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Groucho on 07 August 2008
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Sqrl said:
Groucho said:

Keep in mind the VoD is highly compressed, because it can be, as are all the data types you mentioned, and the number of consumers who actually use them digitally are massively dwarfed by the number that use physical media. We're talking about 100% digital distribution. The distribution you see now is a mere drop in the ocean of commerce, and it already taxes the infrastructure of the internet.

Does anyone who doesn't live within 3 miles of a DSL repeater station have anything to add to this discussion, or do people actually believe that everyone and their dog has a 3.0 Mb/sec downstream connection to their home? Or that even a remotely large number of households do? Urban areas are not the majority of the population, nor do they represent the the majority of consumers (at least in the USA, where I live). If you have a fast internet connection, you are in the vast minority, even to this day, and you need to step back and get a bigger perspective than the little minitown/convenience store/next-to-the interstate highway neighborhood you live in.

 

This isn't going to change without *substantial* fee increases for ISPs, etc. This goes for commerce bandwidth as well. Those fee increases will make large-scale digital distribution financially undesirable, unless there's something standing in the way of physical production and transport (like an oil crisis). And no, services like Steam, and the current XBL are not large-scale, from that perspective. Lol if you think so. Sure Steam and D2D service millions... once in a while. Therein lies the difference. If I could put a hard number on the bandwidth that retailers effectively put into the hands of consumers each day via physical media, it would be downright astonishing, I guarantee.

The US median speed as of June last year was 1.97 Mbps. If you factor out dial-up users, who more than likely aren't interested in DD anyways, the median would go up substantially.

Now, there are several million people who are interested in DD and this group has a higher than average technology interest which means the vast majority of them will be on the high side of this median. In short there is a massive market already available for it.

That is why there are companies who are already in these markets, a fact that contradicts your position. I'm interested in how you explain the fact that companies are already basing their businesses on these DD networks and their profitability. Frankly, I think you have a very warped view of the bandwidth situation in the US. My guess is that it is probably a valid view for your area only.

 

 

 

 

Being interested in DD and relying upon it are very different beasts, and leaf nodes aren't really the issue at hand -- I shouldn't have mentioned it, since its the common user perception, and many people believe that since their leaf-node speed has gone up by leaps and bounds in just a few years, then the backbone must also be increasing in size by that rate. Its not, and cannot without large increases in expenses. Physical storage media, and the amount of data that goes into modern media products has increased much faster than the backbone could ever hope to keep up with.

I'm not saying that its impossible to increase available backbone bandwidth to accomodate masses of DD. I'm saying that doing so will increase the expense of internet usage to the point of making it... pointless. Physical distribution would then be more profitable.

If the backbone was large enough to support such services, I believe that the corporations that run it (Sprint, AT&T, MCI, etc.) would have to start charging for "long-distance" network time, etc., and that would come through on your ISP bill as well. Thus DD would become ineffective as a means of garnering profit, since someone shipping physical media could do the work much cheaper.

The current DD services only work because, to this point, internet bandwidth has not been at a premium -- but large switches to DD service would increase the demand to the point where it would be a supply/demand issue. The costs of sustaining the internet's infrastructure has motivated the government to turn over control of most aspects of the internet to private corporations over the past decade. Corporations don't have some magical money-maker to allow them to pay for bigger/better service where the government cannot -- they have to charge their customers for it. In this case, that means charging both the endusers and the commercial sites to an extent much greater than you're seeing today.

Increasing internet transmission volume isn't the same thing as increasing processor power -- its folly to believe that it is. It just doesn't scale with time in the same manner that processors have in the past few decades. It started out pretty big, and now its reaching its limits. Even if every US household has fiber-optic internet access by 2015 (that was the original goal, now its slipped back), the backbone wouldn't be able to support all those high-bandwidth users using so many high-bandwidth services at once without some serious price increases. As more households get faster downstream internet access, the problem actually gets worse.