A tablet computer
and Cisco App Store.
Today will see Cisco making an announcement that it claims will "forever change the internet". The stock market certainly believed it, sending the IP giant's shares to their highest level in more than a year ($26.34) yesterday. Given Cisco's heritage and product strategy it has more likelihood than most of delivering on its …
Cisco Uses Power for Evil!
And the only way you'll be able to see these healines are on old style "newspapers" because today, Cisco will announce that they are going to hold the world to ransom by shutting down ALL their routers, killing the Interwebs...
...the price of this dastardly blackmailing scheme? One MILLION DOLLARS!
If it's a wireless device with home uses, I reckon it'll be a secure way of getting wireless routers in range of each other to directly route between them, without having to go down the ISP line and back.
...and if not it should be.
It'd put stop the government with their ISP monitoring plans.
Great - so I could be sued everytime someone in the vicinity did some copyright infringement (or worse) and it went down my line.
Also, in the UK at least, the majority of internet packages are nowhere near unlimited so you wouldn't be sharing an unlimited resource. The BT method of running a second open hotspot on the router is still the best solution as then they know who downloaded what.
Well, you can combine suggestion number 2 of ransom (and crank up the price a bit) with the cost of spectrum and we're at :
I'm Cisco and I'm releasing this P2P thing and if it doesn't work due to licensing, I'll shut down all your routers.
Or maybe they're going to use fricking laser beams instead of radio links.
They're releasing the ability for content providers to generally broadcast without having to do individual connections thus TV stations will be able to send a single signal that Cisco routers automatically replicate (but don't store) so that you can watch a live broadcast.
Or a new switch.
This technical capabilty to do this is not new. It has been around for many (at least 10-15) years. Its called IP Multicast, and is used across the world already for this type of application. Indeed the BBC was trially such use a few years ago. Unfortunately it has tended to be restricted to academic and non-consumer oriented internet access services.
This is already happening and the capability has ben around for many years. The key enabling technology is IP Multicast, which does exactly as you describe,only in a more generic sense.
Even the Beeb have dabbled with IP Multicast trials, but sadly it didn't take off, not because the technology is crap (its actually very useful), but because the DSL-based internet services we have the UK do not lend themselves to efficient IP multicast deployment due to the tunnelled nature of the connection topology.
IP multicast works best in broadcast-type network environments like you find on good old Ethernet. The massively tunnelled "hub-n-spoke" topology of most consumer-oriented internet access services almost completely negates the efficiency benefits of IP multicast, which is why the ISPs don't support it in general.
If we ever get to the stage where we all have Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) and we have truly local switching, then IP multicast will come into its own as a mechanism for delivering live broadcast TV.
However, these days we all seem to be heading down the video-on-demand route, which doesn't lend itself to IP Multicast either. *sigh*
Probably just a combination of things to help reach the next performance level for the Internet:
- 100Gbps Ethernet blades and chassis that can drive them at >40Gbps
- an increased range of LTE products for mobile data
- more video over IP (telepresence/videoconferencing)
- staggered release dates ove the next two years....
Can you say "pump-and-dump" children? Well done, I knew you could. No Billy, they don't have mummies and daddies who tell them off when they tell tall stories. Yes Jimmy, maybe they should. Janie! That's not a word we use around here, even if you do think their mummies and daddies weren't married.