Soccer dip
An interesting traffic pattern on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange during the live webcast of the year: the World Soccer game between NL and DK. Instead of a traffic spike, overall traffic was lower. A dip! (updated chart)
Archive for the ‘ The Last Mile ’ Category
An interesting traffic pattern on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange during the live webcast of the year: the World Soccer game between NL and DK. Instead of a traffic spike, overall traffic was lower. A dip! (updated chart)
Many companies are investing in online content services. YouTube, Hulu, broadcasters, publishers. These companies build business cases on the boom of online video: advertisement models, subscription models and pay-per-view models. Their business cases depend on scalability and performance of the internet, both broadband and mobile.
Internet vs cable
Cable operators offer good quality and quality of service, but their limited number of channels and titles can never compete with the vast number of internet channels and billions of online videos. Consumers don’t want to be locked into a package anymore. They want to pull content. Subscribers want to be in control. The internet is open and therefore the distribution infrastructure of today and the future. Digital television operators who ignore this fact will face a very difficult future.
It started last year in New York and San Francisco. AT&T’s network was degrading. Phone calls dropped. At some peak times a third of all calls dropped. More and more AT&T customers throughout the U.S. started to complain about slow data, lost data connectivity and dropped calls.
When I attended Content Delivery Summit in New York this month I experienced exactly the same. Calls dropped, or I suddenly got voicemail messages without getting calls. 3G was slower than GPRS. The phone constantly switched between 3G, GPRS and Edge, and lost connections many times. The signal strength kept changing from max to a single bar. In-session switching between 3G, GPRS and Edge is a drama, because your IP address gets lost so your stream / email / surfing session gets lost too.
I’ve had the same issues in the past with KPN when they just introduced 3G. In the first 2 years, I had to switch 3G off to be sure I could be reached. It has been fixed, but in recent months I occasionally miss phone calls and get voicemail messages much later.
Last week, T-Mobile (another provider with exclusive iPhone contracts) publicly admitted having similar problems in the Netherlands.
Today I was at the Network Neutrality Workshop, organized by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. I was 45 minutes late because of the traffic jams…
We had a Net Neutrality discussion a few years back (I was in the panel) and the conclusions were that there were no real net neutrality issues but that the telcos should be more transparent.
No new developments today. There were some presentations, but no real debate. Because Net Neutrality isn’t really an issue.
I liked the presentation of Dialogic. The Minister of Foreign Trade held a speech…
The StreamZilla infrastructure page just got a refresh to reflect the current infrastructure status. The network is now connected to 17 Internet Exchanges throughout Europe and to the New York… Read more
By patching their networks together, many small and large network operators around the world have built a global virtual network: the Internet. It offers open and global access to any server and service in any connected network. The open and neutral character is what made the Internet the next big thing in humanity. So it is important to keep it open and neutral. And it is important to keep it running.
Iin the past few years, there has been discussion about Net Neutrality. Are ISPs allowed to block services? No? What about spam? Are ISPs allowed to shape traffic? No? Not even if a small number of subscribers can take their entire network down? Are ISP’s allowed to rent network resources to service providers so they can accelerate specific services?
In the USA, the Net Neutrality discussion is very polarized: either you are ‘freedom fighter’ who want laws to make sure that no single bit is discriminated or accelerated, or you are against government involvement and want the TelCos to be able to tune their network.
In Europe, we have a different view… Read more
U.S. based CDN’s often tend to think that they can enter the European market by having an office in London, Paris or Amsterdam.
Although there is a European Union, without borders, with free economics and a single currency, there is no single market like there is in the U.S.A.
There are over 25 countries and even more languages in Europe. You will encounter cultural and language barriers. Opening an office in London also means a geographical barrier.