[ILUG] Free software for .pando files?

[paul at clubi.ie]

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007, Thomas Bridge wrote:

> Sure it does - my entire point is that your average Corrie viewer
> (like say, my grandmother) will record it on her set top box *from*
> the multicast stream.

That isn't 'on-demand'...

That's broadcast, with the STB acting as a proxy for the viewer.

> I've not bothered with Boingboing since they published the ridiculous
> story that a UK user was arrested for using Lynx to access a Tsunami
> donation site.

Sigh.. that story was covered in various places. Exactly whose 
transcript I linked to doesn't matter.

> - there's still going to be a very low percentage of traffic 
> exchanged accross the phone exchanges.

> You have figures for this - preferably properly researched ones - 
> that show this is actually the case as opposed to being simply a 
> figure paul pulled out of the air to try and back up a weak point.

It's pulled out of the air, just as with your claim I've left quoted 
prior to this text..

Some content will be more popular than others. Exactly how much you 
can save depends on distribution of content watched and the size of 
the caches relative to the content. You could do some experiments 
with torrents of popular files and see how much locality you get. 
You'd need ISP level monitoring, for a prolonged period of time, to 
get real numbers.

It doesn't make sense though to think that distribution of downloaded 
content would be essentially random. Humans are far too socially 
driven for that ;).

And bingo, turns out someone /has/ done the monitoring:

 	http://www.usenix.org/events/imc05/tech/full_papers/karagiannis/karagiannis_html/index.html

   "70%-90% of existing local pieces and 50%-90% of existing local
    pieces in active users are downloaded externally! .. Only a
    minimum portion of bytes is downloaded locally even though more
    than 20% of the bytes exist in active users (with the exception of
    April). In an ideal caching scenario, at least 40% of the content
    exists and could be downloaded locally. "

That's ISP level.

How that would break down to exchange level for a country like 
Ireland, well you'd need to gather more stats I guess.

> In any case, even a 10% saving on link capacity isn't much[1] - the 
> savings will quickly get eaten up by increased traffic volumes.

There's a ceiling to how much content households can watch.

> I certainly know from having been there that if you are running an 
> STM-16 and you're worried about 10% of the capacity - then it's 
> time to get that link up to STM-64.

Sigh...

Therefore there exists a point where that 10% makes the difference 
between the STM-16 being adequate and needing an STM-64.

Efficiency is a competitive weapon.. (The more it's used, the more 
important even the smallest savings become).

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
"When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith