Friday, November 30, 2007

Internet issues

I read last week that there may become Internet connectivity problems, at least around these parts, due to increased video downloading. It was said that big ISPs need to invest some ridiculous figure, like 100 billion, otherwise we will get "brown-outs".

I did not take it seriously. But I'm beginning to wonder after today. Because today one of my internet connections (cable) has totally failed, and I keep having problems with my backup connection (DSL). I must say I don't like it.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brown-outs cure?

God knows, I'm no expert, but just
thinking about that, I wondered if
maybe the answer might lie with a
refinement of compression technology,
as in "zip files" - If everything was compressed whenever it travelled, then we could pack more packets into
the pipes, couldn't we? Or could we?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Rather, more information per packet.

I think people are already working on this. For example MPEG-4 video compression is already a hell of a lot more efficient than earlier codes.

Anonymous said...

Flash Player 9, announced last August, supports H.264. Compressionwise there is not much more that can be done for video at the moment.

Over time video services, such as YouTube, may introduce distributed data centers to cache popular video clips locally. This would certainly help.

Eolake, if your connection has "totally failed", it is something else. The bandwidth saturation caused by excessive video traffic would mainly hit the ISPs upstream link. You would experience it in slow throughput when accessing US sites.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I'm sure you're right.

It's just very odd that both my ISPs on the same day tended to display that login page which means you're connected to the ISP but not the internet. I've rarely seen it before.

Anonymous said...

When the BBC started offering free viewing of past TV shows in the UK,
users had to download a little program to access those. It contains
a hidden program called "Kservice.exe" from Kontiki, and that
works on your O/S's P2P system files,
to enable your computer to file-share and act as a server for others in that same sharing scheme. It plays hell with the ISPs' bandwidth traffic, and you don't know it's even there unless you know what to search for. I tried to use that over here, and my bandwidth use (I/O traffic) went crazy for a few days until I found the cause and dumped it from its hidden location. This may have a bearing on your problems, Eolake.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I'd not heard about that.

I'm guessing BBC is *really* unpopular with the big ISPs!! In effect they have shifted the whole download bill over to them.

Anonymous said...

You've got the picture, Eolake...

And if anyone notices unusually large numbers of packets coming in and going out, do a search for that file "Kservice.exe". If it's there, you may not be allowed access to delete it ("program in use, access denied"), so get EMCO's MoveOnBoot, and drag it
into the "delete" window, and then do a reboot. You can find that HERE
and Good Luck, everyone!

Cliff Prince said...

Well, I guess having internet issues lying around all over the place beats the heck out of having interne tissues doing the same ...