4 ms·

I would argue that in the long run, it is better to demand more bandwidth than is available, so that infrastructure builders can react accordingly.

schoen 9y ago
I like the overprovisioning concept fine, but it's going to be pretty expensive to overprovision for the possibility of high-speed connections between all random pairs of hosts everywhere in the world regardless of geography. We'll probably have to persuade a lot more people to value this degree of connectivity ideologically, because demand for it isn't really getting expressed much right now. I don't want to sound like a Bellhead here, but the packet switching infrastructure that's been built out has embodied some assumptions about its likely patterns of use. To change those patterns of use a lot (which I'd like to see too) probably needs more infrastructure. Even things like ADSL are a problem here. I agree that path asymmetry doesn't feel at all healthy for the Internet -- it feels like it's baking in producer and consumer roles -- but there are a few counterarguments that may give us some pause: * It's never been cheaper for people who specifically want to provide services to others to rent servers in colocation facilities. It's getting cheaper every year. So, maybe people who care to do so could just rent some servers. (Of course, this might give them less autonomy because there are more people who can decide to kick them off or shut them down, and they might still not have the infrastructure to distribute media that they produce at home to the servers they rent. On the other hand, running things at home may make anonymous publishing harder because the associated broadband service is usually tied to a physical address by the ISP.) * There's never been a huge amount of expressed demand for symmetric network connections, even when they've been available as an option. (Maybe this is different in different countries?) The economic division of network operators into "eyeball networks" (major net traffic sinks) and "provider networks" (major net traffic sources) seems to be getting sharper over time. The network operators themselves might have an economic incentive to try to get their users to equalize the traffic in both directions -- especially in terms of arrangements around settlement-free peering -- but they haven't managed to change most users' habits very much this way. * I think of myself as a very pro-decentralization Internet user, yet whenever I run "ifconfig wlan0 | grep bytes", my download volumes consistently dramatically outpace my upload volumes, even though I have a symmetric broadband connection both at home and at work! So apparently I'm not being the change I want to see in the world.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  Your first point is actually a boon for P2P. If it is cheap enough for users to rent bandwidth closer to each other, that will solve the same problem CDNs solve. As for points two and three, decentralization does not mean 100% symmetry, just relatively more. I have a symmetric connection, and can forward ports without any fuss, and rather enjoy those advantages. Even so, I download quite a lot more than upload. I don't expect that to change much, even with significantly more P2P traffic. There are a few things where I am really frustrated with other's inability to forward ports, especially video games and VOIP.

schoen 9y ago

I like the overprovisioning concept fine, but it's going to be pretty expensive to overprovision for the possibility of high-speed connections between all random pairs of hosts everywhere in the world regardless of geography. We'll probably have to persuade a lot more people to value this degree of connectivity ideologically, because demand for it isn't really getting expressed much right now. I don't want to sound like a Bellhead here, but the packet switching infrastructure that's been built out has embodied some assumptions about its likely patterns of use. To change those patterns of use a lot (which I'd like to see too) probably needs more infrastructure. Even things like ADSL are a problem here. I agree that path asymmetry doesn't feel at all healthy for the Internet -- it feels like it's baking in producer and consumer roles -- but there are a few counterarguments that may give us some pause: * It's never been cheaper for people who specifically want to provide services to others to rent servers in colocation facilities. It's getting cheaper every year. So, maybe people who care to do so could just rent some servers. (Of course, this might give them less autonomy because there are more people who can decide to kick them off or shut them down, and they might still not have the infrastructure to distribute media that they produce at home to the servers they rent. On the other hand, running things at home may make anonymous publishing harder because the associated broadband service is usually tied to a physical address by the ISP.) * There's never been a huge amount of expressed demand for symmetric network connections, even when they've been available as an option. (Maybe this is different in different countries?) The economic division of network operators into "eyeball networks" (major net traffic sinks) and "provider networks" (major net traffic sources) seems to be getting sharper over time. The network operators themselves might have an economic incentive to try to get their users to equalize the traffic in both directions -- especially in terms of arrangements around settlement-free peering -- but they haven't managed to change most users' habits very much this way. * I think of myself as a very pro-decentralization Internet user, yet whenever I run "ifconfig wlan0 | grep bytes", my download volumes consistently dramatically outpace my upload volumes, even though I have a symmetric broadband connection both at home and at work! So apparently I'm not being the change I want to see in the world.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
Your first point is actually a boon for P2P. If it is cheap enough for users to rent bandwidth closer to each other, that will solve the same problem CDNs solve. As for points two and three, decentralization does not mean 100% symmetry, just relatively more. I have a symmetric connection, and can forward ports without any fuss, and rather enjoy those advantages. Even so, I download quite a lot more than upload. I don't expect that to change much, even with significantly more P2P traffic. There are a few things where I am really frustrated with other's inability to forward ports, especially video games and VOIP.