Brian's Brain

Skype's 'free outbound calls to U.S. and Canada POTS lines' promotion ended with the New Year transition; SkypeOut is now normally $29.95/year for unlimited calls (note: only for those two countries; per-minute charges apply elsewhere). Sign up by the end of this month, though, and you can get a year's worth of SkypeOut to the U.S. and Canada for $14.95. If my past VoIP coverage has whetted your appetite, now might be a good time to take the plunge.

Watch out, though, for the notable upstream and downstream demands that Skype puts on your network, especially if you're acting as a supernode, as mentioned in the second part of my two-month-ago Network Neutrality writeup. If you'd like to learn more about how Skype navigates its way through network firewalls, even if they're not explicitly configured to allow its passage, see this Slashdot discourse.

Further to my above bandwidth comments, Skype's founders are developing a peer-to-peer-based video delivery service, formerly known as the Venice Project, now as Joost. Not surprisingly, Joost makes Skype-reminiscent bandwidth demands on a network, only much more so. A recent Ars Technica writeup on the service and its Network Neutrality-threatening effects contains the following mind-blowing stats:

Bandwidth usage, however, could prove to be a problem for the project. According to the project's documentation seen by Ars Technica, watching an hour's worth of TV consumes an average of 320MB downloaded and 105MB uploaded traffic, due to the service's P2P architecture. US Government statistics suggest that Americans on average watch about 2.6 hours of TV a day, which in Venice Project terms would equate to 832MB downloaded and 273MB uploaded traffic. In a single month, that would tally to 25GB down, 8GB of uploaded traffic alone.

That's MBytes, folks, not Mbits. Multiply by 8 to translate the former to the latter; you know the drill. And keep in mind that these stats are for standard-definition and lower video streams.

My recent coverage of the Xbox Video Marketplace clearly points out the shortcomings of a traditional one-to-many content distribution scheme, specifically when the central server (or, for that matter, any of the network links running between it and the media delivery destination) get overwhelmed by unforecasted demand. As I suggested in part two of that writeup, a P2P approach like Joost would offer some compelling advantages in such a situation. But I can also see why AT&T, my DSL provider, wouldn't be terribly thrilled with the bandwidth impacts of P2P, specifically the upstream traffic flowing out of my node. Readers, your thoughts?