It's long been an open secret that many major telecommunications companies, including Internet service providers (ISPs) and cellular data providers, impose specific limits on the volume and type of bandwidth consumed by their customers.
"Open" in the sense that these companies almost universally reserve the right to impose such limits, and occasionally make public statements defending their right to do so. "Secret" because the companies rarely reveal their specific limits, and because it seems like these limits are constantly being rediscovered by people who ought to know better.
It reminds me of people who claim to be shocked by new evidence of pork-barrel politics even though the practice has been common throughout history (though some politicians do refrain).
Two such shocking cases are before us in the news this week.
First, Comcast admitted it uses traffic shaping to reduce the bandwidth demands of peer-to-peer file-sharing applications such as BitTorrent.
Next, Verizon Wireless settled a dispute with the Attorney General of New York state stemming from its use of the word "unlimited" to describe its wireless Internet plans, which were very definitely limited by secret company policies to a total of five gigabytes per month.
In both cases, the primary issue is fairness...and the contradictory definitions of fairness held by customers and their service providers.
For ordinary customers, fairness means being able to use all the bandwidth they're paying for, continuously, forever, with whatever software they like. Providers apparently want to define fairness as satisfying the maximum number of customers while still making a profit.
I have to take the customer's side on the definition, but you can't argue with the business goal. Without profit, there's no business. Some ISPs don't care about profit, of course--chiefly the ones in foreign countries where the Internet has been subsidized by government for political reasons. But here in the US, Internet services have to make a profit, and that means bandwidth supply can never meet bandwidth demand.
On one hand, ISPs could build out their networks to provide the maximum rated bandwidth to all subscribers at once...but that would be extraordinarily expensive, and wasteful because that kind of load would never be seen in the real world. On the other hand, they could promise the lower throughput they truly can guarantee, then deliver more when possible...but that would look terrible as a marketing campaign. Verizon's 5GB limit, for example, works out to about 2 kilobits per second. Can you imagine advertising "2-kilobit high-speed Internet!"? Nope. Supply and demand isn't just a good idea--it's the law.
So ISPs use what's called "statistical multiplexing"--sharing bandwidth among multiple users on the theory that they won't all use it at once. A cable-modem service such as Comcast's might share some 30 megabits/s of bandwidth among dozens to hundreds of subscribers in a single neighborhood.
Although a mere half-dozen users could overload this shared channel, in practice, the natural load-sharing behavior of Internet protocols provides a reasonable experience for all the users online at any given moment.
Except when it doesn't. An active BitTorrent user might have dozens or hundreds of transfers in progress--multiple files, each with multiple partial downloads in progress. Each transfer competes for a share of the channel's total bandwidth, so a handful of BitTorrent users on one cable-modem service could consume the vast majority of the available bandwidth.
This gives us a third definition of fairness, the BitTorrent definition: fairness is being able to take everything you can get without regard to other customers on the same service.
So is it more unfair for Comcast to cut back on BitTorrent traffic, or for BitTorrent users to exploit the Internet's load-sharing behavior? I have to take Comcast's side on this one.
I was writing a reply to a badly-written article and subsequent ignorant comments about the Comcast situation over on Engadget earlier today when I realized this situation creates a market opportunity for some software company. So I figured I'd write this instead of posting the reply there.
To summarize: although I suspect most BitTorrent traffic consists of pirated software, music, TV shows, and movies, there's also some important, legitimate content on BitTorrent--Linux distributions, collections of classic e-books in the public domain, Linux distributions...wait, I mentioned that already. Actually, there probably isn't that much legitimate BitTorrent activity. But however much there is, it deserves to pass unmolested on Comcast and other Internet services.
It's unfortunate that these files are being subjected to Comcast's traffic shaping, but that's what happens when people put legitimate content into a distribution channel designed and optimized to facilitate piracy.
So clearly we need a separate public-access peer-to-peer system. How would it differ from BitTorrent? Well, the content would have to be legitimate, and probably so. That means a central authority and a master list of authorized content.
Of course, this is basically the Joost business plan. Joost is a peer-to-peer file-sharing service for video. It seems to me that either Joost ought to expand the concept to include other kinds of content, or someone else ought to get into the business. It'll have to be ad-supported, I think, because if anyone has to pay for the service they'll probably just keep using BitTorrent instead.
Such a service should also get support from ISPs since it would actually reduce their overall bandwidth load for legitimate file sharing. Peer-to-peer distribution is very efficient--that's why Joost uses it--so the providers could leave this new service unfiltered while BitTorrent gets quite legitimately squeezed out of operation.
No doubt such a plan would be highly unpopular with active BitTorrent users, but if that's the price of keeping ISPs profitable--and honest in their marketing policies-- I think it's a reasonable price to pay.
(Credit:
Joost (screengrab by Mashable))
The founders of online television start-up Joost, who also count Skype and Kazaa as bullet points on their resumes, have announced that the service now has one million users. Still in beta and technically invite-only (though invitations are now easy to find), Joost was one of the most-talked-about tech products of last year. Originally known by the Bond-worthy codename "The Venice Project," Joost was widely touted as a "YouTube killer" before people really knew what it was--in truth, the service is a slick interface for free, ad-supported video content on-demand. No cat videos there.
Joost co-founder Niklas Zennstrom made the announcement while at a Skype press conference in the Eastern European high-tech hub of Tallinn, Estonia.
The catch is that one million beta testers absolutely doesn't translate to one million active beta testers. I've been playing with Joost since the early days, and I tend to agree with much of the feedback I've heard about the start-up: amazing interface, effective peer-to-peer architecture, but a noticeable lack of worthwhile content. Last I checked, the most worthwhile draws were still National Geographic documentaries, a few CNN talk shows, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. (I'm in Boston right now. Will I get in trouble for saying that?)
Right now, my beta account lies fallow, and I'm sure at least a handful of the other million users could say the same. But when Joost starts offering an impressive lineup of the stuff that I've been either recording on my DVR or buying from the iTunes Store--right now, for the record, my current must-watch is AMC's Mad Men--then I'll start tuning in again.
Microsoft is getting renewed attention this week for LiveStation, an Internet video site co-developed by its research arm and Skinkers, a British start-up.
The project, which uses Microsoft's Silverlight technology, was announced back in April and is still in limited testing. It has gotten a flurry of blog mentions this week, being dubbed a "Joost killer," among other things.
LiveStation uses peer-to-peer technology to allow live video to be more effectively broadcast over the Internet. A video demo of LiveStation is posted to Microsoft's Soapbox site. In the video, Skinkers CEO Matteo Berlucchi says that the company wants to do several months of more beta testing to see how the application performs and scales, with a goal of a broader 1.0 release by October.
However, in a response to an Ars Technica post, the LiveStation team says it is not aiming to compete with Joost, but is instead focused on using peer-to-peer networks to deliver live television.
"We love Joost and think it's a great idea, but we are trying to do something different and complementary: we are trying to get live TV on the computer," the LiveStation crew wrote in the comments section on Ars Technica. "We believe that the user experience with streaming so far has never been really good enough. We hope to move the user experience a step forward and maybe to the point where people will look at LiveStation and think 'Wow, I can actuallly watch this and keep it on my computer.' "
As part of its licensing of technology to Skinkers, Microsoft holds a minority stake in the company. However, the Skinkers team, in its post to Ars Technica, says it is now responsible for developing LiveStation.
This video is Steve Clayton's interview of Skinkers' Matteo Berlucchi.
The 'Tux car' during a qualifying round.
(Credit: Indianapolis Motor Speedway)When the pale blue "Linux car," also known as car #77 from Chastain Motorsports, was the first car to crash in the 91st Indianapolis 500 on Sunday, we can imagine hordes of geeks wishing it had been a "Vista car" instead. Imagine the "blue screen of death" jokes that could have resulted!
The Linux car, as you probably know already, was the result of a campaign called Tux 500, jump-started by two enthusiasts named Bob Moore and Ken Starks. They solicited donations from fellow Linux fans in a "community powered Linux marketing program" to make the open-source operating system a household name by putting its logo on a race car. Unfortunately, it's likely going to be remembered as "the car that placed last."
The race fared better for the "Joost car," car #2 from Vision Racing. While we've heard from more than a few beta testers who say Joost's downloadable software has a tendency to crash on occasion, that didn't happen for the Joost-branded car in the Indy 500, which ended up placing seventh. Mashable speculates that the car may have been a result of the deal between the peer-to-peer video start-up and Indy 500 parent organization IndyCar Series. There's an IndyCar branded channel on Joost, which features footage from Sunday's race (tip: use plenty of slow-mo and pausing when Marco Andretti's car bites it) as well as from all Indy 500 races dating back to 1990.
Joost, the video-on-demand program created by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed a year ago over the technology upon which Skype and Joost are based. StreamCast Networks owns the technology underlying Internet-calling provider Skype's software. In its lawsuit, StreamCast claims that Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zenstromm breached contract by improperly transferring technology rights away from StreamCast. StreamCast, which created the Morpheus file-swapping software, added eBay as a defendant to the lawsuit a year ago. eBay bought Skype in 2005. Joost was launched commercially May 1.
Joost has announced another partnership--but this one's a little different than the seemingly endless announcements of niche TV deals that the much-hyped Web video start-up has been rolling out over the past few months. This time, Joost will be partnering with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), a talent and literary agency with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, and several international locations. Through this deal, the CAA--which represents industries from TV to theater to video games to sports--will help Joost secure more content for distribution.
In other words, it's a partnership that will optimally lead to more partnerships.
Online video network Joost has received $45 million in funding from a group led by Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Also investing were: Li Ka-shing, chairman of Hutchison Whampoa and Cheung Kong Holdings; Viacom; and CBS. The two media companies also are providing content to the site.
The money will be used to "accelerate product development, global expansion, localization and service offerings," according to a statement from Joost. The company was launched by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the founders of Skype and Kazaa.
Online-video network Joost is expected to announce on Monday that it will feature videos from Heavy, a site popular among college-age males.
Joost, a start-up founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the duo that gave the world Skype and Kazaa, has been out striking a host of content deals with media companies ranging from Viacom to the Turner Broadcasting System to Sony Pictures.
The company aims to turn Internet video into a more TV-like experience for viewers.
One of the big questions analysts had about the company was whether it could land hot content from major TV networks and Hollywood studios. The company has gone a long way toward proving that it can.
Few had any questions about the company's peer-to-peer system. Friis and Zennstrom have built two other successful companies using similar technology.
Nonetheless, at Joost's official launch last week, customers complained of choppy images and long waits before they were able to change channels. Joost's service features more than 75 channels of video content.
A representative of New York-based Heavy said the site plans to offer three categories on its Joost channel: Heavy Animation, Heavy Comedy and Heavy Gurls.
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