If the content senders do not want this dipping and levelling off, then they will have to foot the bill for the network capacity.
That's kind of the funniest thing I've seen today, it sounds so much like an Ed Whitacre.
Then Ed learns that the people he'd like to charge for the privilege of using "his" pipes are already paying for pipes.
If they really were paying for pipes, there would be no issue. The reason there is an issue is because network operators have been assuming that consumers, and content senders, would not use 100% of the access link capacity through the ISP's core network. When you assume any kind of overbooking then you are taking the risk that you have underpriced the service. The ideas people are talking about, relating to pumping lots of video to every end user, are fundamentally at odds with this overbooking model. The risk level has change from one in 10,000 to one in ten or one in five.
But today, content production is cheap, and competition has driven the cost of content down to zero.
Right, that's a "problem" I'm seeing too.
Unfortunately, the content owners still think that content is king and that they are sitting on a gold mine. They fail to see that they are only raking in revenues because they spend an awful lot of money on marketing their content. And the market is now so diverse (YouTube, indie bands, immigrant communities) that nobody can get anywhere close to 100% share. The long tail seems to be getting a bigger share of the overall market.
Host the video on your TiVo, or your PC, and take advantage of your existing bandwidth. (There are obvious non- self-hosted models already available, I'm not focusing on them, but they would work too)
Not a bad idea if the asymmetry in ADSL is not too small. But this all goes away if we really do get the kind of distributed data centers that I envision, where most business premises convert their machine rooms into generic compute/storage arrays. I should point out that the enterprise world is moving this way, not just Google/Amazon/Yahoo. For instance, many companies are moving applications onto virtual machines that are hosted on relatively generic compute arrays, with storage all in SANs. VMWare has a big chunk of this market but XEN based solutions with their ability to migrate running virtual machines, are also in use. And since a lot of enterprise software is built with Java, clustering software like Terracotta makes it possible to build a compute array with several JVM's per core and scale applications with a lot less fuss than traditional cluster operating systems. Since most ISPs are now owned by telcos and since most telcos have lots of strategically located buildings with empty space caused by physical shrinkage of switching equipment, you would think that everybody on this list would be thinking about how to integrate all these data center pods into their networks.
So what I'm thinking of is a device that is doing the equivalent of being a "personal video assistant" on the Internet. And I believe it is coming. Something that's capable of searching out and speculatively downloading the things it thinks you might be interested in. Not some techie's cobbled together PC with BitTorrent and HDMI outputs.
Speculative downloading is the key here, and I believe that cobbled together boxes will end up doing the same thing. However, this means that any given content file will be going to a much larger number of endpoints, which is something that P2P handles quite well. P2P software is a form of multicast as is a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Akamai. Just because IP Multicast is built into the routers, does not make it the best way to multicast content. Given that widespread IP multicast will *NOT* happen without ISP investment and that it potentially impacts every router in the network, I think it has a disadvantage compared with P2P or systems which rely on a few middleboxes strategically places, such as caching proxies.
The hardware specifics of this is getting a bit off-topic, at least for this list. Do we agree that there's a potential model in the future where video may be speculatively fetched off the Internet and then stored for possible viewing, and if so, can we refocus a bit on that?
I can only see this speculative fetching if it is properly implemented to minimize its impact on the network. The idea of millions of unicast streams or FTP downloads in one big exaflood, will kill speculative fetching. If the content senders create an exaflood, then the audience will not get the kind of experience that they expect, and will go elsewhere. We had this experience recently in the UK when they opened a new terminal at Heathrow airport and British-Airways moved operations to T5 overnight. The exaflood of luggage was too much for the system, and it has taken weeks to get to a level of service that people still consider "bad service" but bearable. They had so much misplaced luggage that they sent many truckloads of it to Italy to be sorted and returned to the owners. One of my colleagues claims that the only reason the terminal is now half-way functional is that many travellers are afraid to take any luggage at all except for carry-on. So far two executives of the airline have been sacked and the government is being lobbied to break the airport operator monopoly so that at least one of London's two major airports is run by a different company. The point is that only the most stupid braindead content provider executive would unleash something like that upon their company by creating an exaflood. Personally I think the optimal solution is for a form of P2P that is based on published standards, with open source implementations, and relies on a topology guru inside each ISP's network to inject traffic policy information into the system. --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list NANOG@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog