Category: Internet

Ars Technica botches another story

Why is it so hard for the tech press report on the broadband business with some semblance of accuracy? I know some of this stuff is complicated, but if it’s your business to explain technology and business developments to the public, isn’t it reasonable to suppose you’re going to get the facts right most of the time?

Case in point is Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica, the hugely popular tech e-zine that was recently purchased by Conde Nast/Wired for $25 million, healthy bucks for a web site. Lasar is a self-appointed FCC watcher who seems to consistently botch the details on targets of FCC action. The most recent example is a story about a clarification to AT&T’s terms of use for its U-Verse triple play service. The update advises customers that they may see a temporary reduction in their Internet download speed if they’re using non-Internet U-Verse television or telephone services that consume a lot of bandwidth. Lasar has no idea what this means, so he turns to Gizmodo and Public Knowledge for explanation, and neither of them gets it either. So he accepts a garbled interpretation of some AT&T speak filtered through Gizmodo’s misinterpretation as the gospel truth of the matter:

Ars contacted AT&T and was told by company spokesperson Brad Mays that the firm has no intention of “squeezing” its U-verse customers. “It’s more a matter of the way data comes into and travels around a home,” Mays said. “There are things (use of PCs, video, etc.) that can impact the throughput speed a customer gets. We are not doing anything to degrade the speed, it’s just a fact of the way data travels.”

The AT&T guy is trying to explain to Lasar that U-Verse TV uses the same cable as U-Verse Internet, but U-Verse TV has first call on the bandwidth. The cable’s bandwidth is roughly 25 Mb/s, and HDTV streams are roughly 8 Mb/s. If somebody in your house is watching two HDTV shows, 16 of that 25 is gone, and Internet can only use the remaining 9, which is a step down from the 10 Mb/s that it can get if you’re running one HDTV stream alongside an SDTV stream.

This isn’t a very complicated issue, and it shouldn’t be so muddled after multiple calls to AT&T if the writers in question were mildly up-to-speed on IPTV.

Lasar botched another recent story on Comcast’s agreement with the Florida Attorney General to make its monthly bandwidth cap explicit as well, claiming that Comcast had adopted the explicit cap in a vain attempt to avoid a fine:

Ars contacted the Florida AG about this issue, and received the following terse reply: “We believe the change pursuant to our concerns was posted during our investigation.” When asked whether this means that when the AG’s probe began, Comcast didn’t post that 250GB figure, we were told that the aforementioned one sentence response explains everything and to have a nice day.

In fact, the cap was part of its agreement with Florida, as the AG’s office explains on its web site:

Under today’s settlement, reached with Comcast’s full cooperation, the company has agreed not to enforce the excessive use policy without prior clear and conspicuous disclosure of the specific amount of bandwidth usage that would be considered in violation of the policy. The new policy will take effect no later than January, 1, 2009.

And everybody who follows the industry knows that. The Comcast cap is also less meaningful than Lasar reports, since Comcast says they’re only going to get tough on customers in excess of the cap who are also in the top 1% of bandwidth consumers, so simply going over 250 GB won’t get you in trouble at the future date in which everyone is doing it.

The tech press in general and Ars Technica in particular needs to upgrade its reporting standards. It’s bad enough when Ars trots out opinion pieces on network neutrality by Nate Anderson thinly disguised as reporting; most sensible readers understand that Anderson is an advocate, and take his “reporting” with the necessary mix of sodium chloride. But Anderson doesn’t consistently get his facts wrong the way Lasar does.

It would be wise for Ars to spend some of the Conde Nast money on some fact-checkers, the better to avoid further embarassment. We understand that Gizmodo is simply a gadget site that can’t be counted on for deep analysis, and that Public Knowledge is a spin machine, but journalists should be held to a higher standard.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Our Efforts Bearing Fruit

Regular readers are aware of my Op-Ed criticizing Google’s rapacious ways, written for the San Francisco Chronicle and subsequently re-printed in the Washington Times. That doesn’t happen too often, BTW. The Wall St. Journal reports that the Justice Department is paying attention:

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.

Mr. Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.

Google shares tumbled 5.5%, or $24.30, to $419.95 in 4 p.m. trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while Yahoo shares were up 18 cents to $18.26.

For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.

An 80% market share in search ads is not good for democracy, of course, so we applaud the impending suit in advance.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Your broadband service is going to get more expensive

See my article in The Register to understand why your broadband bill is going to rise:

Peer-to-peer file sharing just got a lot more expensive in the US. The FCC has ordered Comcast to refrain from capping P2P traffic, endorsing a volume-based pricing scheme that would “charge the most aggressive users overage fees” instead. BitTorrent, Inc. reacted to the ruling by laying-off 15 per cent of its workforce, while network neutrality buffs declared victory and phone companies quietly celebrated. Former FCC Chairman Bill Kennard says the legal basis of the order is “murky.”

Comcast will probably challenge on grounds that Congress never actually told the regulator to micro-manage the Internet. In the absence of authority to regulate Internet access, the Commission has never had a need to develop rules to distinguish sound from unsound management practice. The order twists itself into a pretzel in a Kafka-esque attempt to justify sanctions in the absence of such rules.
Technically speaking, they’re very confused

The FCC’s technical analysis is puzzling, to say the least.

The order describes an all-powerful IP envelope, seeking to evoke an emotional response to Deep Packet Inspection. The order claims the DPI bugaboo places ISPs on the same moral plane as authoritarian regimes that force under-aged athletes into involuntary servitude. But this is both uninformed and misleading. Network packets actually contain several “envelopes”, one for each protocol layer, nested inside one another like Russian dolls. Network management systems examine all envelopes that are relevant, and always have, because there’s great utility in identifying protocols.

The FCC’s order is especially bad for people who use both P2P and Skype. The comments lack the usual snarkiness, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

UPDATE: Right on cue, a price war is breaking out between cable and phone companies, according to the Wall St. Journal. I wonder if the converts are going to be the high-volume users worried about the caps, or the nice, low volume grannies every carrier wants.

Technorati Tags: , ,

FCC finally issues Comcast memo

Kevin Martin and his Democratic Party colleagues at the FCC have issued their Comcast order, available at this link. They find some novel sources of authority and apply some interesting interpretations of the facts. I’ll have some detailed commentary after I’ve read it all and checked the footnotes. It’s an amusing exercise, if you like that sort of thing.

For a good summary of the order, see IP Democracy.

Google is Dead

They don’t know it yet, of course. I’ve just checked the new alternative to Google, Cuil (pronounced “cool”) and found it amazingly accurate. They show me as the number 1 Richard Bennett and the number 1 Bennett. Very sweet, even though I’m only the number 12 Richard; that gives me something to strive for.

UPDATE: Esteemed BITS blogger Saul Hansell interviewed Cuil president Anna Patterson on her “36 hours of fame” and got an explanation of the site’s first day troubles: “We were overwhelmed with traffic that was not the standard pattern,” Ms. Paterson said. “People were looking for their names a lot.”

Doh.

Upgrading to IPv6

Speaking of Comcast, the cable giant is offering an interesting proposal to the standards community concerning the long overdue transition from IPv4 to IPv6, using NATs and tunnels:

Comcast is upgrading its networks from IPv4, the Internet’s main communications protocol, to the standard known as IPv6. IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses and supports an unlimited number of devices.

At issue is how Comcast will support new customers when IPv4 addresses run out, which is expected in 2011. Comcast can give these customers IPv6 addresses, but their home computers, printers, gaming systems and other Internet-connected devices are likely to support only IPv4.

Comcast engineers have come up with a solution to this problem, dubbed Dual-Stack Lite, which it says is backwards compatible with IPv4 and can be deployed incrementally.

Comcast outlined Dual-Stack Lite in a draft document published by the Internet Engineering Task Force on July 7. Dual-Stack Lite will be discussed at an IETF meeting in Dublin scheduled for later this month.

It’s a reasonable approach, putting the onus of dual stacks on the carrier NATs and home gateways where it belongs. It’s fortunate the IETF has companies like Comcast to give it guidance.

H/T CircleID.

UPDATE: Iljitsch van Beijnum has some further illumination on the Ars Technica blog, without using the “C” word; they don’t go for that sort of thing on Ars.

What’s good for Google is good for the Internet

Anna Eshoo used to be my Congressional representative, so I paid particular attention to her remarks in the recent Markey Committee hearing on Internet privacy. Frankly, she’s an embarrassment. She started her remarks by jumping all over Scott Cleland for being a shill of the broadband industry, which would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Scott started his remarks by disclosing who pays him, and I didn’t hear any disclosure from Rep. Eshoo about who’s paying her (see: Open Secrets for details of Google employee contributions to Eshoo and for Google PAC bucks. This Congresswoman has raised $3 million from PACs.)

She carried Google’s water, essentially saying: “Google is entitled to rape and pillage personal information for their own purposes, but nobody else better mess with it in the slightest way.” You can see the video of the hearing here, warts and all. Eshoo, like her colleague Zoe Lofgren (D, Google) has a place in these hearings, but it’s at the table with all the other lobbyists, not on the dias.

Aside from Eshoo, it wasn’t a totally bad hearing. Markey likes to simplify issues to the point that they’re all so black-and-white that you can’t see why they warrant discussion, but the witnesses were (with one exception) pretty clear on the fact that DPI is simply a technology, and as such has no moral significance. What matters, obviously, is how it’s used.

After all the hand-wringing, it should be clear that DPI isn’t a privacy issue in its own right because it’s simply a tool for harvesting information out of network packets. The privacy issues are solely in the realm of the information itself: who provides it and under what terms, who processes it, and who retains it. And these same issues have to be addressed for all personal information, on the Internet or off it, in the packets or on the web site.

But the pattern here is something that’s all too common in Congress: this technology has a scary name, so it must be bad. The focus on the technology with the scary name then takes up the time that should be spent on the important issue, privacy.

But privacy isn’t black-and-white, so we better not talk about it; it might be bad for Google.

Technorati Tags:

House Anti-Trust Task Force Hearing on Google

C-Span has the archived video of the Conyers hearing on Google’s proposed ad deal with Yahoo:

House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Internet Competition
Recently, a number of transactions and potential transactions have raised anti-competitive and privacy concerns in the field of online advertising, online search, and web platform interoperability. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) chairs a House Judiciary Antitrust & Competition Policy Task Force hearing to examine the state of competition with respect to various online markets.

It’s quite long but as a bonus it’s also quite boring. Google maintains there will be no price-fixing because ads are sold in auctions, Microsoft points out that the auctions have a floor price and a subjective quality index.

The smoking gun was produced: Google proposed this deal to Yahoo the day after Microsoft made their tender offer.

Google’s girl, Zoe Lofgren, tried to spin the old “two guys in a garage can take Google down” myth, but I doubt anyone with a room temperature IQ is buying that nonsense.

There was one wild card on the panel, the Ask The Builder guy who seemed overly fond of the sound of his own voice.

Of all the members, Issa gets it the best. And he should, because he actually started and built a successful technology business before going to Washington.

Lofgren and Conyers – what can I say without being rude?

Let’s make data centers obsolete

We currently get most of our Internet content, especially video, from large data centers. The high cost of these data centers, and their data comm lines, is a huge barrier to entry to new content providers. This is why 20% of the Internet’s traffic today comes from a single source. So what options to we network architects have to bring about a shift in the Internet’s content architecture such that a few large companies don’t monopolize content?

One is the approach taken by NADA in Europe to create a universal network of P2P-enabled Nano Data Centers:

NADA is seeking to leverage advancements in Peer-to-Peer technology to connect the Nano Data Centers to enable them to work together to provide services to end users.

The set top box would essentially be split in two – one half facing the end user with all the typical functionality and services, while the other half acts as the Peer, or Nano Data Center.

“They isolate it using virtualization technologies, and that secure compartment is now talking to all the other set top boxes, co-ordinating and shifting stuff around. Each of the set top boxes has plenty of storage in it so we can put them together and build a massive data store for all those YouTube videos, Flickr pictures or whatever. We’re using Peer-to-Peer under the hood to provide a service,” Dr Ott said.

This approach, or something like it, has tremendous promise.

The server farm replacement needs to be an always-on device, separate from display machines like PCs and TV sets, inexpensive, easily expandable, and easily manageable. The devices that most resemble it today are home gateways and set top boxes, and the home gateway is actually a better leverage point than the set top box we have today.

I think I’ll build a prototype and see what happens.

FCC-enabled Triple-Play Customer

After writing about triple-play and residential broadband for years, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and try it out. I already had Internet access from Comcast, and I’ve taken out an order to add TV and phone service. The motivation wasn’t entirely economic, although it will save me a bundle for the first year. I’m currently getting TV from DirecTV and my phone from AT&T like a normal person, so the prices of these services will be cut in half and my Internet would have been $15 cheaper for a 50% higher cap, but I decided to go for the 16 Mb/s cap for a price that’s still lower than what I’ve been paying for a 4 Mb/s cap.

My primary motivation for dropping DirecTV was to get away from their crappy DVR. I don’t watch live TV at all, and haven’t since I got my first TiVo in 2002, but there’s no way I can tolerate DirecTV any more. They used to partner with TiVo for a nice unit that integrated two satellite tuners with the recorder, but they idiotically decided to cut their ties with TiVo and do their own thing a couple of years ago. The DirecTV box still doesn’t know what channels I get, and there’s no way I can tell it, so it tries to record baseball games on channels I don’t get and misses the ones I do. This is really unacceptable.

The only convenient way to record all the games played by the A’s is to do a keyword search for “Oakland A’s”, because the actual titles of the games are things like “Oakland A’s at Evil Anaheim Angels of Anaheim” or vice versa. So title search would require 58 entries on each of the four channels where A’s games appear (local OTA, Comcast Sports Net Bay Area 1, 2, or HD.) The keyword search for “Oakland A’s” tries to pick up games on other sports nets and national channels, which is worthless.

Although Comcast has a deal with TiVo and is testing a Comcast DVR with TiVo software, the feedback on the TiVo forums is that it doesn’t work very well, no doubt due to the crappy Motorola hardware platform it’s built on. Some day it will probably be fine, but it clearly sucks at this stage. Thanks to the FCC, cable companies are required to support CableCard, so I can use a true TiVo HD box on cable with the simple addition of a cable M-Card, as the story goes. So we have an odd case of Comcast gaining my TV business because of regulatory action on the cable front that doesn’t exist for satellite TV. DirecTV is not required to open their system to third-party DVRs, and they don’t. Don’t believe that the irony of this effect of cable regulation is lost on me.

The first hiccup came when I tried to activate TiVo service on my new DVR, which I bought from Amazon for $214.65 (it’s up to 263.47 already.) TiVo accounts are indexed by e-mail address, and because I already had a DirecTV TiVo, they wouldn’t let me login to their site with my e-mail address to active the new own-brand TiVo, which is pretty dumb. So I had to use an alternate e-mail address after a fruitless hour on the phone with CS. TiVo does some things exceptionally poorly.

I should have that all straightened out by the time the cable guy shows up, but I do have to ask him why he ran over Kevin Martin’s dog (*inside joke*.) More on that later.