^{Democracy & Technology Blog} The bandwidth conundrum

John Dvorak, PCMag.com:

In today’s world, bandwidth demand is similar to what processing demand was 20 years ago. You just can’t get enough speed, no matter how hard you try. Even when you have enough speed on your own end, some other bottleneck is killing you.
This comes to mind as, over the past few months, I’ve noticed how many YouTube videos essentially come to a grinding halt halfway through playback and display that little spinning timer. Why don’t they just put the word “buffering” on the screen?
All too often, it’s not the speed of my connection that’s at issue–it’s the speed of the connection at the other end. It may not even be the connection speed itself; it may simply be the site’s ability to deliver content at full speed under heavy demand.
This concerns me, since I’m an advocate of IPTV and other technologies that need lots of speed to work. We seldom consider the fact that if something becomes hyper-popular (like YouTube), user demand on the system is enormous and can easily break the system from the demand side….
Read On

Interesting article that misses the chief recent development on the net: the huge advances in the efficiencies of the datacenters that dispense these web pages. The “cloud” computing paradigm, pioneered by Google, is now going mainstream as Nicholas Carr, Telecosm speaker this year (www.TelecosmConference.com), documents in his intriguing book. For example, Jules Urbach–our movie and virtual world renderman and Telecosm star with his Lightstage corporation–can send images from thousands of different “viewports” per second from his graphic processor based OTOY servers, which can scale to millions of users. A company called Azul has developed cheap scalable datacenter technology that delivers terabits per second from its OS neutral Java-based clusters of servers.
The bottleneck is rapidly moving back to where it has long resided: at the last mile, where passive optical networks, such as VZ’s FiOS, are increasingly necessary. For IPTV, content delivery networks (CDN) from Akamai and its increasing throng of video rivals using a variety of ingenious delivery algorithms will eclipse the cumbersome BitTorrent mesh model, which shuffles video files through underused personal computers across the network.