8 ms·

Imagine for a moment, if they fudged the numbers a bit on the storage capacity of every box going into your home. They advertise the usable capacity of 1 or 2T

by fsckin 14y ago

Imagine for a moment, if they fudged the numbers a bit on the storage capacity of every box going into your home. They advertise the usable capacity of 1 or 2TB. In reality, it has 30-200% more storage that is not usable by the customer. They just made a very fast, low latency, distributed mesh CDN that the customer pays Google for the connectivity AND electrical bill.

throwaway64 14y ago
they don't really save anything on the connectivity, as everything would still be routed through Google, thus it would use exactly the same amount of bandwidth as if the storage was sitting inside a data center. As for electricity, the cost of packaging up and sending drive units to the customer + upkeep would dwarf the costs of electricity for the total lifetime of the drives. I don't think this really makes sense.
- dullcrisp 14y ago
  Also regarding the electricity, would that not be considered theft, if nothing else.
  - derleth 14y ago
    I really don't see how.
    - dullcrisp 14y ago
      If they don't disclose that the box they gave you purportedly to record TV shows is actually also drawing power from your line and using it to run part of their datacenter? I would think that that could be considered theft by deception. It's certainly very shady. I'll admit that the line is a bit blurry.
      - SquareWheel 14y ago
        If they were to actually do this, they would of course disclose that fact. It would be written in small print, but still disclosed.
      - lukeschlather 14y ago
        It's recording TV shows, it's just also serving them to your neighbors. It's the neighborly thing to do.
- btilly 14y ago
  The idea of a CDN is that you don't route everything through Google's data centers, you just pretend to and fetch from a nearby mirror. This really does save you bandwidth - a lot of bandwidth. Having some of the mirrors you use for this be in people's homes is an interesting twist that I had not thought of.
  - throwaway64 14y ago
    the thing is the route to any "mirror" that sat in a persons home would be through Google's network. This wouldn't save them any money.
    - btilly 14y ago
      It does save them money, which is why every large ISP does it. The fact that makes it work is that not all routes through Google's network are created equal. Routes that go to and from data centers go a longer distance, through more pieces of equipment, and include busy backbones that you do not want to get overloaded. Routes that stay in a local neighborhood go a short distance and put load on one router which should be able to take it, and totally skip the critical backbone. From the point of view of the network operator, going to a data center is slow and expensive. Keeping traffic inside a local neighborhood is fast and cheap. Thus they want as much traffic as possible to go the fast and cheap route. CDNs cache data on local mirrors, and routes traffic to them whenever possible because that is faster and cheaper than going all the way to a data center. Every large ISP does this, and it would be shocking if Google didn't follow suit. But actually caching data on hardware that is sitting at customer's houses is an interesting twist.
    - tonfa 14y ago
      Yes, and putting a CDN node where the fiber terminates seems much much simpler (they might already do it for TV feeds anyway).
  - nostrademons 14y ago
    Why stick the mirror in the customer's home, though, where you have to mirror it once per customer? It basically becomes the same as a browser cache then. The logical place for it would be the local switching office (or whatever the equivalent is for fiber technology) - no idea if that's how it actually works, but that's where my naive knows-little-about-networking-besides-the-TCP/IP-stack mind would put it.
chermanowicz 14y ago
that's a really interesting thought
natrius 14y ago
That is an incredible idea.
nostrademons 14y ago
Isn't the point of a CDN to push content out close to consumers because the last mile "pipe" is significantly slower than a content-provider's network? If the consumer is already on the content-provider's network, and operating at the same speed as the backbone, you don't need a CDN.
- philwelch 14y ago
  A CDN also provides reduced latency and massive load balancing.
- dedward 14y ago
  The point of a CDN, at least a significant one, is to reduce latency. To put your content closer to your customers. It also lets you handle larger load, is more resilient to DDOS, etc, but, at least in my view, those are often secondary... the main issue is latency, and perhaps capacity. Gigabit to your house won't remove latency, other than perhaps to apps hosted by google (including google, obviously)
danielhughes 14y ago
I don't think the fiber runs all the way to the TV box (someone correct me if I'm wrong). I have FiOS where I live and the way it works is Verizon installed an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) in my basement and then plugged the coax cabling into that box. It would be very expensive to rewire the home with fiber or even ethernet. Presumably if Google was building a CDN they wouldn't want to be reliant on standard wiring in their customers' homes. Also that sleek-looking TV box would probably have to be much larger if it doubled as an ONT (the one in my basement is huge). Seems a little impractical if my assumptions are correct. Edit: I don't mean to dismiss your idea about the value of Google reserving some space on the disk for their own purposes. Cable & satellite operators already do that today. Technology exists for example that allows the operators to cache household-targeted TV ads on the disk. These deployments are still small scale but I think it's highly likely Google is thinking about such things as a way of monetizing their new network. If you're curious about this topic do a quick search on Google's investment in Invidi and on their partnership with Echostar.

by fsckin 14y ago

throwaway64 14y ago

they don't really save anything on the connectivity, as everything would still be routed through Google, thus it would use exactly the same amount of bandwidth as if the storage was sitting inside a data center. As for electricity, the cost of packaging up and sending drive units to the customer + upkeep would dwarf the costs of electricity for the total lifetime of the drives. I don't think this really makes sense.

dullcrisp 14y ago
Also regarding the electricity, would that not be considered theft, if nothing else.
- derleth 14y ago
  I really don't see how.
  - dullcrisp 14y ago
    If they don't disclose that the box they gave you purportedly to record TV shows is actually also drawing power from your line and using it to run part of their datacenter? I would think that that could be considered theft by deception. It's certainly very shady. I'll admit that the line is a bit blurry.
    - SquareWheel 14y ago
      If they were to actually do this, they would of course disclose that fact. It would be written in small print, but still disclosed.
    - lukeschlather 14y ago
      It's recording TV shows, it's just also serving them to your neighbors. It's the neighborly thing to do.
btilly 14y ago
The idea of a CDN is that you don't route everything through Google's data centers, you just pretend to and fetch from a nearby mirror. This really does save you bandwidth - a lot of bandwidth. Having some of the mirrors you use for this be in people's homes is an interesting twist that I had not thought of.
- throwaway64 14y ago
  the thing is the route to any "mirror" that sat in a persons home would be through Google's network. This wouldn't save them any money.
  - btilly 14y ago
    It does save them money, which is why every large ISP does it. The fact that makes it work is that not all routes through Google's network are created equal. Routes that go to and from data centers go a longer distance, through more pieces of equipment, and include busy backbones that you do not want to get overloaded. Routes that stay in a local neighborhood go a short distance and put load on one router which should be able to take it, and totally skip the critical backbone. From the point of view of the network operator, going to a data center is slow and expensive. Keeping traffic inside a local neighborhood is fast and cheap. Thus they want as much traffic as possible to go the fast and cheap route. CDNs cache data on local mirrors, and routes traffic to them whenever possible because that is faster and cheaper than going all the way to a data center. Every large ISP does this, and it would be shocking if Google didn't follow suit. But actually caching data on hardware that is sitting at customer's houses is an interesting twist.
  - tonfa 14y ago
    Yes, and putting a CDN node where the fiber terminates seems much much simpler (they might already do it for TV feeds anyway).
- nostrademons 14y ago
  Why stick the mirror in the customer's home, though, where you have to mirror it once per customer? It basically becomes the same as a browser cache then. The logical place for it would be the local switching office (or whatever the equivalent is for fiber technology) - no idea if that's how it actually works, but that's where my naive knows-little-about-networking-besides-the-TCP/IP-stack mind would put it.

chermanowicz 14y ago

that's a really interesting thought

natrius 14y ago

That is an incredible idea.

nostrademons 14y ago

Isn't the point of a CDN to push content out close to consumers because the last mile "pipe" is significantly slower than a content-provider's network? If the consumer is already on the content-provider's network, and operating at the same speed as the backbone, you don't need a CDN.

philwelch 14y ago
A CDN also provides reduced latency and massive load balancing.
dedward 14y ago
The point of a CDN, at least a significant one, is to reduce latency. To put your content closer to your customers. It also lets you handle larger load, is more resilient to DDOS, etc, but, at least in my view, those are often secondary... the main issue is latency, and perhaps capacity. Gigabit to your house won't remove latency, other than perhaps to apps hosted by google (including google, obviously)

danielhughes 14y ago

I don't think the fiber runs all the way to the TV box (someone correct me if I'm wrong). I have FiOS where I live and the way it works is Verizon installed an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) in my basement and then plugged the coax cabling into that box. It would be very expensive to rewire the home with fiber or even ethernet. Presumably if Google was building a CDN they wouldn't want to be reliant on standard wiring in their customers' homes. Also that sleek-looking TV box would probably have to be much larger if it doubled as an ONT (the one in my basement is huge). Seems a little impractical if my assumptions are correct. Edit: I don't mean to dismiss your idea about the value of Google reserving some space on the disk for their own purposes. Cable & satellite operators already do that today. Technology exists for example that allows the operators to cache household-targeted TV ads on the disk. These deployments are still small scale but I think it's highly likely Google is thinking about such things as a way of monetizing their new network. If you're curious about this topic do a quick search on Google's investment in Invidi and on their partnership with Echostar.