How Linking and Bandwidth Work
Now that we can upload with the Transloader and WebUP to our own homepage directories, hundreds of WebTV'ers have already made their sites fast and "link free!"
But some confusion remains... what's the deal about bandwidth, and why does it matter where it comes from? Let's see if I can explain.
Basically, the internet is like a road system and the html pages, gifs,
jpegs, audio files, email, etc. that travel on it are the traffic. The
backbone of the Net is like a big, wide superhighway system with the
capability of moving data very fast. (But like the freeway, it can get
crowded and even crawl virtually to a halt.)
Connected to this backbone are a lot of smaller roads that go to the
servers that host sites, and to the ISPs that they connect through. The
traffic-carrying capability of those roads is called their "bandwidth."
A T1 line, which we use for Net4TV, can transport about 120K bytes
of traffic per second. That's actually slower than a single-speed
CD-ROM drive. (A lot of computers today have 24-speed CD-ROMs and
they're still slower than hard disks.) This is the highway that we have
to deliver every image, audio file, and web page through to everyone
that surfs to Net4TV and Net4TV Voice. Pretty small, and still, $2,000 per month.
Lower-capacity lines like ours don't pay extra for bandwidth -- instead,
everything we serve and our own surfing slows to a crawl when we get
overloaded with too much data trying to be moved down this narrow line
at once. Higher-speed services are available, but they charge for the
amount of traffic that goes over them -- in other words, the bandwidth
you use.
Here's where the charges for people come in. For example, Earthlink, a
major ISP, gives their members 6MB of webspace for free. But the
"bandwidth allotment" (amount of files that can be transferred) is 250MB
per month. Above that, Earthlink charges 10 cents per Megabyte.
Now, if it's your site and your pages each contain 5K of HTML and a
single 45K animated GIF, you can get 5,000 total page hits per month
before you hit your max and start getting charged. (Each page hit is
50K). If your typical visitor views 4 pages on your site, that's a
respectable 1,250 hits per month to your site.
But one of those images is a popular animated GIF and just 22 people
"link" it into their website by referencing it from yours. Just 1 hit
to each of their pages where your GIF is referenced is almost 1MB of
traffic charged to YOU. Now, suppose each of them gets 250 hits a month
on the page where your GIF is linked in. You've just hit your entire
bandwidth allotment for the month without a single hit to YOUR page. If
you're already at your limit, Earthlink gives you a bill for $25.
Worse than than, suppose 22 people put your image into their email sig.
Every time anyone opens one of their emails, or reads one of their posts
in a newsgroup that allows HTML, your site is hit again. ONE post
in a popular newsgroup can be read by 250 people, and who only posts one
per month? One person alone with your GIF in their sign can gobble up
your whole allotment if they post and email a lot. If you get 20 like
that, Earthlink hands you a bill -- not for $25 -- but for $500!
This has happened to people we know -- artists who made neat graphics and
offered them on their websites for people to copy freely -- but instead,
people took their pictures AND their bandwidth and the sites had to be
shut down.
Of all resources, the one that is the worst at stealing bandwidth is RealAudio. For graphics, MIDI and regular audio files, once they're loaded, the bandwidth is released. But RealAudio continues to pull bandwidth for the entire time that it's playing! Fifty people reading posts or emails containing a RealAudio file can use up the entire bandwidth of a T1! And, since sites with RealServers pay to license a number of streams (our 60-stream license costs about $1,000 a year), the site can find itself unable to serve its real visitors because all of the streams are being used by email and posts.
It's the reason that the subject of
bandwidth is such a hot topic -- it's not "theoretically stealing" or an arguable "fair
use," it's real money -- a lot of real money -- having to be paid out
by ordinary people, not big companies.
PLEASE don't link in content from other people's sites. Use the
Transloader or WebUP to put the resources you want into your own home
page directory and, if you want them in your email, link them from
there. (Your ISP may not like it, but that's between the two of you -- it doesn't cause problems for other people.
And please help to get the word out to all WebTV'ers! It's good netizenship, your website will run soooo much faster, and you can count on your website and email displaying the way you intended, every time!
