Chorus trialling a direct broadcasting service over its fibre network

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#1983894 26-Mar-2018 23:42

well sky in the UK is a big broadband supplier so since they seem to copy what they do there but with a decade long delay, probably will.

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#1983897 26-Mar-2018 23:59

rb99:

Any idea how people get on this trial ? Too early to say ?

I'm wondering as well. I'd like to potentially get in on a trial not just for curiosity's sake but for learning and potentially smashing it into TVHeadend.

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#1983917 27-Mar-2018 06:36

BarTender:

........ Also doesn't indicate how unicast traffic would work as Sky couldn't multicast everything as there isn't enough capacity on the fibre so they would multicast the common channels and unicast the unique ones.......

Yes this is the big question from my point of view, even though its on a seperate GEM and delivered to a seperate UNI its impacting on the same GPON.

As an aside, does anyone have any figures on real 4K streaming rates, looking around the net I dont find much in the way of real info, but undestand 25-30Mb/s, anyone?

Cyril

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#1983921 27-Mar-2018 07:03

If Sky migrated fibre users to this means of transmission, and this caused an uptake boost to fibre (I believe there are many in fibre areas that have not bothered) does the NZ fibre network have enough bandwidth for 200,000 watching Sky via LFC at night? 400,000? 600,000?

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#1983923 27-Mar-2018 07:05

That is why they are trialing this multicast system, since it would be expensive to even send it as unicast to each customer independantly. Even if they did unicast, it could probably work, the CDNs are well into the providers networks, its only a few megabits per stream and people already all watch other services on ISPs. But sky and online have a bad history of failure to work so any failures would probably not be on the ISP side.

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#1983929 27-Mar-2018 07:16

cyril7:

BarTender:

........ Also doesn't indicate how unicast traffic would work as Sky couldn't multicast everything as there isn't enough capacity on the fibre so they would multicast the common channels and unicast the unique ones.......

Yes this is the big question from my point of view, even though its on a seperate GEM and delivered to a seperate UNI its impacting on the same GPON.

As an aside, does anyone have any figures on real 4K streaming rates, looking around the net I dont find much in the way of real info, but undestand 25-30Mb/s, anyone?

Cyril

Remember Vodafone (at least to my understanding so I stand to be corrected) are using around 800Mbps at present for their multicast so that's already a lot of multicast traffic on their network.

cisconz

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#1983944 27-Mar-2018 08:02

tdgeek:

If Sky migrated fibre users to this means of transmission, and this caused an uptake boost to fibre (I believe there are many in fibre areas that have not bothered) does the NZ fibre network have enough bandwidth for 200,000 watching Sky via LFC at night? 400,000? 600,000?

The Key here is multicast - i.e. it uses the same bandwidth if noone is watching it vs a million users watching it.

Hmmmm

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#1983948 27-Mar-2018 08:10

cisconz:

tdgeek:

If Sky migrated fibre users to this means of transmission, and this caused an uptake boost to fibre (I believe there are many in fibre areas that have not bothered) does the NZ fibre network have enough bandwidth for 200,000 watching Sky via LFC at night? 400,000? 600,000?

The Key here is multicast - i.e. it uses the same bandwidth if noone is watching it vs a million users watching it.

Trying to get my head around this. Say Sky is multicasting and only I am watching. The data is coming down my fibre line from Sky, to me. If a million are watching, surely a million streams are going through fibre to those million homes?

cyril7

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#1983973 27-Mar-2018 08:26

sbiddle:

Remember Vodafone (at least to my understanding so I stand to be corrected) are using around 800Mbps at present for their multicast so that's already a lot of multicast traffic on their network.

Hi Steve, that seems quite a bit, significantly more than the aggregated Sat traffic, I would have thought more like 200-300Mb/s

Cyril

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#1983982 27-Mar-2018 08:59

tdgeek:

Trying to get my head around this. Say Sky is multicasting and only I am watching. The data is coming down my fibre line from Sky, to me. If a million are watching, surely a million streams are going through fibre to those million homes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_multicast

IP multicast is a technique for one-to-many and many-to-many real-time communication over an IP infrastructure in a network. It scales to a larger receiver population by requiring neither prior knowledge of a receiver's identity nor prior knowledge of the number of receivers. Multicast uses network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network (typically network switches and routers) take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers such that messages are sent over each link of the network only once.

So yes, there are streams going everywhere, however each section of the path the traffic takes, only has 1 set of multicast streams (As Steve says above, about 800 Mbps for Vodafone TV at present)

This means there is no backhaul with 100 Tbps being sent, the backhaul only requires the 800 Mbps

Hmmmm

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#1983985 27-Mar-2018 09:05

cisconz:

tdgeek:

cisconz:

tdgeek:

If Sky migrated fibre users to this means of transmission, and this caused an uptake boost to fibre (I believe there are many in fibre areas that have not bothered) does the NZ fibre network have enough bandwidth for 200,000 watching Sky via LFC at night? 400,000? 600,000?

The Key here is multicast - i.e. it uses the same bandwidth if noone is watching it vs a million users watching it.

Trying to get my head around this. Say Sky is multicasting and only I am watching. The data is coming down my fibre line from Sky, to me. If a million are watching, surely a million streams are going through fibre to those million homes?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_multicast

IP multicast is a technique for one-to-many and many-to-many real-time communication over an IP infrastructure in a network. It scales to a larger receiver population by requiring neither prior knowledge of a receiver's identity nor prior knowledge of the number of receivers. Multicast uses network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network (typically network switches and routers) take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers such that messages are sent over each link of the network only once.

Ok, so Sky sends one transmission of a linear show. I assume this one transmission goes to one location inside the LFC's network? From there, if there are 300,000 watchers, we now have 300,000 streams using bandwidth. So while Sky does not need gazillions of bandwidth, at some point the fibre network still does.

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#1984041 27-Mar-2018 09:26

Hi, tdgeek, you have the logic reversed. If there are say 60 streams, which means 60 linear programs in motion, this is pushed out to all ends of the network, well the OLT's I presume, and the last leg pushes a currently selected stream to your STB/device. So all programs are pushed on the network, but only once, not 300,000x

Cyril

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#1984046 27-Mar-2018 09:34

https://sp.chorus.co.nz/chorus/files/File/Intro%20to%20Multicast.pdf

Might be worth a read

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cisconz

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#1984047 27-Mar-2018 09:35

tdgeek:

Ok, so Sky sends one transmission of a linear show. I assume this one transmission goes to one location inside the LFC's network? From there, if there are 300,000 watchers, we now have 300,000 streams using bandwidth. So while Sky does not need gazillions of bandwidth, at some point the fibre network still does.

Not really, Chrous's Network includes nodes, so in a highly simplified example you might have 30 subscribers on a node, and then 20 nodes in the trial (600 Subs).

Because each part of the network only requires 1 stream, the incoming transmission will be sent to each of the 20 nodes once, then the nodes will rebroadcast it to each of the 30 subs for that node.

So the Core as such in this small example, is only sending it 20 times, down 20 independent links, servicing 600 Subscribers.

Because none of the bandwidth is cumulative, the overhead is quite small (In terms of pipe size).

Hmmmm

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#1984147 27-Mar-2018 11:09

cyril7:

Hi, tdgeek, you have the logic reversed. If there are say 60 streams, which means 60 linear programs in motion, this is pushed out to all ends of the network, well the OLT's I presume, and the last leg pushes a currently selected stream to your STB/device. So all programs are pushed on the network, but only once, not 300,000x

Cyril

Hi Cyril

Thanks. I get that Sky isn't sending 300,000 streams, but when 300,000 are watching The Bachelor :-) there must be 300,000 streams to all our homes? Not from Sky but where do those 300,000 streams send from?

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