On 20-Jan-2006, at 07:54, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Alexander Harrowell wrote:
Whatever. No-one's actually trying to do "some packets are more
equal than others" here in Europe, except for the mobile people
with IMS and such. BT just transferred its access network into a
new division with a specific remit to provide open access to all
ISPs and alt- tels who want it.
My guess would be that basically everybody doing triple play will
prioritize the IPTV and VoIP packets in their network including the
access. Considering that streaming UDP IPTV requires very very low
packet loss, much better than Best Effort, this is needed to
provide a good quality service.
Perhaps this additional networking complexity (and hence cost, at
some level, presumably) will allow peoples' eyes to be opened to the
fact that the majority of television being viewed over the Internet
today is done asynchronously, through peer-to-peer, file-sharing
networks.
It amuses me to think of early-adopting consumers receiving all their
expensive, network-optimised television shows in real-time on their
TiVOs, only to have them recorded to disk and watched days later.
(Recorded onto hard disks with no DRM, no less, ready to be encoded
and uploaded to eDonkey :-)
If content distribution companies would accept this as the final
outcome, then sticking a torrent client on the set-top-box and
feeding it from an RSS feed starts to seem a lot cheaper than
encumbering every access network with traffic shaping.
Joe
