is this like a peering war somehow?

Fri Jan 20 16:16:48 UTC 2006

On 20-Jan-2006, at 07:54, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Alexander Harrowell wrote:
>
>> Whatever. No-one's actually trying to do "some packets are more  
>> equal than others" here in Europe, except for the mobile people  
>> with IMS and such. BT just transferred its access network into a  
>> new division with a specific remit to provide open access to all  
>> ISPs and alt- tels who want it.
>
> My guess would be that basically everybody doing triple play will  
> prioritize the IPTV and VoIP packets in their network including the  
> access. Considering that streaming UDP IPTV requires very very low  
> packet loss, much better than Best Effort, this is needed to  
> provide a good quality service.

Perhaps this additional networking complexity (and hence cost, at  
some level, presumably) will allow peoples' eyes to be opened to the  
fact that the majority of television being viewed over the Internet  
today is done asynchronously, through peer-to-peer, file-sharing  
networks.

It amuses me to think of early-adopting consumers receiving all their  
expensive, network-optimised television shows in real-time on their  
TiVOs, only to have them recorded to disk and watched days later.  
(Recorded onto hard disks with no DRM, no less, ready to be encoded  
and uploaded to eDonkey :-)

If content distribution companies would accept this as the final  
outcome, then sticking a torrent client on the set-top-box and  
feeding it from an RSS feed starts to seem a lot cheaper than  
encumbering every access network with traffic shaping.

Joe