Re: Google wants to be your Internet

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Jan 20, 2007, at 10:37 AM, Rodrick Brown wrote:

> On 1/20/07, Mark Boolootian <booloo () ucsc edu> wrote:
> > Cringley has a theory and it involves Google, video, and  
> > oversubscribed
> > backbones:
> >
> >   http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070119_001510.html
>
> The following comment has to be one of the most important comments in
> the entire article and its a bit disturbing.
>
> "Right now somewhat more than half of all Internet bandwidth is being
> used for BitTorrent traffic, which is mainly video. Yet if you
> surveyed your neighbors you'd find that few of them are BitTorrent
> users. Less than 5 percent of all Internet users are presently
> consuming more than 50 percent of all bandwidth."

I'm not sure why you find that disturbing.  I can think of two  
reasons, and,
they depend almost entirely on your perspective:

If you are disturbed because you know that these users are early  
adopters
and that eventually, a much wider audience will adopt this technology
driving a need for much more bandwidth than is available today, then,
the solution is obvious.  As in the past, bandwidth will have to  
increase to
meet increased demand.

If you are disturbed by the inequity of it, then, little can be  
done.  There
will always be classes of consumers who use more than other classes
of consumers of any resource. Frankly, looking from my corner of the
internet, I don't think that statistic is entirely accurate.  From my  
perspective,
SPAM uses more bandwidth than BitTorrent.

OTOH, another thing to consider is that if all those video downloads
being handled by BitTorrent were migrated to HTTP connections
instead the required amount of bandwidth would be substantially
higher.

Owen