Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

Sat Jan 6 14:25:27 UTC 2007

Note that 220 MB per hour (ugly units) is 489 Kbps, slightly less  
than our current usage.

> The more popular the content is, the more sources it can be pulled  
> from
> and the less redundant data we send, and that number can be as low as
> 220MB per hour viewed. (Actually, I find this a tough thing to explain
> to people in general; it's really counterintuitive to see that more
> peers == less bandwidth - I'm still searching for a useful user-facing
> metaphor, anyone got any ideas?).

Why not just say, the more peers, the more efficient it becomes as it  
approaches the
bandwidth floor set by the chosen streaming  ?

Regards
Marshall

On Jan 6, 2007, at 9:07 AM, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:

>
> On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 03:18:03AM -0500, Robert Boyle wrote:
>> At 01:52 AM 1/6/2007, Thomas Leavitt <thomas at thomasleavitt.org>  
>> wrote:
>>> If this application takes off, I have to presume that everyone's
>>> baseline network usage metrics can be tossed out the window...
>
> That's a strong possibility :-)
>
> I'm currently the network person for The Venice Project, and busy
> building out our network, but also involved in the design and planning
> work and a bunch of other things.
>
> I'll try and answer any questions I can, I may be a little  
> restricted in
> revealing details of forthcoming developments and so on, so please
> forgive me if there's later something I can't answer, but for now I'll
> try and answer any of the technicalities. Our philosophy is to pretty
> open about how we work and what we do.
>
> We're actually working on more general purpose explanations of all  
> this,
> which we'll be putting on-line soon. I'm not from our PR dept, or a
> spokesperson, just a long-time NANOG reader and ocasional poster
> answering technical stuff here, so please don't just post the archive
> link to digg/slashdot or whatever.
>
> The Venice Project will affect network operators and we're working  
> on a
> range of different things which may help out there.  We've designed  
> our
> traffic to be easily categorisable (I wish we could mark a DSCP,  
> but the
> levels of access needed on some platforms are just too restrictive)  
> and
> we know how the real internet works. Already we have aggregate per-AS
> usage statistics, and have some primitive network proximity  
> clustering.
> AS-level clustering is planned.
>
> This will reduce transit costs, but there's not much we can do for  
> other
> infrastructural, L2 or last-mile costs. We're L3 and above only.
> Additionally, we predict a healthy chunk of usage will go to our "Long
> tail servers", which are explained a bit here;
>
> 	http://www.vipeers.com/vipeers/2007/01/venice_project_.html
>
> and in the next 6 months or so, we hope to turn up at IX's and arrange
> private peerings to defray the transit cost of that traffic too.
> Right now, our main transit provider is BT (AS5400) who are at some
> well-known IX's.
>
>> Interesting. Why does it send so much data?
>
> It's full-screen TV-quality video :-) After adding all the overhead  
> for
> p2p protocol and stream resilience we still only use a maximum of  
> 320MB
> per viewing hour.
>
> The more popular the content is, the more sources it can be pulled  
> from
> and the less redundant data we send, and that number can be as low as
> 220MB per hour viewed. (Actually, I find this a tough thing to explain
> to people in general; it's really counterintuitive to see that more
> peers == less bandwidth - I'm still searching for a useful user-facing
> metaphor, anyone got any ideas?).
>
> To put that in context; a 45 minute episode grabbed from a file- 
> sharing
> network will generally eat 350MB on-disk, obviously slightly more is
> used after you account for even the 2% TCP/IP overhead and p2p  
> protocol
> headers. And it will usually take longer than 45 minutes to get there.
>
> Compressed digital telivision works out at between 900MB and 3GB an  
> hour
> viewed (raw is in the tens of gigabytes). DVD is of the same order.
> YouTube works out at about 80MB to 230MB per-hour, for a mini-screen
> (though I'm open to correction on that, I've just multiplied the
> bitrates out).
>
>> Is it a peer to peer type of system where it redistributes a portion
>> of the stream as you are viewing it to other users?
>
> Yes, though not neccessarily as you are viewing it. A proportion of  
> what
> you have viewed previously is cached and can be made available to  
> other
> peers.
>
> -- 
> Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm 
> +pgp at stdlib.net