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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

With how ubiquitous gigabit symmetric is becoming, I wonder if you could even do P2P nowadays.

Assuming a single gigabit symmetric connection could dedicate at most 100mb of upload bandwidth, you'd need one such viewer per each 25 viewers with a worse connection. This feels achievable.

You'd have 1 server that broadcasts to at most 10K tier-1 viewers. Tier 2 viewers get 3 tier1 ips for failover, and pre-negotiate a connection with them, e.g. through STUn, to get sub-second failovers in case their primary source quits the stream. A central control plane load balances these.

With something like 15s of buffer (acceptable for a gaming stream, not so much for sports, where your neighbors might be watching on satellite and cheer), this feels achievable.

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> With how ubiquitous gigabit symmetric is becoming, I wonder if you could even do P2P nowadays.

CGNAT is going to make that a hassle.

Ideally any ISP resorting to CGN would be providing IPv6 support, but Tailscale shows that nat hole-punching can work well [1]. I'm not sure if that's feasible to implement in a web browser though.

[1] https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

It can work okay, but still not perfectly. Before I asked my ISP for a static address, tailscale connections between my place and my partner's only managed to maintain a direct connection half the time. The other half of the time, they required a relay.

yep. I'm still kind of shocked at how little ipv6 has been deployed.

i'm so effing tired of NAT here and NAT there and NATs in between NATs. NAT complicates things for almost no reason now that ipv6 was released almost 30 years ago. Wait, what? 30 years? Now I'm VERY shocked at how little ipv6 has been deployed.

> With how ubiquitous gigabit symmetric is becoming, I wonder if you could even do P2P nowadays.

You don't even need gigabit connections to make p2p work: a video stream is usually between 1-10mbps, with which you can do p2p even with a regular connection.

(I used to work for a start-up doing p2p streaming using WebRTC in the browser, we got up to 90% efficiency on live streaming back in 2015, and 80% for VoD).

I'm still very confused that this technology hasn't become mainstream (there are privacy concerns, but that doesn't usually stop the tech market…).

In theory I think you're right, but you do need a really smart control plane. Just because a connection is fast doesn't mean it's not metered (let's say fast 5G, starlink, rural fiber) and so on.

Are all of the issues P2P brings really worth it?

I'd say this definitely opens up streaming from your desktop with 1 CPU core handling a SFU for say 100 viewers = 500Mb or from a $5/month VPS if you've not got the capacity at home. That's pretty awesome, for most people no need to use P2P.

It's not nearly as "ubiquitous" as you may think

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