Posts by Why Fly

BBC's Britflix likely dead before the ink has even dried on the news

Re: I think a paid service would only work

I suspect it will be based upon detection rather than enforcement.

Access logs will tell them the IP addresses of everyone using iPlayer, which they can map to an ISP and use geoip to get approximate location.

The BBC already send threatening letters to anyone who doesn't have a license, on the assumption everyone watches TV. They could extend this to send out letters "reminding" anyone without a license within that approximate location.

Maybe demand the ISP tell them which household had been assigned that IP address and take a few people to court to make examples of them.

Make cool shows, make money: Netflix's SHOCKING TV strategy

Re: Netflix v Love Film

Actually Netflix have a lot of their own infrastructure, co-located or peered with major ISPs.

http://blog.netflix.com/2012/06/announcing-netflix-open-connect-network.html

They name and shame the ISPs that aren't on-board. Just search for "Netflix ISP speed index".

Can a new TCP scheme give wireless a 16-fold boost?

Re: I'll attempt to explain this

Turning off acknowledgements at the WiFi layer actually hurts performance, because this feedback is used to drive the selection of modulation parameters. When most frames make it through, the WiFi driver will choose a higher transmission speed, and when frames fail to be acknowledged, the PHY rate is reduced. A benefit (and a problem) with the lack of ACK feedback is that frames can be sent in a burst, one after each other, without having to perform the costly "listen for a random amount of time" collision avoidance.

When we tried to use this approach we were finding bursts of lost frames. This meant that the erasure coding had to be over a large enough number of packets to able to recover from these burst losses. We found that the best performance was achieved with a small amount of WiFi retransmissions and when both the good WiFi frames and corrupted WiFi frames were fed in to the error correction (because there was still useful information in many of the corrupted frames).

Alas the IEEE folks in 802.11 didn't see it that way and wouldn't let us add this "layer 2.5" feature to 802.11aa.