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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (18739)	1/6/2007 12:32:36 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

The "Venice Project," which I referenced above in Message #18739 (uplinked), is viewed as a threat by some network operators who see its participants consuming ever greater amounts of bandwidth, as the following thread heading from NANOG suggests: "Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?" This story was picked up by NANOG at tinyurl.com and continues for another fourteen uninterrupted posts, and still counting, making for some interesting and informative reading if you have a few moments of time. In the fifteenth message Andrew Odlyzko makes some astute observations, as well. See: tinyurl.com --snip: [Odlyzko:] Responding to postings by CM and ME: 1. There is practically no live television (at least in the United States). After the Janet Jackson episode, networks are inserting a 5-second (or perhaps it is a 10-second, I don't recall) pause, in order to stop anything untoward from showing up on the screen. Admittedly, there are live events (videoconferencing, or sports events that some people get a thrill out of watching in real-time), but that is a small fraction of total traffic. 2. Business models (such as advertising-financed TV) are certainly slow to change, as both businesses and consumers do not alter their habits on Internet time. But neither business models nor consumer habits need to change when you move from streaming to file downloads. As long as the transmission does not have to be absolutely real-time (as it does with videoconferencing), you gain a lot. Say you have a 3 Mbps download link, and the transmission speed of your video is 1 Mbps, start shooting it down at 3 Mbps (possibly allowing the customer to start watching it right away), and after 5 seconds you will have the first 15 seconds in the buffer on the customer's device. Even if that person has been watching from the beginning, you now have a 10-second grace period when you can tolerate a complete network outage without disturbing your customer. Just think of how much simpler that makes the network! And if you do worry about long videos not being viewed to the end, shoot them down to the customers in 10-second increments. This solves concerns about advertising and everything else. And of course you can encrypt the files, and do whatever else you want. Andrew P.S. I have been puzzled by the fixation on streaming for over a decade. A couple of years ago I wrote about it in "Telecom dogmas and spectrum allocations," dtc.umn.edu At my networking lectures, I often do a poll, asking how many people in the audience see any advantage (for consumer, or service providers, very vague requirement) in faster-than-real-time download of video. The response rate has ranged from 0 to 20%, with the 20% rate at two networking seminars at Stanford and CMU, full of networking graduate students, professors, VCs, and the like. There is a (small) fraction of people who see buffering and file downloads as the obvious thing, and others mostly have never even imagined such a thing. What's strangest is that the two camps seem to coexist without ever trying to debate the issue. ---/snip FAC