Networking
The HD-DVD defections continue, as porn kings follow Warner Brothers to embrace Blu-Ray:
Porn label Digital Playground is to adopt Blu-ray exclusively despite initially choosing HD DVD. It has announced that it will be launching eight titles on the format next month to complement its big-budget HD porn fest Pirates based (very loosely we suspect) on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean.
These things are always decided by the porn buyers.
Get your red-hot 2008 Presidential Election returns right here.
With 12% counted, Hillary and McCain are doing well, but Vermin Supreme has five votes.
UPDATE: AP has declared McCain the winner.
UPDATE: With 42% counted, Hillary has a slight lead, due to Gloria Steinem’s whining.
If I had the time, that is, I’d be blogging like crazy on issues like these:
* Blu-Ray’s triumph over HD-DVD
* The latest wild claims about Net Neutrality.
* The latest wild claims about Open Source.
* Jimbo Wales’ underwhelming new search engine.
* The NFL playoffs (maybe not, since the Titans are out.)
* The Swisher and Haren trades.
* My new job.
* The presidential race
* Gov. Arnie’s initiatives
* Britney’s custody beef.
* Jeremy Clarkson’s ID theft experiment.
But I don’t, so I won’t.
An Op-Ed about net neutrality in last week’s Seattle Times by Avis Yates Rivers makes all the obvious points: solution in search of a problem, treatment worse than the disease, etc., including this one:
Because a network’s bandwidth is a finite resource, the management tools function like traffic lights and yield signs. They seek an orderly way to allow heavy P2P-like traffic to flow without interfering with other users. At peak times, these tools send a signal to a high-bandwidth user that they will find the requested content when a lane opens on the information highway.
But wonders never cease, and David Isenberg found it wrong and offensive:
So mostly Yates Rivers is wrong when she says that bandwidth is finite. Where it is finite, the blame lies at the feet of the telcos . . . well, not really, they wouldn’t be so stupid as to build such abundance that they have nothing to sell anymore. The blame lies with our limited vision — we have affordable, mature technology that would make bandwidth scarcity as obsolete as horsepower from horses.
Can Isenberg really be this stupid? He worked for Bell Labs for 12 years, presumably doing something more technical than sweeping floors, but he still makes bonehead statements like this. I can only conclude that he’s lying deliberately.
Yes, Virginia, bandwidth is finite and it always will be. Even when we have gigabit access connections, we’re still counting on everybody not using theirs full-tilt at the same time. For every consumer of data there’s a producer, and for every pair of consumer/producers there’s a carrier, and every link has its limit. Beef up the core, and the access network becomes a bottleneck. Beef up the access network and the core becomes a bottleneck. That’s life.
My latest piece for The Register is up: Dismantling a Religion: The EFF’s Faith-Based Internet. In it, I explore the difference between the way the EFF wants to manage the Internet and the new way the IETF folks are discussing.
Bottom line: the Internet has never had a user-based fairness system, and it needs one. All networks need one, actually.
On that note, the TCP-Friendly folks remind us:
The network will soon begin to require applications to perform congestion control, and those applications which do not perform congestion control will be harshly penalized by the network (probably in the form of preferentially dropping their packets during times of congestion).
An actively-managed Internet is a functional Internet.
Thanks to Retrosheet, I can identify the first major league baseball game I ever saw in person, an epic 4-3 victory by the Yankees over the Senators on July 3, 1959. Winning pitcher Whitey Ford scored the winning run, Ryne Duren got the save, Mickey Mantle hit a single and Tony Kubek went 3-5 playing RF for some weird reason. I had remembered it as a 3-2 game, but was otherwise pretty accurate in my story-telling about it.
Would you like to have a fat Internet connection to your home? If we can agree that 100 Mb/s in both directions would qualify as “fat”. you should be able to have your way in a year or two, three at the most. Here’s a quick survey of the alternatives.
First. we have a clue as to why Comcast still uses relatively pokey DOCSIS 1.1: it’s skipping the faster and more symmetric DOCSIS 2.0 and going straight to the nirvana of even faster connections with DOCSIS 3.0:
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) plans to have a Docsis 3.0 infrastructure in place in about 20 percent of its footprint by the end of 2008, teeing up cable modem services capable of delivering shared Internet speeds in excess of 100 Mbit/s.
The nation’s largest MSO will be 3.0-capable in one-in-five homes by the end of next year, according to Comcast Chief Technology Officer Tony Werner, the keynoter here Wednesday morning at the first CableNEXT conference.
This should make them competitive with FTTH for a good while, but not forever:
While we’ve seen all sorts of blazing feats over fiber here lately, it’s not often that such wide open bandwidth gets piped directly to a home, but a 75-year old Swede recently changed all that when she had a 40Gbps connection installed in her domicile.
She can download a DVD in two seconds.
Closer to home, Verizon is going faster and more symmetric with FiOS:
With the help of the symmetrical services, users can benefit from equally fast downstream and upstream connections of up to 15 megabits per second (Mbps) or up to 20 Mbps, based on the state where the service is sold.
DSL over copper isn’t sitting still either:
University of Melbourne research fellow Dr John Papandriopoulos is in the throes of moving to Silicon Valley after developing an algorithm to reduce the electromagnetic interference that slows down ADSL connections.
Most ADSL services around the world are effectively limited to speeds between 1 to 20Mbps, but if Dr Papandriopoulos’s technology is successfully commercialised that speed ceiling would be closer to 100Mbps.
Papandriopoulos is joining ASSIA, a company founded by DSL inventor John Cioffi (and named after his wife and EVP.) ASSIA currently develops tools, but I suspect that will change. (Assia, on the other hand, is an aesthete.)
And wireless is on the move as well. Corporate products conforming to the new ~100 Mb/s (real speed) 802.11n standard are starting to roll out in trials, 4G cellular network deployments are starting, and UWB for the home is available at multi-hundred megabit/sec rates.
One has the feeling that the residential network regulators are already fighting yesterday’s war, and that the network pessimists have no basis for their fears.
Reading blogs about network neutrality is a never-ending source of fun. This comment from the Save the Internet Blog about Verizon’s open wireless network is choice:
Verizon customers will be able to use non-Verizon cell phones and applications like GPS, but what about the rest of us?
What about the rest of us non-customers indeed.
Nemertes Research speculates that investment in residential networks isn’t keeping pace with user demand for bandwidth, hence a bandwidth crunch will come about in 2010 or so. Their method is to assume that bandwidth appetite follows Moore’s Law and investment is linear, therefore the lines have to cross.
They may very well cross, but their math is wrong. One of the corollaries of Moore’s Law is that circuits grow cheaper as you pack more of them on a die, hence a linear investment in technology should result in a pool of bandwidth that accommodates Moore’s Law increases in demand. Moore’s Law applies at both sides of the network interface, in other words.
There is a caveat, however: communication networks are hybrid systems, part analog and part digital, and only the digital part obeys Moore’s Law. The way around this is to engineer them to minimize the role of analog, which is what we did when we moved Ethernet from shared coaxial cable to point-to-point twisted pair on a silicon hub. It costs more to upgrade bandwidth on shared-cable systems like DOCSIS than on dedicated cable systems like FTTH. So the real issue is getting a cable plant in place that facilitates Moore’s Law economics.
Predictably, the regulation fanatics fail to deal with any substantial issues in relation to this study, and simply throw poo at the walls of their cages. See: Save the Internet, and DSL Reports. An ad hominem is not an argument, and Nemertes refuted Save the Internet smartly in the comments.
Nobody knows, of course, how fast user demand for bandwidth will grow in the next few years, but it’s inextricably bound with how fast carriers deploy fatter pipes. At some point, we will get our TV shows in HD over an IP network or something similar, and even that (100 Mb/s or so) won’t be the final upper limit.
This is impressive:
Verizon Wireless today announced that it will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company. Verizon Wireless plans to have this new choice available to customers throughout the country by the end of 2008.
Does it signal VZ’s intention to bid on the 700 Mhz C block? Fleishman thinks so.
One thing it does show is that markets are more efficient than regulators, which is why the regulation-happy crowd is silent on it*. Tim Wu in particular should have something to say as he’s the one who petitioned the FCC for Carterfone-like regulations on cellular networks.
Let’s see.
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*UPDATE: Harold Feld takes respite from his painful loss at the FCC today to take credit for Verizon’s move. I don’t think so, and here’s my alternate theory: Verizon has figured out that winning in the marketplace requires superior technology. Don’t tell Harold, he’ll be sad.
