The 100 Gbit/s problem in your network

Mon Feb 11 05:46:01 UTC 2013

On Feb 9, 2013, at 6:45 AM, fredrik danerklint <fredan-nanog at fredan.se> wrote:

> No. Streaming from services, like Netflix, HBO, etc..., is what's
> coming. We need to prepare for the bandwidth they are going to be
> using.

Then work on your HTTP caching infrastructure. All these services already use a proprietary form of HTTP adaptive streaming, either MSFT, Adobe, or Apple. These technologies are being unified by DASH in the MPEG/ISO standards bodies.

Adaptive HTTP chunk streaming gives you the best of multicast-like and cached VoD behavior, exploiting the temporal locality of popularity in content while not requiring multicast.

As a content publisher, I must say it works wonders for us so far, even with just two bitrates. There is a huge HTTP caching infrastructure out there in businesses, schools, and other orgs that is unused by other video transports; even plain HTTP downloads usually overrun cache object size limits.

The Olympic streaming in particular showed how well HTTP chunk video can scale; dozen of screens in my org showed the same content all day from local cache, with no noticeable spikes on our transit links.

Is HTTP as efficient a protocol as possible for transporting video? No, but 1K of headers per 1M of content chunk
puts it within 0.1% of netcat. And "working now with widely deployed infrastructure" beats  "stuck in Internet Draft forever".