Superbowl Resulted in 15% Dip in Internet Traffic > No Bandwidth!

reply to brianiscool

Re: No Bandwidth!

The quality wasn't even HD. It was more like 360p and had to watch it in a small box. Where is the 1080P support with 7 channel audio support?

reply to iansltx

reply to brianiscool
CBS was broadcasting from New Orleans, not Lafayette

Seriously, 1080p with even stereo audio would've been 12 Mbps...per stream. Good luck delivering that over a unicast network, unfortunately.

This does raise a point though. Flash if that's what they're using does have a built-in Peer to Peer system. Assuming most folks have a router with UPnP turned on or a method is implemented to allow NAT Transversal, couldn't they in theory use a P2P distribution method? I wonder wonder how that would work on a mass scale. Lots of crushed last mile networks but I believe it would help out a lot in a LAN environment so you're not taxing the CDN further. One machine gets the 720p/1080p stream and sends it out to others who do the same on the LAN.

reply to espaeth
That's why you don't deliver video as a unicast stream from anywhere near the Internet's core. That's not the way Akamai does it, that's for sure. Put nodes as deep as possible into ISP networks (as deep as, if not deeper than, Akamai's current nodes/Netflix OpenConnect), then push the stream to them (total bandwidth used: ~20 Mbps per node). Then anycast (or use DNS based resolution, whatever floats your boat) over the last 50-250 miles, depending on how far you are away from an ISP core router.

Oh, and serve everything over UDP, with no ability to fast forward/rewind the stream other than what the client can handle on its own. What you want is a network of dumb pipes piping a data firehose to wherever it needs to go...the smartest piece of the puzzle should be bandwidth detection (serving 360p, 480p, 720p or 1080p), and that should be client-side.

Oh, and don't forget the dual 10 Gbit NICs on the edge nodes. So you can serve 1000 viewers from one system.

Is the scale of this event enormous? Absolutely. Is it a special case that, if handled correctly, requires significantly less hardware per streamer than you'd normally expect? Yep.

reply to Smith6612
Think of the context of the 'bowl.

On average 17 people, all watching one screen.

Yeah, the only thing P2P would do in this case is destroy the upstream capabilities of any network where there are a number of SB viewers...because most last-mile networks still are lacking in the upstream capacity department (I'm talking raw capacity, not provisioned speed). Never mind the fact that many folks couldn't stream more than 480p on the upload side anyway.

In a situation like this, you want a branching topology, where the data flows in exactly one direction: toward the end user. There will be branches along the way ("repeater nodes") but anyone serving the stream should have enough upstream bandwidth to serve several users (or, you know, 1000...16GB RAM, high-cpu, 2x10G NIC machine). And, for the next ten years or so, the only place where upstream bandwidth will be reliably available in that quantity is a data center.