S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

Tue Oct 12 01:24:54 UTC 2021

> On Oct 11, 2021, at 13:57 , Matthew Walster <matthew at walster.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 11 Oct 2021 at 21:05, Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com <mailto:mpetach at netflight.com>> wrote:
> I think it would be absolutely *stunning* for content providers 
> to turn the model on its head; use a bittorrent like model for 
> caching and serving content out of subscribers homes at 
> recalcitrant ISPs, so that data doesn't come from outside, 
> it comes out of the mesh within the eyeball network, with 
> no clear place for the ISP to stick a $$$ bill to.
> 
> Ignoring for the moment that P2P is inherently difficult to stream with (you're usually downloading chunks in parallel, and with devices like Smart TVs etc you don't really have the storage to do so anyway) there's also the problem that things like BitTorrent don't know network topology and therefore only really increases the cross-sectional bandwidth required.

A 4K 2 hour movie is about 40GB. Most modern smart TVs around 32GB of RAM and can probably devote about 20GB of that to buffering a stream, so yeah, that should actually be doable.

While torrent-like distribution isn’t particularly good for the eyeball provider, it can be good for getting content to eyeballs under some circumstances regardless of how bad it is for said network.

Unfortunately, it’s not good at knowing how bad it’s being for the network and it’s also not good at detecting the circumstances when it’s good for the end user or not.

> Not to mention that it has been tried before, and didn't work then either.

Yep.

Owen

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