The UK has already had this experience in early 2008 when the BBC began making huge amounts of TV content available through its iPlayer project. The impact on the DSL ISP industry was..not pretty. Our company did quite a bit of analysis on the results: http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/02/bbcs_iplayer_nukes_all_you_can.html http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/04/bbc_its_paymasters_cutting_the.html http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/06/no_video_really_has_killed_the.html http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/07/online_video_scoreboard_youtub.html http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/08/bbc_iplayer_bandwidth_wars.html Essentially, if you're dependent on bitstream or on monopoly/near monopoly backhaul, you're in for an interesting few years. Answers: encourage peering with content providers, push CDNs as far into the network as possible, look at using set-top boxes creatively (local caching, integrated delivery with satellite/broadcast/cable). On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
I've been seeing a flurry of new streaming service offerings, proposed or actual, such as Netflix, where it appears that they may be shooting to eventually ditch the mailed-DVD approach and just do broadband delivery of content. Might be a ways off, but they're doing the streaming now.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&refer=&sid=a1zxwiC6ELnA
So we're potentially talking 4Mbps streamed at a customer for 2 hours at a shot, 500KB/s, 3.6GB of data.
I know I've mentioned this several times in the past as a "coming challenge," and various parties, including many of our Australian networking friends, have expressed skepticism (and implemented quotas, etc). Yet it seems ever more certain that we're going to be seeing an explosion of video over the Internet, and sooner or later our rural areas, and all of the Australians ( :-) ), won't want to feel like left-out, second-rate Internet users.
I see the current situation as being a gateway of sorts. Clearly, there are fortunes to be made and fortunes to be lost on this sort of thing, and I suspect that if some company is successful at this sort of streaming, we'll suddenly see a lot more business plans that involve Internet video delivery.
This would seem to present some challenges to networks today, and probably more in the future. This would seem to be a pivotal time of sorts, are our networks planning to meet this challenge by providing the capacity, or are we going to degrade or limit service, or ... ??? What are networks doing today about these issues?
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.