4 ms·

P2P can't work once you have more than a few participants.

• southerntofu 5y ago
  This is only true due to bad protocols and network infrastructure. As long as ISPs have incentives to make Netflix go fast and the connection to your actual neighbors go slow, P2P can't take off. Also multicast networks could easily outperform cloud infrastructure in many setups, but something something business incentives.
  • roca 5y ago
    In-network IP multicast has all kinds of practical issues. Without it, you can't match the performance of colo-hosted stream concentrators.
    • southerntofu 5y ago
      I'm not saying otherwise, although i don't have any experience with multicast (i just know people who were playing with that some years back). Feel free to point to some more detailed/critical resources if you have links at hand. But even on unicast networks Bittorrent (and other P2P protocols) largely outperforms any cloud provider in terms of bandwidth, especially in parts of the world where your "cloud" company has no infrastructure. What i was denouncing is that many ISPs (at least in France) make sure if you have 10Mbit/s upload it will work fine on a route to Google, but you won't ever get the full 10Mbit/s to your literal neighbor who's using a competing ISP... You'll be happy if you even get 1Mbit/s. There's no technical reason for that, it's all political/economical considerations (the same that make us have asymmetric bandwidth, no static IP, no configurable reverse DNS, etc).