A simple proposal

Matthew Petach mpetach at netflight.com
Fri May 16 05:26:02 UTC 2014


There's been a whole lot of chatter recently
about whether or not it's sensible to require
balanced peering ratios when selling heavily
unbalanced services to customers.

There's a very simple solution, it seems.
Just have every website, every streaming
service, every bit of consumable internet
data have built-in reciprocity.

You want to stream a movie?  No problem;
the video player opens up a second data
port back to a server next to the streaming
box; its only purpose is to accept a socket,
and send all bits received on it to /dev/null.
The video player sends back an equivalent
stream of data to what is being received in.
The server receiving the upstream data stream
checks the bitrate coming into it from the player,
and communicates back to the video streaming
box every few minutes to lower the outbound
bitrate going to the player to match what the
inbound bitrate coming from the client is.
That way, traffic volumes stay nicely balanced,
and everyone is happy.  For extra credit, and
to deal with multiple layers of NAT in the v4
world, you could even piggyback on the same
stream, though that would take just a bit more
work.

Mobile apps could be programmed the same
way; you download a certain amount of data,
an equivalent volume of data is sent back
upstream to balance it out, and preserve
the holy ratio.  Even web pages could use
javascript footers to send back upstream an
equivalent amount of data to what was
downloaded.

Once and for all, we could put an end to
the ceaseless bickering about ratios, as
everyone, everywhere would be forced
into glorious unity, a perfect 1:1 ratio
wherever the eye should look.

As far as I can tell, this should solve
*everyone's* concerns from all sides,
all in one simple effort.

Matt



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