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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
On 6-jan-2007, at 15:07, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote: Is it a peer to peer type of system where it redistributes a portion of the stream as you are viewing it to other users? Yes, though not neccessarily as you are viewing it. A proportion of what This is a really weird service. It sends out semi-live streams (as opposed to downloads) but it can be cached and made available later, it's also peer-to-peer but needs a massive network or at least massive amounts of peering. With Bittorrent, it's typical for people to download faster than they upload, and then continue to upload for some time after they've finished downloading. This works very well as long as not everyone starts downloading at the same time. However, for something with time constraints this doesn't work so well. Either you're limited by the maximum up speed, which generally isn't enough to support decent video, or the peer-to-peer aspect can only take care of part of the required total upload capacity so there must be additional servers to take care of the rest. I'm guessing the latter is the case here, and this new service works much the same way as Skype in the sense that it will plunder people's upload capacity for the benefit of the people running the network, rather than being a real peer-to-peer service. ISPs should of course welcome this, because when people start craving their daily 2 GB fix you got them exactly where you want them, especially in markets with little or no broadband competition.
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