up/down asymmetry engineering, terms of service, disincentives, supply and demand

Posted Mar 10, 2019 14:34 UTC (Sun) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: up/down asymmetry engineering, terms of service, disincentives, supply and demand by Garak
Parent article: Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

I have no particular interest in providing videos or video games with bulky audiovisual assets from my third-floor council flat, but I have plenty of interest in consuming those things, so even with a home server, I'd still have heavily asymmetric bandwidth needs.

television 3.0

Posted Mar 11, 2019 0:08 UTC (Mon) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (1 responses)

true enough. Perhaps the more important point is that there are less well known dynamics of that engineering/tuning. I.e. if the cable modem provider is offering 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up it is not simply their choice to retune to 14 up and 14 down IIRC. And if home servers were protected by a network neutrality law/policy it wouldn't take such a 50/50 balance to accomplish many usual high bandwidth things. I.e. distributed(bittorrentesque) streaming/distribution is already widely succussfully used as an alternative to paying a CDN to help mitigate the source bandwidth bottleneck issue. While of course many bittorrent peers(cough simultaneous client and server behavior cough) are not home servers with access to greater outbound bandwidth, even if you had to have 10 or 1000 100kbps peers/cdn-amplifier-nodes/homelinuxservers, the method is clearly viable for the key example of an alternative fully decentralized video distribution network able to accomplish the same things as broadcast and cable television networks.

television 3.0

Posted Mar 11, 2019 10:24 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

In large part, though, that's because the US hasn't built home Internet infrastructure; they have repurposed infrastructure designed for television (cable, DSL) for home Internet service, instead of putting in dedicated networking facilities.

This makes offering service very cheap - most of the civils have been done already in order to provide subscription TV (cable) or telephone networks (DSL - which was designed to let telcos compete with cable networks by offering TV), but also means that the compromises that make sense for TV (limited bandwidth from home to central office, much wider bandwidth from central office to home, more control of signal at central office thus higher modulation rates possible getting more bits/symbol) have to be accepted in terms of Internet access.

Fixing that requires fresh civils that replace the existing last mile networks with either dedicated copper or fibre (probably fibre nowadays, as it's cheaper in the volumes that a new network would need, and has far higher bandwidth in each direction than expensive copper - expensive copper can be good to around 5 GHz at best, but has attenuation on the order of 60 dB/km, while single mode fibre is good for around 100 THz - 100,000 GHz - with attenuation on the order of 1 dB/km).

This, in turn, requires either political willpower to spend tax money on disruptive infrastructure projects, or commercial incentives to do so rather than just providing Internet access on existing (paid-for) infrastructure. It's worth noting that in many former Soviet countries, where TV and telephone infrastructure did not exist, they're doing just that; putting in cheap fibre and running symmetric Internet services on it, because it's cheaper to do that than put in US-style TV and telephone infrastructure.

Similarly, parts of Scandinavia, Singapore, and South Korea are putting in fibre for Internet service because the political willpower is there to say "we want good Internet service, and we'll pay the price to get there, bypassing Internet over legacy installs.

Finally, in countries like the UK, there's a different route being tried to make it work commercially; we're doing fibre-to-the-cabinet (in the form of HFC cable and VDSL2 from telephone cabinets), which effectively moves the central offices closer to people's homes, and reduces the cost of replacing the old TV/telephone network with a pure fibre data-first network by making money from moving the switch to Internet services closer to people's homes. It's a lot cheaper to replace the ~300m of cable from my house to the nearest cabinet than it is to replace the ~5km of cable from my house to the central office.