The Internet is going to get a whole lot slower next week

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 3:43am — Chauncey Dupree

People have been calling for the Internet to get crushed under the weight of its own bandwidth since it was created in the 80s. Of course it never has. But the threats have always been overstated.

However, next week, Apple will almost definitely launch it's iTunes movie rental store, and millions of people will start downloading like they never have before. One and a half hour movies can get up to one gigabyte in size. Contrast that to a four megabyte iTunes music file which is 250 times smaller. This is a huge amount of data.

Additionally, these movies will only be good for a short time - at that point they will be deleted from the computer. So if you want to see Casablanca again, you'll need to download the whole gigabyte of data all over. In iTunes you hopefully only have to download a file once.

Apple already utilizes Akami for media distribution which house web file servers all over the globe and at ISPs to help alleviate Internet congestion. This will certainly help - but will it be enough? Other people have said that Apple could use the AppleTV as a bit torrent client which would help distribute files quickly and more cost effectively.

Or perhaps this threat is overstated. It isn't just Apple in this game. Netflix and Amazon are currently selling movies as downloads without crippling the Internet. But neither of these vendors has anywhere near the marketshare as Apple. iTunes currently resides on over 100 million computers. Again, we are talking about a lot of bandwidth here.

By most accounts, Apple's movie rental store will most be a big success - hopefully not at the expense of the Internet.

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Comments

You're so very far off the

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 4:12am — Joe (not verified)

You're so very far off the mark. Seriously with HD proliferation your worried about single-Gig files? Come on now. I know it's a slow news day but be a bit more clever.

HD proliferation? Not over

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 4:30am — admin

HD proliferation? Not over the internet. doesn't exist unless you count VUZE/Torrenting which is a very small audience.

Single gig files mean little unless there are a lot of them - which there will be. We know a lot of you download lots of stuff off of Torrent that make 1 Gb seem like nothing. However, this is going to affect a much larger percentage of people.

Even on a micro level. You share your cable modem speed with a few of the people in your neighborhood (subnet). The max speed of most coax is 10Mb. If they are downloading the Star Wars trilogy and you want to download Raiders of the Lost Ark on a snow day, your other neighbors aren't going to be getting very good Internet speed.

That's my point! It's just

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 5:29am — Joe (not verified)

That's my point! It's just now starting to pickup.

Let's do some math (I'm likely wrong here so correct me please):

60 seconds x 120 minutes = 7200 seconds in a 2 hours movie...

h.264 can be beautiful at 6000 kbps so

7200s x 6000 kb/s = 43200000 kilobits

43200000 kilobits= 5.15 GB

Right now, this very second, hundreds of files are available on Amazon's Unbox service. Most two hour movies are 2.5 GB. These are compressed in vc1. Twice that file size would get you HD content. Hey look at that ~2.5 x2 = ~5.15 mmm math.

Anyway. It's do-able. For what it's worth, With a 6 mbps down connection Unbox videos download (buffer) enough (to play fully without stopping to download more "re-buffer") in less than 2 minutes. If you forgo watching it as you download it, you could allow it to download overnight.

Moreover, to shape your own load, one could say "Download will complete within 24 hours." and come back the next day. That's the simple solution ignoring the ability to include a torrent-style update to iTunes.

Coax at 10 Mbps? Where the

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 2:20pm — Ethan (not verified)

Coax at 10 Mbps? Where the hell do you live?

By-the-way: if your

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 5:31am — Joe (not verified)

By-the-way: if your downloading the Star Wars Triology in HD (5GB x 3) and Raiders of the Lost Arc (5GB) then it should slow down.

Do you, honestly, expect 20 GB of files to download promptly?

Well, if you look at what

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 5:42am — running (not verified)

Well, if you look at what flew through the internet tubes tuday - it's 50% p2p stuff (or more). p2p is much worst on bandwith than downloading from some server, because everyone who downloads uploads too... and I dont expect Apple to be more popular than bittorrent or than Peer-to-peer in general.

Internet can live with bittorrent, which is enormous bandwidth eater (really enormous), why shouldn't it live with one download service from one specific firm in one specific country (i don't expect apple to put it to the world, it will be U.S.-only, as a lot of their download products)

That's exactly the point.

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 11:06am — Mac (not verified)

That's exactly the point. Compared to P2P free downloads around the globe a pay rental operation, even if it is on iTunes with all the apple clout, is going to be negligible. negligible. P2P is what makes internet slower, and that is really is going to be a problem in the near future.

http://www.webpronews.com/top

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 1:00pm — Anonymous Coward (not verified)

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/06/19/youtube-comprises-10-of-all...

Pile of Excretions, this is

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 5:53am — Arjun Muralidharan (not verified)

Pile of Excretions, this is not going to take any toll anywhere. And if it was supposed to be funny, it wasn't.

Apple keeps things to US soil only, sadly, and with 400 million people out of which maybe half are richt enough to afford these kinds of things, that's a relatively small target market, and they might hit 10 percent in there.

Hey Joe, I work with a

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 6:58am — TerpsFreak

Hey Joe, I work with a company that is developing a platform for High Res viewing and delivery of long-form video content online. H.264 looks fantastic at 2000kbps. 6000kbps would be overkill. I can take a movie encoded at 2000kbps, hook my laptop up to a 50" 1080i flat screen and the picture is amazing. Casino Royale and Any Give Sunday are great tests since they use a lot of complicated transitions, flash cuts, etc. BTW, HD requires 19 megabits/second. Anyone delivering video online and claiming it to be HD is "fudging the facts".

I think we are reaching the

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 8:32am — Dan (not verified)

I think we are reaching the point when Internet access pricing should be done by amount of traffic and not by theoretically available max bandwidth. I do not see why my Internet surfing should suffer because of bitorrent/VOD crowd. Let higher prices for higher traffic pay for imrovement of infrastructure to support this, out of the pockets of people who use it.

>> I think we are reaching

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 9:41am — Anonymous Coward (not verified)

>> I think we are reaching the point when Internet access pricing should be done by amount of traffic and not by theoretically available max bandwidth.

It's been like that for several years. Even if you didn't realize it, ISPs have had defacto monthly caps on bandwidth. It's just that not all of them have been upfront about it. And now Comcast is being sued for that very thing (they are "shaping" traffic, to reduce bandwidth, by dubious means).

I know this. But it has been

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 11:48am — Dan (not verified)

I know this. But it has been done by covert and inefficient means, and not by everyone. There should be a clear, market-driven structure around paying-per-GB, rather than these questionable practices.

Does a torrent P2P approach

Tue, 01/08/2008 - 2:37pm — Anonymous Coward (not verified)

Does a torrent P2P approach do anything useful in this specific case?

P2P takes the load off the MAIN server and dsitributes it. But if Apple already distributes the load via Akimi to the shorted route, P2P would be worse for the internet as a whole (but maybe better for your personal download speeds). Instead of a 4 hop route to the nearest server, you'd be doing 20+ hop routes to random P2P sharers.

Good for you, if you can download faster than the nearest server can send. Bad for the internet, which is what the article is about, because you're moving local traffic in an attempt to use MORE bandwidth than the nearest server can send by reaching FURTHER into the internet for extra servers.

Now, a Akimi may be able to better optimize its services for large files if IT decided to impliment a closed P2P system... allowing an Akimi server in east bumwick doing nothing to suppliment the overloaded Akimi servers in downtown bumwick, trading some extra abuse of the internet as a whole for better load management of it's servers than can be gained by finding the closest non-overloaded server and then serving the entire file from that single server.