Month: May 2006

There are probably more QoS engineers per capita in Portland than any other place in the world. The local paper there gets the regulation issue:

While neutrality advocates can cite a few cases in which network providers have shut down access to sites of which they disapproved, the telecom companies correctly note that they don’t have a history of playing favorites with Web sites or users. They say they understand the Net’s culture of openness and recognize it would be bad business to violate it.

They point out that it’s costly to build a high-speed network. They ask why customers willing to pay a premium for high speeds and broad lanes — “throughput,” as the geeks say — shouldn’t be allowed to do so. On this point, the telecoms are right — as long as nobody else’s ability to use the network is diminished.

Congress is under pressure from both sides of the debate, but it should borrow the first principle of the medical profession: First, do no harm. Bad law, in this case, could be much worse than no law. And it’s not entirely clear yet what a good law would look like.

Against the embarrassingly wrong editorial in the Mercury News, the Oregonian is downright brilliant.

From the mountaintop, straight talk on Internet regulation:

Don’t kid yourself that the issue here is “censoring” the Web. The issue is Internet survival. AT&T talks about the coming Multimedia Explosion as new forms of video traffic rapidly overtake Web-surfing, file transfer and email as the prime users of backbone capacity. Literally, “net neutrality” would result in an increasingly unreliable Internet as more and more high-bandwidth applications contest for space on networks that nobody would have an incentive to expand.

The real issue is where will the big bucks come from to create an Internet capable of handling the services now envisioned, let alone those not yet dreamed up. BellSouth’s Chief Architect Henry Kafka told an audience in March that a typical broadband user today consumes about two gigabytes of data a month, at a network cost of $1. Once TV has gone high-definition and on-demand, a typical user will consume about 1,120 gigabytes a month at a cost of $560 (that’s in addition to the administrative, sales and service costs that today make up the lion’s share of the user’s bill). “Clearly that’s not what the average user is going to pay per month for their video service,” Mr. Kafka said. “That’s why we need help.”

Think back to the beginnings of radio and TV: Those business models would never have worked if consumers had had to foot the bill directly for programming. It’s clear today that giving consumers the kind of Internet that will support high-definition video and gaming will require the bill to be shared by companies with a stake in putting the new services in front of consumers.

Amen, brothers and sisters, and a tip of the hat to Turk for this fine link.

Today’s editorial in the San Jose Mercury News in favor of Internet regulation is a real belly-buster:

Network neutrality isn’t new. Its basic tenets — that all users can access all legal content on the Internet and that all content providers are treated the same on the network — have been in effect since the birth of the Internet through regulations governing the old telephone network. But a series of court decisions and a vote of the Federal Communications Commission last year have voided those rules. And that has opened the door for phone and cable companies, which control Internet access, to change the rules of the game.

Bzzztttt – wrong. Cable Internet access has never been covered by common carrier laws, only dial-up and DSL have. And who provides the better service? Lawmakers freed DSL of its disadvantage against cable a year ago. The Internet itself, the backbone network, has never, ever been covered by common carrier regulations, and it’s this very thing that the search and software monopolies seek to change.

Consider the nascent world of Internet video, which promises to be a free-for-all of ingenuity and creativity. With enough bandwidth, CNN, a public access channel or an amateur video producer could put up content for the entire Internet to enjoy. Scores of innovative start-ups are coming up with business models to exploit that creativity, by organizing the new content, making it searchable and delivering it effectively to millions of users.

This stands reality on its head again. Real-time video isn’t practical over Vint Cerf’s Internet because it was engineered for e-mail and downloads. The Internet needs to grow the ability to deliver multi-media streams with very low delay to support the next generation of applications. Net neutrality criminalizes this practice, and along with it most of the advances that have been made in network engineering since the Internet was turned on in 1983.

Outside the Bay Area, few lawmakers seem to understand that by not enacting network neutrality legislation, they’d be subverting the basic principles that have made the Internet into such a powerful force for economic growth. Perhaps, it’s because they’ve been worn down by armies of lobbyists from the telephone and cable industries.

What Bay Area lawmaker understands how the Internet works, the one who gave us the V-Chip or the ones who line their campaign coffers with contributions from the companies that gave us the Internet Bubble? Our politicians are like politicians everywhere, captives to a group of interests who have positions on issues the lawmakers and their staffs scarcely understand. The legislation that opens up rights of way for fiber to the home is sensible, practical, and good for America as a whole and the high tech community in particular.

Network neutrality would be nothing short of a disaster for all of us who create or use networks.

Check out the Lippard Blog on Misinformation in defense of net neutrality:

It is distressing to see net neutrality advocates continue to get basic facts wrong in defense of their poorly thought-out positions. If you don’t understand how the Internet works today (technologically, politically, and legally), then you are not in a position to be making proposals about how it should be regulated that are not going to have significant (and likely very bad) unintended consequences.

Indeed.

The Personal Democracy Forum had a panel on net neutrality yesterday featuring notorious neut Susan Crawford, who displayed some remarkable flexibility according to this report by Michael Turk:

To the content, all I can say is there were some misstatements made by Chris and Steve, but on the whole, they made the better argument. They stuck to facts and the discussion rather than making outlandish claims about things that might happen, maybe, someday, possibly. That seemed to be Tim Karr’s specialty. When challenged to name (outside of the Canadian cases which are irrelevant due to a different legal structure, and the Madison River case) one instance of telcos blocking access to content, he stared at the audience and made not sound.

He chose instead to repeat the already discredited claim that net neutrality has been the law of the land. If 60% of broadband connections are provided by cable; and cable has never had to live by the law that applied to DSL lines; and that law was repealed (essentially) to provide a level playing field; and the cable companies have not, regardless of having no legal prohibition, done any of what the net neutrality proponents claim will happen; how can you make such an outlandish argument with a straight face?

Worse than Karr, however, was Susan Crawford. She has, on her blog, routinely raged against the FCC and giving them more power. She has routinely referred to them in the most vile ways and spoken out against their power to, for instance, enforce their puritanical belief systems about exposing a naked breast to the world.

Crawford, a law professor, wants the FCC to regulate network management systems and business models but not content. If this makes any sense to you, please enlighten me. Crawford is typically mentioned as one of the Big Three law professors pushing neutrality, alongside Wu and Lessig, and she seems pretty dim. On her blog she reveals massive ignorance about networking:

These are just bits we’re talking about. Making them into “service type” decides the question up front — they’re not services until the carrier decides to call them that.

…which kind of ignores the fact that some bits are in a hurry and others aren’t, hence the need for different traffic classes.

Get a podcast about the debate here. Unfortunately there’s no podcast of the actual debate.

Public Knowledge is a backer of the wacky “Save the Internet” campaign, and the following commentary by their leader Gigi Sohn is eye-opening. Sohn comments on the AP story below about Internet congestion from HDTV, totally distorting the facts:

I’m sorry to say that this latest rationale for discrimination doesn’t wash either. These fears (how ironic that the pro-NN forces are the ones accused of fear-mongering) are based on absurd assumptions about how people use the Internet — that people will start watching streaming video like they do regular TV — for 8 hours a day, or that, as the AP story states “everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time.” We know that this won’t happen any time soon, if ever. Also, and this should be no surprise, the telcos are not revealing how much it would really cost to provide the best solution to the problem — building a fatter pipe.

There’s no need to assume that people will be watching TV for 8 hours a day for HDTV to represent a significant increase over TV downloads on today’s Internet because the baseline is virtually zero. How much TV does anybody download today? And yes, even one hour of HDTV consumes more bandwidth than the the typical Internet user consumes in a week, and a single baseball game in HDTV is a million times larger than a web page. As for people downloading news at the same time, isn’t this exactly what will happen if the broadcasters and telcos don’t go to Internet multicast in real-time for broadcasting? The news doesn’t have much value hours later.

Indeed, Internet2’s Gary Bachula testified a few months ago that the best, and most cost-effective way to deal with any capacity issues is to make the pipe fatter. Internet2, which is the next-generation Internet available only at Universities and colleges, considered both a discrimination-based model and a 100 MG pipe model, and chose the latter. If telcos and cable companies are permitted to create a two-lane Internet w. tolls for access to the high-speed lane, they will have no incentive to build the fat pipe, because they would then lose the revenue from the high-speed lane.

Bachula’s testimony in probably the most misunderstood comment on QoS in recent memory. His experimental network doesn’t serve a consumer market. It’s built on an over-provisioned backbone and fat pipes to the offices of the professors and grad students who connect to it. His discovery is nothing new: an over-provisioned network doesn’t take much management. But out here in the real world were people pay for services and companies have to profit from providing them, we don’t have such luxury. Solving QoS by adding bandwidth is like improving your computer’s performance by adding memory, it only works until the next release of Windows and then you need more memory again. QoS is needed on large scale networks that operate in the normal and economic range of bandwidth.

In the short term, there are other non-discriminatory ways to deal with this so-called “choking” of the Internet. One way is to put a cap on he amount of data that a user gets for free, and then charge extra if that person uses more, like cellphone usage.

There really aren’t any “non-discriminatory ways” of managing a network, as any user who finds what he wants to do constrained by policy is going to feel victimized.

That’s the prediction of Forrester Research:

Many have called for the US government to mandate “network neutrality” that will ensure all Internet traffic is delivered equally, consumer choice is upheld, and Internet innovation is not stalled. But, it won’t happen in the next three to five years. Why? Because no problem exists today and legislating neutrality will not give consumers the best results. In five years, when rich content taxes networks and broadband adoption approaches saturation, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will take a more hands-on approach and intervene if a consumer’s access to content and service is being denied. In the meantime, operators should err on the side of limited prioritization and content owners should build priority delivery into carriage agreements.

I hope they’re right.

Nutria would do well to read and understand the facts of life:

In this sense, broadband is like old-fashioned telephone service, where there are always more lines leading from homes to the local switching station than there are going from the station out of the neighborhood. If everyone in a neighborhood picks up the phone at once, some calls won’t go through because there aren’t enough outgoing lines. But that rarely happens, so the system works.

On the broadband network, the over subscription means that one megabit-per-second connection to the Internet is enough to serve 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second, typical for low-end DSL. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

Of course, the carrier also needs to pay for the equipment that brings data from the Internet connection point to the subscriber, first through fiber-optic lines and then through DSL or cable.

Over-subscription doesn’t present a problem as long as people are using the Internet for Web surfing, e-mail and the occasional file download. But if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to download the evening news at the same time, it’s not going to work.

“The plain truth is that today’s access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect,” according to Tom Tauke, Verizon Communications Inc.’s top lobbyist.

Over-subscription is the essence of packet-switching, boys and girls, and without it we have the good old telephone network. We don’t want that, do we?

Vint Cerf’s letter to Congress on COPE displays some remarkable arrogance:

The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. This has led to an explosion of offerings – from VOIP to 802.11x wi-fi to blogging – that might never have evolved had central control of the network been required by design.

Positively breath-taking.

But let’s give credit where it’s due: the Internet is huge, and its very existence has made the world a better place. We should thank all the thousands of engineers who’ve made it possible, as well as the business people, the academics, and the bureaucrats. Thanks to all of y’all.

But do we really have any way of knowing whether the Internet’s success is mainly a function of its design as opposed to some other factor such as its parentage and timing? I could certainly argue that the advent of the IBM PC in 1981 made some kind of world-wide packet network inevitable, and if it hadn’t been the Internet it would have been something similar such as an ISO or XNS network. The Internet was a better choice than ISO because it was relatively simple and much earlier. And the Internet was a better choice than XNS because it wasn’t tied to single vendor and the government practically forced the source code on people. So I’m not so sure about the architect’s claim that the architecture was more important than the implementation.

And what exactly did TCP/IP have to do with the invention of WiFi? I worked on the original MAC protocol for WiFi and I can tell that the Internet wasn’t on the minds of anyone I worked with on it. We were certainly glad to use WiFi to attach devices to the Internet later on, but we would have been just as happy to attach them to anything else. All that the Internet did for WiFi was cause it problems because the Internet is too primitive to allow roaming; it ties a computer address to a location and that’s that.

The central control thing is a big goof too. WiFi networks have central control big time, and so does the Internet, in a more surreptitious way. See RFC 2309 for more on that, or scroll down.

Cerf has convinced himself that his role in history was greater than it really was, and he’s dead set on ensuring that there won’t be a Cerf Jr. who takes the Internet to the next level.

It’s sad to see a once-good engineer stoop so low.