is this like a peering war somehow?

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Fri Jan 20 15:27:26 UTC 2006


On Jan 20, 2006, at 9:29 AM, Peter Corlett wrote:
> <Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com> wrote:
> [...]
>> But it's no magic bullet. Streaming live media also requires low
>> jitter, especially if you are selling it as TV because viewers will
>> join and leave channels often, as they change channels on their
>> remote controls. This means you can't have big local buffers to hide
>> jitter, therefore you have to build a network with enough capacity
>> so that packets are all cut-through switched.
>
> I observe about 3-4 seconds of latency on the UK DVB-T and DAB
> broadcasts anyway compared to analogue. Cost-cutting on CPU grunt in
> decoder boxes can mean it takes up to ten seconds to change channel.

<AOL>
Here in the US, Comcast's "digital cable" service takes seconds to  
show a picture after you change channels.  I don't know if that's  
buffering or CPU or what, but consumers are clearly OK with it.
</AOL>

So you _can_ have a large client-side buffer and ignore jitter.  That  
means packet loss is important, not jitter.  (A 2 second buffer would  
be orders of magnitude more than your typical jitter.)  Which means  
queue size is only relevant if you drop things off the back end of  
the queue.

Which means you can build an intentionally congested network and  
"sell" the front-end of the queue to services which will pay you  
more.  The rest will just risk being dropped off the end of the queue.

Will consumers care?  Hell, they're already used to the Internet not  
really working right, rebooting their computers every day, and sites  
being taken down 'cause the next box over is infected and DDoS'ing  
someone (or their domain has been removed for spamming :).  In fact,  
most consumers probably can't use the speed they have since their  
computer is using all the available bandwidth & CPU spewing crap onto  
the 'Net from the 1389 viruses installed.

So, yeah, I think the end user will put up with the fact some sites  
are slower on their DSL line and not look to change providers.  And  
they will slowly migrate to the faster sites - i.e. the ones who pay  
for the front of the queue.


Also, no one has talked about the ideas proposed in Vixie's second  
link: That the big content providers are willing to pay a 'little' to  
raise the bar of entry.  A few million bux a year to each of the  
RBOCs in the US would be a rounding error in Google's bottom line,  
but it would make it nearly impossible for a 'start-up' to make it.

Doesn't that scare anyone?


> In contrast, streaming video and audio from iTMS starts to play a lot
> quicker. It sounds like the problems with jitter and latency over
> private IP networks is overstated if it still works fine over the
> Internet.
>
> (FWIW, this is on 1Mb/s ADSL that is 170ms from www.apple.com.)

Yeah, but you don't get iTMS stuff from www.apple.com.  I'm betting  
you are a LOT closer to iTMS. :-)

-- 
TTFN,
patrick



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