OT: Bandwidth realities (was: Drum Beat with David Hall..... media problems)]
2004-04-15 by Vernon Graner
Gary Menzel said: > So - I'd say the DigEvent people are a bunch of losers! FWIW: Reality Check: As the owner of an ISP I can tell you that bandwidth is the most expensive and least appreciated commodity we have. It can be ridiculously expensive to provide streaming video and *someone* has to pay the bill. For example, a T1 line that costs ~500/month to lease is and is usually plenty of bandwidth to serve 50-100 web sites while at the same time providing email for thousands of user accounts, is *completely consumed* by just FOUR people dloading digital video at "broadband" rate (384k). Figure if you expect to be able to serve "broadband" rate video to 24 clients in parallel, it would take about SIX T1 lines, at $500/each is about $3000 a month. Oh yeah, if you only need those 24 parallel streams for 1 or 2 hours a day (like 7-9pm), you STILL have to pay the 3 grand, even if the bandwidth remains unused (unless you can get some sort of metered rate and/or colocate a server at a major network hub). Anyway you look at it, it's expensive! And, of course, the 25th person who logs in gets slow, choppy or just plain *no* video and calls the site owner a "loser". :) Could be whatever business model this guy had put together didn't pay the bill so the ISP yanked the high-bandwidth feeds till he pays up... I've had to do that on occasion... Not pretty, but its reality.. If someone has these videos downloaded, they might be able to share them around using BitTorrent or maybe Kazaa or some other distributed file download utility. Vern -- Vern Graner CNE/CNA/SSE | "If the network is down, then you're Senior Systems Engineer | obviously incompetent so why are we Texas Information Services | paying you? Of course, if the network http://www.txis.com | is up, then we obviously don't need Austin Office 512 328-8947 | you, so why are we paying you?" \ufffdVLG