On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Nathan Ward wrote:

Just so I can say it first; Multicast!

Oh, completely. But that would go totally against the entire NZ ethos of keeping the 'net as worthless and useless as possible. -- Matthew Poole "Don't use force. Get a bigger hammer."

Matthew Poole wrote:

On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Ian Batterbee wrote:

...

Just out of interest, was anyone able to watch the funeral on tvnz's website ?

I was trying to watch it from Auckland Uni, and it was ridiculously crap. I ended up using the "international visitors" dialup stream, because it was the only one that was vaguely watchable. The domestic ones, and the international broadband one, were really jerky. The int'l dialup one got pretty awful right at the end, jumping back in time and re-playing.

We did a lot of work with TVNZ (and RadioNZ) on this one and I'd like to make a few comments. On the domestic feed: TVNZ's server in Auckland is hosted in our computer room and was putting out 350 Mb/sec at the height of the activity so somebody was watching it! This server is connected to the APE so anyone peering there should have been OK. I'd be interested in reports of poor performance from directly peered users. Unfortunately Auckland University no longer peer at the APE so any incoming connection was coming down their pipe from their upstream provider (TelstraCear). TelstraClear's feed for the domestic hosting was via Telecom NZ who have connectivity directly to that server in Auckland over a circuit that has a number of limitions on speed and how much data that can be moved before overage charges apply. That link was full as far as I know. There's also a TVNZ feed in Wellington available for WIX peers. Both these TVNZ servers are reachable on high speed links for anyone who wants to peer at the exchanges. On the international feed: We provide international connectivity for a number of streams for a number of providers in San Francisco. We ship a single copy of a stream to SF where we can buy bandwidth at *significantly cheaper* prices than Telecom or TelstraClear offer for domestic transit and then fan out from there. See this graph showing what went on yesterday (http://www.citylink.co.nz/images/danube.streaming.net.nz-wmsBits_allstreams-...) note the increased output from the two San Francisco servers compared with their normal output. These servers were not stressed at any time (CPU usage was around 15%) and the Gig link we have to our upstream provider operated really well. We provided audio and video streams of the funeral proceedings for a number of providers on this platform. Under normal operations Telecom NZ and TelstraClear (and their customers) connect to the San Francisco servers to collect streaming media from our platform. This then travels across the Pacific congesting pipes which could be used for other things. There is real cost to the telcos in this as that's capacity that they could sell for other things. But the telcos still refuse to peer. I hope that all of you at the NZNOG meeting can get yourselves agitated enough to realise that this is important that the peering ball needs to be still kept in play and that unless the Tier 2 ISPs and Content Providers keep working on the telcos they'll sit on their hands. Perhaps that might be more useful than worrying about multicast - if you can't get people to peer sensibly then getting them to cooperate on multicast is like expecting pigs to fly.

All in all, I was distinctly unimpressed with TVNZ's effort. It says a lot of terrible things about the general state of play for 'net connectivity in this country that the largest university and the state broadcaster don't have an adequate connection between them.

So I'd summarise this alternatively as "It says a lot of terrible things about the general state of play for net connectivity in this country that the two largest telcos in this country still refuse to peer with both the State broadcasters (and others) even when there are serious economic imperatives that they should do so"