Make the Net more like TV
Vint Cerf says changes need to happen to allow good video on the Net.
It's an odd notion, but Net pioneer Vint Cerf knows his stuff. Cerf says that the Net as currently configured doesn't lend itself well to video on demand services. If everyone in your neighborhood was streaming or downloading high-def video at the same time, the load on the networks would be insupportable, he says.
Better is a system used by MovieBeam, which uses spare TV bandwidth to broadcast (or "multicast") data to subscribers' receivers all at once, and store a bunch of movies locally. The Net could adopt this model by letting ISPs use satellite transmissions to send content, he says.
It does make a lot of sense that different applications need different architectures. We're moving to video on demand and voice over the Internet on the back of a network built for "bursty" traffic like email and Web surfing. Sounds like a recipe for traffic jams to me, unless people listen closely to Cerf and others like him.