On 27/Feb/15 19:13, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
Consider a group of 10 users, who all create new content. If each one creates at a constant rate of 5 mbits, they need 5 up. But to download all the new content from the other 9, they need close to 50 down.
And when you expand to several billion people creating new content, you need a *huge* pipe down. Bottom line is that perfect symmetry isn't needed for content distribution - most people can't create content fast enough to clog their uplink, but have trouble picking and choosing what to downlink to fit in the available bandwidth.
Isn't this a phenomenon of the state of our (uplink) networks?
Remove the restriction and see what happens?
Only partially. It is also a phenomenon of having built the first broadband networks with that asymmetry, which in turn discouraged a whole host of potential applications, which in turn creates a sort of bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy: broadband networks don't see much call for tons of upstream because it wasn't available, and so there aren't lots of apps for it, and so users don't ask for it, and so the cycle continues. In many cases, users who had high upstream requirements have been instead working around the brokenness by, for example, renting a server at a datacenter. I know lots of gamers do this, etc. So even if we were to create massive new upstream capacity tomorrow, it might appear for many years that there's little interest. Consider streaming video. We theoretically had sufficient speed to do this at least ten years ago, but it took a long time for the technology to mature and catch on. However, it should be obvious that the best route to guaranteeing that new technologies do not develop is to keep the status quo. With wildly asymmetric speeds, upstream speeds are sometimes barely enough for the things we do today (and are already insufficient for network based backup strategies, etc). Just try uploading a DVD ISO image for VM deployment from home to work ... The current service offerings generally seem to avoid offering high upstream speeds entirely, and so effectively eliminate even the potential to explore the problem on a somewhat less-rigged basis. ... 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.