Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

[Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

> On Oct 12, 2021, at 08:13 , Jared Brown <nanog-isp () mail com> wrote:
>
> Mark Tinka wrote:
> > Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I know BitTorrent to
> > work is the file is downloaded to disk, unarchived and then listed as
> > ready to watch.
>  That's not how it works. Several streaming BitTorrent clients specifically request blocks in order so that you can 
> start watching immediately.
>  Not that you need a special client, it works pretty well with the standard client as well on a well seeded torrent, 
> as blocks are generally requested more or less in order.
>
> > It also assumes the device has all the necessary apps
> > and codecs needed to render the file.
>  Well, yes. Or you could just stream content that is guaranteed to be compatible with the device used.
>
> > On the other hand, BitTorrent could just make an Apple
> > TV/PS4/PS5/Xbox/whatever-device-you-use app as well.
>  They could, and they might even have, I forget, but there is little demand for such a thing as a centralized CDN 
> strategy works better.
>
> > But I doubt that
> > will work, unless someone can think up a clever way to modify BitTorrent
> > to suit today's network architectures.
>  Unless network topology is somehow exposed, this isn't possible. All anybody can do is use latency, IP and ASN 
> information as a proxy.

Well, latency + measurements of e2e bandwidth and possibly IP+ASN information.

However, in reality, if you are trying to optimize your ability to receive data, latency + e2e bandwidth are pretty 
good assuming they don’t
vary greatly (which is, admittedly a problem, they do, and worse, any client-level continuous measurement at scale will 
affect the experiment
in a very negative way).

>  Nothing is stopping a BitTorrent client from being selective about its peers. The current peer selection algorithm 
> optimizes for throughput, not adjecency or topology.

Is that bad?

It might be suboptimal for the eyeball ISP, but it seems to me that it’s probably optimal for everyone else involved.


Owen