Up with Up — Big Clash Coming
About 18 months ago I wrote a little post called “Up With Up” — about the importance of uploading.
There are big clashes coming when users discover they can't upload predictably.
1. BitTorrent. John Waclawsky pointed me to this Wikipedia chart listing ISPs that block BitTorrent. How do the ISPs do it? And how do they decide between “good” and “bad” BitTorrent protocol uses? James Enck and others point out that there are many studios and virtual world companies using it for distribution — a legit, legally Torrent-able Harry Potter trailer, anyone? Huge headaches coming, and only getting worse with high definition files. (Top ten Torrent-ed files listed here.) Here's a paper about symmetric broadband use in Japan — where a small percentage of users is accounting for most of the upload traffic.
To block it, you need to sniff out the Torrent seeds and headers. Fascinating discussion here between admins trading tips on blocking a computer-literate Torrent user.
2. Not providing symmetrical upload. Carriers assume that people will download, not upload. Dave Burstein provided me with the following (paraphrasing, all mistakes are mine): For DSL, there's also a lot of interference caused by the strong user-side transmitter. So ADSL was originally designed for 6 Mbps down, 768K up. And, besides, telcos want to be able to hang onto enough bandwidth to sell videos. For the telcos, it would be simple (and incredibly inexpensive — pennies — to provide symmetric 768K up and down, but they want to upsell people to 3 Mbps down, 768K up. Same with cable — it would be easy to provide symmetrical upload, but DOCSIS 3.0 is designed for 1 Gbps down, 100 Mbps up because cable carriers don't make money on upload “services.”
In other countries where there's more competition, carriers tend to provide symmetric upload/download.
3. The Venice Project. From the people who brought us Kazaa and Skype. Here's a description:
“The Venice Project is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of bandwidth per hour. One hour of viewing is 320MB downloaded and 105 Megabytes uploaded, which means that it will exhaust a 1 Gigabyte cap in 10 hours. Also, the application continues to run in the background after you close the main window.”
“For this reason, if you pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP, you should be careful to always exit the Venice Project client completely when you are finished watching it.”
Here are some network operators mulling over the implications.
So — we've only just begun the upload battles.
[Heartfelt thanks to the members of Gordon Cook's list who sent along this information.]
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2 Responses to “Up with Up — Big Clash Coming”
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Susan,
I so happen to have the Cho et. al. paper in front of me at the moment. If you look at it, there is no clear distinction between high-end users and other users. there is not even a clear cut between ftth and dsl customers. There is just one long continuum of people using more and more bandwidth. The top 10% of FTTH users are using more than 2.5 Gigabytes per day, measured as an average per week. However there is also a significant amount of users close to that level, but not yet up to that level. The researchers conclude that there is no real gap between a heavy user and a normal user. James Enck sais that he can hear backbones creaking, I fear that it will be the first feet that will become hot with traffic, such that in the midst of winter you can still see where the DSL and Cable lines lay by just following the green patches in the snow.
I don't know if they're one and the same, but your link to “top ten Torrent-ed files” actually seems to give a list of the top ten Torrent-ed movies. BitTorrent has a lot of useful applications — I downloaded (and sourced) a Linux distribution that way — that don't have anything to do with copyright violations. But I think that's your point.
Unfortunately, many of the services consumers have access to were designed before the boom in user-generated content. I'm reminded of the days when split-speed modems provided 1200 bps down and 110 bps up, because it was assumed that all the upstream needed to do is keep up with your typing.