[LINK] Relieving Peer-to-peer Pressure

[Chirgwin, Richard]

In some ways (sorry for top posting Outlook Web etc) ... in some ways this
gets religious. The >hard< theoretical point of view** says:
1) The user should host and publish services;
2) Any endpoint should be able to host any service.

**I confess to severely abbreviating this. It's a misrepresentation, simply
because I have never found a "consensus" view on the ideal state of the
Internet anyhow**

If you offload hosting to the ISP, it degrades the ideal state of things.
It's a pragmatic rather than a theoretical decision.

In the pragmatic sense, there's no absolute reason that asymmetry is >per
se< a bad thing. What does the individual require, or use, or want?

RC

-----Original Message-----
From: Glen Turner
To: Stilgherrian
Cc: The Link Institute
Sent: 26/02/04 15:31
Subject: Re: Re: [LINK] Relieving Peer-to-peer Pressure


> The asymmetrical model is built on the assumption that "most
> information comes from a few big providers"

That's not quite right.  The assumption is that
there is more incoming data than outgoing data.

There's nothing about ADSL to say if the incoming
data is generated by few big sites or lots of
small ones.

Note that the assumption doesn't always hold.  For
example videoconferencing participants send as much
information as they receive, so SDSL is a better
choice there.

You also need to be aware of the edge cases.  I've
got a 0.5M/0.5M SDSL link simply so that when I
totally stuff things up I can upload files at twice
the speed of a 3M/0.25M ADSL link.  The ability to
do a faster upload outweighs the significantly
slower average performance.  I imagine web designers
and authors are in the same situation.

> While I agree with the point you're making, I think that the cost of 
> entry to the distribution channel is still high, for most people, 
> even if it's "just"  blogging or even writing a letter. Even for a 
> skill which the vast majority of us possess -- the ability to write 
> -- most of the time we'll be reading what other people have written, 
> rather than writing something myself.

Even if you wrote more than you read you might
still want to host your words elsewhere.  Imagine
if lots of people want to read your words and
clogged your small link all the time.

Why should you pay for a bigger server and bigger
link for other people to use?  Better to shove it
on a service which doesn't charge you for being
popular (and might even be thrilled to have a popular
author).

Cheers,
Glen



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