VUDU: Their Cost Savings=Your Headaches

Continued from ‘VUDU: An Intriguing (And Troubling) Embedded P2P Case Study‘…

How much bandwidth was VUDU pushing, and how could I modulate it? Unfortunately, the short answers to these questions are who knows and not really at all. When I initially scroll to the Set Bandwidth Limit setup screen (under the Service Quality option within the Info & Settings menu), which is the only way I’ve found to get a dynamic report on VUDU’s current download and upload bandwidth demands, the screen reports upload usage nearing 200 kbps in my particular case. But the numbers immediately and rapidly start trending downwards towards 1-2 kbps…suggesting to me that VUDU’s not keen on letting its customers know how much of their WAN upstream potential it’s snagging for its own use.

Combine this reporting sleight of hand (unfortunately, my router doesn’t give an accounting of what cumulative downstream and upstream bitrates are flowing through it, or I’d be able to get the stats I seek that way) with the fact that the P2P element of the service is almost completely absent from VUDU’s promotional materials, and I’d go so far as to suggest that the company’s being downright deceptive. Nowhere can I find documentation on which port(s) and protocol(s) VUDU’s P2P technology employs, so I can’t QoS-throttle or completely block them at the router’s firewall (assuming I could at all…I suspect VUDU’s algorithms are probably as nimble as Skype’s). And as for bandwidth throttling at the set-top box, the only way my VUDU contact tells me this can be done (albeit at a very coarse level) is by overriding the unit’s pre-determined settings to specify a 1 Mbps peak download limit versus the 2 Mbps default…which symbiotically throttles back upload bandwidth, too, but has the unfortunate side effect of precluding ‘instant’ standard-definition video playback.

Check out this lovely quote from a support forum ’super moderator’:

Upload usage is typically a maximum of around 300 kbps. How often this happens depends on your box and where it fits into the peering network. For example, my box is receiving database updates but it is also simultaneously sending them out to others. So my upstream usage is about 300 to 400 kbps today. However, there are days that go by where the usage is ZERO from my box. Also, I have 2 Vudus so my upstream numbers are higher. If you have content on your box that someone rents or purchases and your box is selected as a peer, you will see your box use around 300 kbps for a short period of time - maybe 15 to 20 minutes.

Up to 400 kbps of upstream bandwidth consumed? At random times of day, and for random durations? That’s a surefire recipe for being banned from a network, IMHO. VUDU’s bandwidth usage was nearly constant, judging from my regular monitoring of router LED activity, throughout the time period that my rental of My Kid Could Paint That was sitting on the unit’s HDD (like Apple TV, VUDU seems to auto-delete movies after the rental license timeframe expires). And subsequent, to then, it’s continued generating random, lengthy bursts of traffic, since I’ve got the two Bourne films (plus previews, first-few-minute movie clips and other content) sitting on the unit. The only way I can consistently get the traffic to cease, aside from the earlier-mentioned setup screen access, is ironically by watching a movie.

I’ve just experienced the latest in a series of sub-par VoIP experiences over the past few days. I could hear the person on the other end of the connection, but she couldn’t hear me, suggesting that upstream data flow was impaired. I’m pretty sure I know what the culprit is. To be abundantly clear, my issue isn’t fundamentally that VUDU employs P2P techniques. My gripe centers on how the company employs P2P; by subterfuge, in an overly aggressive and unpredictable manner, and without providing any meaningful means (such as the upstream bandwidth throttle settings found in Bittorrent clients) by which VUDU’s consumers can tone down the service’s bandwidth grabs.

I’d like to think that my VUDU experience is atypical, but I fear it’ll be increasingly common in the future. I’ve already mentioned Skype’s network nimbleness, and Joost (from the same core developer team) pulls the same tricks, as do Sling Media and another company I’ll be writing about in the next few days. Persistent (versus its dial-up predecessor) broadband access is becoming increasingly cost-effective with the passage of time, and both downstream and upstream speeds are also rising. Bandwidth caps are virtually nonexistent (unless Time Warner’s experiment is judged successful, that is) and cost-effective hardware’s processing capabilities are exponentially growing thanks to Moore’s Law trends.

As a result, cash-strapped (or said another way, profit-hungry) companies will increasingly find irresistable the temptation to tap into their customers’ broadband pipes. Even knowledgeable ‘IT administrators’ like me will be unable to manage the resulting erratic and sometimes substantial data flow through their home LANs and in and out of their WAN portals. And the vast majority of consumers won’t even have a clue what’s going on, far from how to solve it. All they’ll know is that their streamed music and video playback is glitchy, their web-surfing is slow, and their Internet telephone service quality has just taken a nose-dive.

As I type these words, I’m reminiscing about my early DSL days, when Pacific Bell was paranoid about consumers hanging servers on broadband connections, and when router use to share a common WAN pipe among multiple LAN clients was also strongly discouraged (necessitating workarounds such as MAC address cloning). While I wouldn’t want to return to those ’socialist’ times past, the current ‘free love’ environment isn’t sustainable, either. For companies out there tempted by broadband trends, I strongly encourage you to restrain yourselves. Moderate your bandwidth usage, and make it easy for your customers to further throttle back the streams you source and sink on an as-needed basis. Otherwise, any short-term gain you might incur will be miniscule in contrast to the long-term negative impact of your actions.