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Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
- From: Marshall Eubanks
- Date: Mon Jan 08 07:09:05 2007
Dear Sean;
On Jan 8, 2007, at 2:34 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:
On Sun, 7 Jan 2007, Joe Abley wrote:
Setting aside the issue of what particular ISPs today have to pay,
the real cost of sending data, best-effort over an existing
network which has spare capacity and which is already supported
and managed is surely zero.
As long as the additional traffic doesn't exceed the existing
capacity.
But what happens when 5% of the paying subscribers use 95% of the
existing capacity, and then the other 95% of the subscribers
complain about poor performance? What is the real cost to the ISP
needing to upgrade the
network to handle the additional traffic being generated by 5% of the
subscribers when there isn't "spare" capacity?
If I acquire content while I'm sleeping, during a low dip in my
ISP's usage profile, the chances good that are nobody incurs more
costs that month than if I had decided not to acquire it. (For
example, you might imagine an RSS feed with BitTorrent enclosures,
which requires no human presence to trigger the downloads.)
The reason why many universities buy rate-shaping devices is dorm
users don't restrain their application usage to only off-peak
hours, which may or may not be related to sleeping hours. If peer-
to-peer applications restrained their network usage during periods
of peak network usage so it didn't result in complaints from other
users, it would probably have a better reputation.
Do not count on demand being geographically localized or limited to
certain times of day. The audience for streaming is world-wide (for
an example, see
http://www.americafree.tv/Ads/geographical.html
for a few hour slice in the early evening EST on a Sunday - note,
BTW, that this is for English language content). The roughly equal
distribution to the US and the EU is entirely normal; typically the
peak-to-trough bandwidth usage variation during a day is less than a
factor of 2, and frequently it disappears all together.
Regards
Marshall
If I acquire content the same time as many other people, since
what I'm watching is some coordinated, streaming event, then it
seems far more likely that the popularity of the content will lead
to network congestion, or push up a peak on an interface somewhere
which will lead to a requirement for a circuit upgrade, or affect
a 95%ile transit cost, or something.
Depends on when and where the replication of the content is taking
place.
Broadcasting is a very efficient way to distribute the same content
to large numbers of people, even when some people may watch it
later. You can broadcast either streaming or file downloads. You
can also unicast either streaming or file downloads. Unicast tends
to be less efficient to distribute the same content to large
numbers of people. Then there is lots of events in the middle.
Some content is only of interest to a some people.
Streaming vs download and broadcast vs unicast. There are lots of
combinations. One way is not necessarily the best way for every
situation. Sometimes store-and-forward e-mail is useful, other times
instant messenger communications is useful. Things may change over
time. For example, USENET has mostly stopped being a widely
flooded through every ISP and large institution, and is now
accessed on demand by users from a few large aggregators.
Distribution methods aren't mutually exclusive.
If asynchronous delivery of content is as free as I think it is,
and synchronous delivery of content is as expensive as I suspect
it might be, it follows that there ought to be more of the former
than the latter going on.
If it turned out that there was several orders of magnitude more
content being shifted around the Internet in a "download when you
are able; watch later" fashion than there is content being
streamed to viewers in real-time I would be thoroughly unsurprised.
If you limit yourself to the Internet, you exclude a lot of content
being shifted around and consumed in the world. The World Cup or
Superbowl are still much bigger events than Internet-only events.
Broadcast
television shows with even bottom ratings are still more popular
than most Internet content. The Internet is good for
narrowcasting, but its
still working on mass audience events.
"Asynchronous receivers" are more expensive and usually more
complicated
than "synchronous receivers." Not everyone owns a computer or
spends a
several hundred dollars for a DVR. If you already own a computer,
you might consider it "free." But how many people want to buy a
computer for each television set? In the USA, Congress debated
whether it should
spend $40 per digital receiver so people wouldn't lose their over
the air broadcasting.
Gadgets that interest 5% of the population versus reaching 95% of
the population may have different trade-offs.
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