Author: RB

A fear-monger’s view of networking

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.

The US Will Not Mandate Net Neutrality

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.

The ugly truth

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?

Internet Evangelist takes all the credit

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.

Poor Alyssa

The funny Flash ad for Hands Off the Internet singles out poor Alyssa Milano for abuse. It’s pretty well done.

In related news, Congress is considering hearings on Google’s click-fraud case. See the Google watchblog with the colorful name for info about Google’s multi-billion dollar fraud against small businesses. (And you thought they were the good guys? After China even? Dude, are you nuts?)

Cisco weighs in on net neutrality

This is historical by now, but I was curious about it so I checked:

“We strongly support the principle of an open Internet,” Cisco CEO John Chambers wrote in a letter to Congressman Joe Barton, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “We must, however, balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints and enable new services.”

Chambers makes one very excellent point: most of the talk about Internet innovation in DC is about services attached to the Internet, and not the system of lines and routers itself. The neutrality regulations would stifle innovation in the core structure of the Internet, which will eventually lead to stagnation in the services space, even worse than the stagnation we’ve seen since the Bubble burst. That can’t be good.

Full text of COPE Act

The COPE Act is in Thomas now, and the lies about it fly fast and furious in Nutrialand. See the bill here, and notice this:

‘‘(3) ADJUDICATORY AUTHORITY.—The Commission shall have exclusive authority to adjudicate any complaint alleging a violation of the broadband policy statement and the principles incorporated therein. The Commission shall complete an adjudicatory proceeding under this subsection not later than 90 days after receipt of the complaint. If, upon completion of an adjudicatory proceeding pursuant to this section, the Commission determines that such a violation has occurred, the Commission shall have authority to adopt an order to require the entity subject to the complaint to comply with the broadband policy statement and the principles incorporated therein. Such authority shall be in addition to the authority specified in paragraph (1) to enforce this section under titles IV and V. In addition, the Commission shall have authority to adopt procedures for the adjudication of complaints alleging a violation of the broadband policy statement or principles incorporated herein.

Nutria claim this means the FCC lacks the authortity to punish broadband abuse. Right.

The rules they’ll enforce are in Appropriate Framework for Broadband Access to the Internet over Wireline Facilities:

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

• To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

That doesn’t seem too complicated.

NRO likes the new network

Here’s a great editorial from National Review Online on the cool new network:

Where the telecoms predict bold innovations, advocates of net neutrality see Orwellian nightmares. They argue that if telecoms are allowed to speed up the delivery of some content, there is nothing to stop them from slowing down or blocking content they don’t like. But such anti-consumer behavior is unlikely in a competitive market. Let’s say George Soros somehow took over Verizon and made troublemaking websites like National Review Online disappear from his network. Competition from other broadband providers would discourage him from thus breaking his customers’ hearts.

Net-neutrality advocates argue that there isn’t enough competition among broadband providers to ensure that service degradation would be punished or that telecoms would charge Internet companies fair prices for faster service. Most U.S. broadband consumers are forced to choose between their local cable and local phone companies, they argue, giving these telecoms a “virtual duopoly” in the broadband market.

Leave aside the FCC’s finding, noted in the Supreme Court’s ruling on this matter, of “robust competition . . . in the broadband market,” including not just cable and DSL, but burgeoning satellite, wireless, and broadband-over-powerline technologies. Ignore also the argument that net-neutrality legislation could actually entrench the bigger players at the expense of new technologies that might otherwise compete by differentiating their services.

They make an important point: there’s a lot of doubt about the business plan for new broadband, but that’s all the more reason to let the market sort it out. The Nutria want to abort it before we ever get a chance to see what it can do. That would be a dreadful mistake.

The Daily Neut – Part II

Recent developments on the neut front have the New York Times showing a failure to grasp the concept:

“Net neutrality” is a concept that is still unfamiliar to most Americans, but it keeps the Internet democratic. Cable and telephone companies that provide Internet service are talking about creating a two-tiered Internet, in which Web sites that pay them large fees would get priority over everything else. Opponents of these plans are supporting Net-neutrality legislation, which would require all Web sites to be treated equally. Net neutrality recently suffered a setback in the House, but there is growing hope that the Senate will take up the cause.

And Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee flying off into a socialist Neverland:

It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing. We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video, or quality audio. But we each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me.

There’s actually nothing magical about how the Internet delivers packets, it’s a machine that follows a strict set of rules. The Net Neutrality advocates are indeed hostile to levels of service that are good for video or good for audio, and nobody is even thinking about a service that blocks access to anybody; in actual fact the COPE Act that was passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee expressly forbids that. So this is simply another strawman argument from somebody who should know better.