Author: RB

I left some questions for Tom Evslin on the talk he gave today at Berkman on neutrality regulations. Tom has a technical background, and while he’s not come out in favor of new regulations, he appears sympathetic to the arguments for them. Check his responses at Fractals of Change.

I post some reactions later, but suffice to say his first comment is the most interesting. It goes into what seems to me like a very gray area for end-to-end: selecting routes through the public Internet for low latency. In general, the end-to-end network structure doesn’t allow that as routes are supposed to be the network’s business. We need to understand that and what it implies.

UPDATE: I’ve responded to Tom’s take on “application neutrality”. He gave a VoIP service he started as an example of using “the stupid network” to accomplish different things than what its architects envisioned, but it seems to me it proves the opposite case: a multi-service network promotes innovation better than a single-service one does. My response is here.

The Register has published a number of reader comments on the Net neutrality debacle, er, debate, one of whom takes me to task:

TCP/IP’s ‘end-to-end’ nature (what used to be called a “connectionless network layer”) – far from being the consensual fashion of the time – was ferociously denounced by communications experts. They basically said it was just the sort of rubbish you’d expect with a communication system invented by computer people: it obviously wouldn’t scale.

Indeed, there have always been protocol wars, and they’re generally pitted computer people against networking people. The TCP Internet was a radical departure from networking principles as they were understood in the 1970s, and it turns out most of the criticisms from networking people were sound. The TCP Internet is great for handling one type of traffic – store and forward file transfers – and not so great for handling other types of traffic, such as real-time voice and video. As the latter is now more important than the former, the Internet needs to be tweaked again, and not for the first time.

Read the comments at The Reg, some are quite interesting.

Declan McCullagh reports that the telecom and video franchising reform may hit the floor very soon:

Reports are circulating that Sen. Ted Stevens, the Republican champion of a bill to rewrite telecommunications laws, is trying to hold a vote on it this week.

That would be pretty keen, but Google is fighting hard for a subsidy.

Net Neutrality, as conceived in the Snowe-Dorgan bill and similar measures, is a subsidy to large bandwidth consumers such as Google and Yahoo. This is not to say to that these companies don’t pay anything for Internet bandwidth today as much as it is to point out that whatever they pay (and it’s far below market rates that you and I pay) doesn’t cover Quality of Service. Let me back up a little and explain what this is about.

The Telcos – principally Verizon, but to a much lesser extent AT&T and Bell South – are in the process of transitioning from old-fashioned DSL to systems that will enable them to offer cable-rivaling triple-play service. This means TV, phone, and Internet over a common wire. This can be done as the cable companies have done it, by partitioning the cable into slices of frequency for the different services, it can be done using strict time-division multiplexing a la the old days, or even better, by running IP across the entire bandwidth of the cable and segregating services with packet priorities. The latter means is the best way because it means in principle that you can use your entire cable for Internet downloads when you aren’t using higher-priority services.

The natural assumption is that they would be entitled to charge fees based on the service level a customer chooses, just the cable company does today. I can buy phone, TV, and Internet from Comcast separately or together. If the technology that Comcast uses to segregate these services changes, the economics don’t, inherently, so they should be allowed to continue pricing these services separately even if they’re all delivered over some form of Internet Protocol.

Google doesn’t think so, because they want their video and phone service to perform just as well as Comcast’s or Verizon’s without their having to pay anything more than base level Internet connection service prices.

So net neutrality amounts to this: even though Comcast or Verizon may charge their customers more for TV and phone service than they do for basic Internet service, Google should never have to pay more than a basic Internet connection fee for accessing Comcast customers at the highest level of service. Google wants to pay for basic cable and get HBO for free.

That’s what “net neutrality” really means. Mike McCurry wrote an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun that expresses this idea in a less-than-clear fashion, implying that Google doesn’t even pay for a basic cable, and the boyz at Techdirt whacked him around for it:

[McCurry’s] written up an editorial for the Baltimore Sun that doesn’t bother to mention his lobbying duties, or who has funded them. McCurry tries to make it seem as though the whole net neutrality thing is simply a ploy by Google to get “free” bandwidth. He notes, derisively, that “a $117 billion company like Google wants legislation that would drive Internet prices higher.” Of course, he doesn’t happen to mention that his viewpoint is funded by AT&T, who at close of business on Monday appears to be worth (oh, look at that) $117 billion as well.

Leaving aside the “grass-roots purity” angle, which is silly in a fight where Google’s side is represented by paid bloggers at Save the Internet, Techdirt has at best a technical point, not a substantial one. Google is seeking a subsidy, make no mistake about it.

And if that subsidy becomes law, we can more or less forget about any significant upgrades in the last mile, because there will be nobody to pay for them.

UPDATE: For the record, here’s the relevant part of Snowe-Dorgan:

(5) only prioritize content, applications, or services accessed by a user that is made available via the Internet within the network of such broadband service provider based on the type of content, applications, or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization;

Emphasis added.

Jon Stewart, the hypocrite girly-man who blasted Crossfire for being too entertaining and Sen. Ted Stevens for being too accurate in his description of the Internet, has been called out:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mocked by comedian Jon Stewart for calling the Internet a bunch of tubes, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Thursday he is open to going on Stewart’s popular “Daily Show” for a rebuttal.

Stewart makes his living selling the cynicism of the stupid to the clueless, so I doubt he has the balls to face Stevens face-to-face.

Here’s a nice comment on Stevens’ metaphoric description on CNet by Rod Adams:

I thought that old Ted did a pretty fair job of concisely describing a complex issue about a complicated system using words that had a chance of being understood by most of the people he was talking to. Unlike most of the people who have been commenting back and forth, the man has made his living for many years by trying to fit complex thoughts into sound bites or short speeches. He is, after all, an elected official.

The Internet is a network with as much variation in traffic capacities and flow as the road network. There are portions that are the equivalent of cow paths, dirt roads, city streets full of traffic lights, parking lots with improperly designed entrances and exits, and wide open freeways in Montana or West Virginia. There are intersections, security gateways, and “mixing bowls”. The volume of traffic on each of these portions is also variable by location, time of day and major events.

Stevens might very well have had difficult with receiving email in a timely fashion – his office is, after all, probably served by a network with tightly controlled firewalls, insufficient capacity (I am a government employee and understand how poorly designed some of our networks are and how slow they are to be upgraded) and probably multiple layers of routers and switches trying to add more drops or backbone wiring.

Stewart did a good job introducing Beavis and Butthead on MTV; the Comedy Central show has been less well-done.

According to our Vint Cerf, broadband access to the Internet is “at best a duopoly.” Reality, however, disagrees with Google’s chief evangelist. See the latest FCC report on broadband competition summarized by Scott Cleland::

The other very powerful piece of evidence was in Table 15 “Percentage of Zip Codes with High Speed Lines in Service.”

* In 2005, the number of zip codes with 3 or more competitive broadband providers increased 21%, from 67% of all zip codes to 81% of all zip codes.

* In 2005, the number of zip codes with 5 or more competitive broadband providers increased 35%, from 39% of all zip codes to 53% of all zip codes.

* In 2005, the number of zip codes with 10 or more competitive broadband providers increased 62%, from 13% of all zip codes to 21% of all zip codes.

* Moreover, the number of zip codes where there were no broadband providers at all fell from 4.6% of all zip codes at the end of 2004 to 1% of all zip codes at the end of 2005.

Market forces are producing more supply: in the number of competitors serving a market and in the numbers of markets served.

This is Google’s worst nightmare, as it totally erodes any basis for the subsidy they seek in the form of net neutrality regulations.

Ken Camp is an interesting guy. He recognizes that net neutrality is a “fabricated issue” but he still wants to advise “netheads” to make more influential contributions to the political process:

That isn’t the only place the Bellheads win. Look to political process. I’ve oveen wondered about our own ranks. Jeff Pulver. David Isenberg. Tom Evslin. Several others. Leading voices fighting the battle from without rather than stepping into the political fray of politics to redirect the system from within. If we’re going to win some measure of control away from the Bellheads, there is only one way. The political power base needs to shift. Netheads have to become the influeinfluencerslicy, something we are clearly not today.

Why help them?

Allow me to digress. I don’t like the distinction between Bellheads and Netheads. I’ve worked with people from the Bell companies who’ve made heavy contributions to the networking standards and protocols that we all use today in and around the Internet. One example is the twisted-pair Ethernet standards, which started with something called StarLAN that initially came from AT&T IS. The bellheads understand networking – how to move data through the tubes efficiently – much better than the netheads, who are mainly concerned with what to put in and what to take out.

The people he mentions – Jeff Pulver, David Isenberg, Tom Evslin – are actually quite naive about the operational dynamics of packet processing, forwarding, queue management, error recovery, routing table management, and the other crucial aspects of network operations. They’re marketing people, not engineers.

They approach politics in the same way they approach network engineering, by formulating fanciful simplifications and then trying to influence the process as they would like it to be rather than as it is.

And that’s fortunate for all of us, because the worst nightmare for users of the Internet would be to subject it to the whims of philistine, dilettante regulators.

Network engineering is a tough subject that requires a great deal of study to crack. Political lobbying isn’t nearly as hard, but it takes a lot of time to perfect, as politics is largely based on trust. Developing relationships takes a long time and a long attention span, and that’s a good thing as it weeds out most of the people who shouldn’t be involved in it. I learned that the hard way, by lobbying my state legislature a weekly basis for three years while holding a full-time job. with a major supplier of networking equipment.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so:

With almost 1 million VoIP connections tested through its Web site, Brix said that about 20 percent of all calls had unacceptable quality. This is up from about 15 percent of calls made about a year ago.

Let me make this as simple as possible: there are 1 billion people on the Internet today, and they each want more bandwidth. Unless bandwidth is continually added to the Internet, it slows down. VoIP is the first casualty of bandwidth congestion.

Net neutrality only makes this trend worse.

Just FYI, here’s a bit of optical fiber cable for telecom applications like, you know, the Internet. It’s a tube:

Loose Tube Optical Fiber Cable

WLC’s loose tube cable consists of acrylate coated fibers placed loosely in a gel-filled thermoplastic tube 12 fibers are respectively colored. Required number of loose tube and fibers are stranded around a metallic center member, followed by water blocking filling and aramid yarn for flame-retardant cable only.) Then a black polyethylene inner sheath is applied. A water blocking tape shell is applied over the polyethylene inner sheath. The outer jacket is LAP or LSP, or FR-LAP. The application is good at urban junction & long-haul communication. Please call for further details.

Now you know.