth going into.
Oh, or you could use swarmcasting (for example, BitTorrent). It's not
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:2)
> mean bandwidth usage is more localised (because clients will tend to connect to clients close
> to themselves in network terms).
No, BitTorrent doesn't care about where peers are. It only cares about how fast they are uploading. If ISPs didn't cap upload between subscribers then the clients would definitely prefer local peers.
In any event, BitTorrent and CacheLogic have announced [bittorrent.com] a caching system so ISPs
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:3, Informative)
>Kind of. There's tricks you can do, for example carousel,
> where you continously send the same file out again and
> again. So people can start listening at any point, receive
> to the end of the file in the current sending, then listen
> for the first half when it's broadcast again.
What? So I should watch the last half of a show to see the ending and THEN watch the first half of it? That is completely pointless.
Not quite. I've worked with some software from Digital Fountain [digitalfountain.com]. Pretty n
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:2)
Yes, BitTorrent doesn't currently support multicast, but if networks actually supported multicast it wouldn't be long before it was either integrated into BT or as a sort of "back channel" for BT.
Multicast would also be a great way to "push" content to local caches.
As someone else pointed out, IP Multicast in its current implementation presents some scalability problems, probably one of the main reasons it hasn't
Re:Multicasting to the rescue (Score:2)
It's all about tiered QOS (Score:4, Insightful)
As an example, if a given company (can anyone say "Google"?) wanted to provide VoIP telephone service with a guaranteed, deterministic, bit-rate allocated to each connection, they would sign a contract with a particular ISP and pay certain licensing fees and so on. The controversy arises because we could reach a point where a large chunk of bandwidth is dedicated to these paid-for streams, and the rest of the world is left with a best-effort attempt at whatever's left over. This would of course leave the smaller companies out in the cold. If CNN.com pays the premium to provided guaranteed QOS for it's streaming audio, and another, smaller site does not, well, guess who's video is going to look better?
At the moment, there is still a lot of dark fiber and unused bandwidth in the backbone, such that the real bottlenecks, if any, are in the last mile to the house, so it's not an issue. Yet. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, but it's not hard to envision a future where the days of all internet sites being equal are long gone.
Should people pay for the bandwidth they use? (Score:2, Insightful)
Most big ISPs (comcast, verizon, etc.) charge a typical flat rate for monthly service. So Bobby checking his email pays the same as Grandma downloading those high-quality Frank Sinatra mpegs.
But maybe there's another way to do this- monthly fees based upon data transfer. I pay it now as the host, but maybe the consumer should pay some metered/scaled/tiered rate?
It's easy enough to compute transfer rates per account (they do this now in a limited way so they can send warnings to people consuming too m
NO to metered usage... (Score:2)
Back in the bad old days of pre-dialup, most services WERE pay-by-the-minute services. I HATE that kind of plan. I hate pay-per-minute usage for phones and cell phones. I can't stand every time I go to use the thing constantly fretting about how many minutes are ticking away. I want a flat rate that I can count on being the same n
Re:Should people pay for the bandwidth they use? (Score:2)
Uninformed (Score:2)
Most Internet traffic is consolidated within large network companies (Tier 1s, cable companies, phone companies) at this point. Large network comapnies exchange traffic with each other over high-capacity circuits (peering points) in multiple locations. Typically they don't charge each other for it because it allows both to keep their traffic levels at public exchanges, which are exp
The press is stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
People who solve problems instead of hyping them understand that if there's a shortage of something (bandwidth, or QoS in this case), you go get more of it. And the problem is solved.
I have an idea - pay me to increase priority! (Score:2)
Your truly,
-Satan
Oh my, the Internet is going to implode! (Score:2)
Should have put a picture of chicken little in a tin foil hat on this one.
Astroturf (Score:4, Insightful)
Blame microsoft. (Score:2)
Telco? (Score:2)
Late for work! (Score:3, Funny)
Employee: Sorry I was late for work boss. My telecommute was delayed in a "traffic jam". Traffic was moving well down the backbone, but when I pulled off at the Cisco exit it slowed down to a crawl due to a collision at the next router. After so long in traffic I was running low on gas and headed for the nearest repeater, unfortunately I didn't make it and my 'car' was dropped off the road.
I already have Vonage performance problems... (Score:2)
I sometimes wonder if my content is getting "throttled" by some carrier along the way...
Steve
FUD from telcos? (Score:2)
I read a recent NYT article which said if we had faster broadband speeds like in other first world countries, the problems with bottlenecks simply vanish. Let's see if the telcos champion that solution.
Blurb Is Economically Ignorant (Score:2)
If people need and want bandwidth, the market will happily comply and keep increasing it. I've already got 55 megabit fibre to my house where I live. Besides government regulation and controls, I can't think of any reason telecommunication companies cannot meet the demands of Internet users.
Just for once... (Score:2)
Scaremongering by the badguys (Score:2)
If you ask me, this is probably a bunch of scaremongering by the pigopolists over at Verizon and AT&T designed to get people to think more highly of the idea of a "tiered Internet" where "content providers" like Google have to pay extra for the privilege of sending bandwidth-intensive video over the Internet.
It's a manufactured problem. (Score:2)
L.A. Traffic can't be that bad... (Score:3, Funny)
It wasn't designed for voice (Score:2)
Reminds me of people who buy houses near working farms and then expect the farmers to stop farming so they won't be offended by the smell associated with normal farm o
Beware of marketing posing as journalism (Score:2)
Web companies and civil libertarians have bitterly criticized this idea, calling for "network neutrality" that doesn't relegate other content to a slow lane, or pass along costs to consumers.
Nobody is calling for network neutrality. The FCC already requires network neutrality. The telcos are calling for network neutrality requirements to be overturned so that they can charge more money for a tiere
Great, now my ISP will cut me down.... (Score:2)
Utter Crap (Score:2)
"Downloadable video files are large enough that few are cached at the local level, and it's expensive for content companies to do so."
This is utter crap, video content on itunes and google is akamized. That means the popular stuff is cached on servers by your isp (if it doesn't suck). Or by the very least a public akamai server in your nearest city.
The bandwidth "pinch" referred to by the author doesn't exsist in a modern network. If it does your ISP is incompetant.
The only impact the increasing quail
The business way (Score:3, Interesting)
"Sure you can have unlimited rentals for $14.99, as long as you limit it to less than 5 a month, otherwise we'll throttle you to a limit of our choosing."
"Sure you can have 1Mbps up/down, as long as you don't try to use it, otherwise it will be 128Kbps."
How do they keep getting away with this. If I were to say, "sure I'll agree to pay you $14.99/mo for the service as long as it's only for one month, otherwise I'll just pay you $1.99/mo" I'd get service interrupted and a big splap on my credit history. We need consumer unions to protect ourselves. When one person drops the service, they'll be glad as it's just someone using the service to the advertised terms (instead of much lower than that), but if a thousand subscribers do it at once they'd notice.
Planted story tobuild support for tiered Internet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there's a plug for "Itiva", which has some technology they call "Quantum Streaming" (tm). Itiva's web site is vague, but this seems to be more about DRM than transmission: "Itiva enables publishers and media content owners to monetize media content. The technology protects copyrighted material, supports embedded advertising, and defines the future direction of video publishing over the Internet." Itiva has done a demo, one that basically demonstrates that if you have 5.5Mb/s to the user, streaming works reasonably well.