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Excite@Home To Change Routing Priorities For $$
" I am expecially troubled by this because it would mean that sites and companies that have gobs of cash could in essence pay excite to guarantee a better experience than a competitor. It's not clear from the article, but for excite to specifically give higher priority to one than that would by default reduce the priority of competitors.
The question then becomes, how long until someone can literally pay to make it impossible to reach a competitors site. Say how would cnn reader feel if they could no longer reach cnn , but msnbc always came up super fast?
It's a surprise that the same company that appears to be for open access for cable lines would take this approach to cash for network routing. Excite is definately doing the right thing through it's support of open access (imho), but a very wrong thing in pursuing this line of business. "
Hey, they are free to do it, but we are also free to talk or complain about it.
As customers (at least I am) it's nice to know these things. It's not like @HOME is going to e-mail all their customers and tell them this. Also, this is the first time I've heard anyone doing this. I'd be interested to know if this is going to start a trend.
I swear, some people are just here to whine and complain. I don't mind if you have some masochistic urge to read news you hate on a site you don't like, but do you have to complain about it too?
Finkployd
This is exactly why I pay $40 dollars a month for @home. First, it's been fun having my ports scanned every couple of days by @home. Also, seeing my bandwidth shrink and a cap placed on my upload speed.... all I can say is that's customer service, baby! I don't get new newsgroups any more, but who needs 'em? And SPAM in my mailbox, bring it on! More! Harder! And now my service will be faster when I go to sites like, oh, CNNTIMEWARNERAOLDISNEY but I get to wait 30 second for /.
Why, I'm so fscking happy I wish I were paying $80 dollars a month!
I think you are thinking of slate.com, Microsoft's political mag. I don't recall Salon.com ever charging.
The cake is a pie
Oh of course if I want to eat/drink in the theater I tend to smuggle contraband snacks in whenever possible, me and a friend once snuck a pair of foot long subs into movie (trench coats are your friend ;-) ;->
To further steer this off topic a new resteruant/movie theater just opened here that serves pizza and beer during the show, and I think that's just pretty damn cool, prices are pretty decent too.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
The only problem with this is defining which system is the server, and which is the client.
Is the server the one providing most of the traffic? That would work for ftp downloads, but not uploads. How about gnutella and other peering systems?
The way to do it would be to say that you don't pay for any traffic _from_ your location, only to it. Currently, you pay for traffic in both directions.
Note that this is how cell-phones work over here. It is the caller that pays for the call. If you call a cell-phone, you pay. If the cell-phone calls you, they pay. This is different from North America, where the cell-phone always pays (again from what I remember).
As for collecting payment for traffic, most ISPs outside of the US do this already. My cable modem here in New Zealand is metered, and so is the ADSL line the Telco offers.
Jason PollockThis sounds kinda like AOL. Where AOL makes the user think they are on the internet, but really just getting there info on the local/proprietary AOL servers. Here it sounds like the Excite is just routing the requests for specific IP addresses and sending that request over its own network, which it says will be faster. That is until they contracts with many web sites, and then suddenly their wires are just as full as the the rest of the internet.
Hmmmm.... I'd argue the time it takes to get a page up (dependent on how fast you get the data) is a very real issue in determining who dominates the web.
Jakob Nielsen (we've had him interviewed here) says that people are very sensitive to download times - guess why he recommends spartan design in his sites.
I can't find the quote from his book, but he cites surveys where it's found that people prefer speed over content.
With high bandwidth piping from excite, some would have a very real advantage in reach people.
-
Excite needs money. Bad. And they'll use all of their resources (i.e., their infrastructure) to make it. I don't think it is really clear what the effects will be on others. If Excite isn't robbing Peter of bandwidth to pay Paul, then they should be free to sell their resources as they see fit.
What does routing priority have to do with Linux? this will affect all users equally.... Windows, Linux, Mac, BeOS, etc... Think before you set of your "Somebody is trying to take down linux" alarm. Just incase you didn't notice there isn't some big router conspiracy to disallow packets that have been fingerprinted as coming from a linux tcp/ip stack.... calm down
Why exactly do any of you care what Excite does with their backbone. They paid for it, its not government funded, your taxpayers dollars didn't go towards it. Its their bandwidth, they can do whatever the hell they want with it and no one has a reasonable right to second guess them. If you don't like it, don't buy services from them. And the folks that are implying that its somehow a crime if Excite decides to devote more bandwidth to one customer over another, I'd like some of what you're smoking.
\w0zz - OpenBSD - A Better Solution
Anyway, priority flags are embedded into IPv6, aren't they? do you think all priority (except Army/Intelligence ones!) will cost the same?
Thus we no more pay for the time, we will anyway pay for something... will it be bandwith, traffic, priority, or all of them?
If them is corporate lobbyist, we r what ? /. lobbyists ? :)
Hey, Im sorry but the utopia of the Internet being free for everyone and that the small guy has the same rights and "power" as a huge company has never been true.
Lets see...
"Slashdot's new co-location site is now at Andover.Net's own (pinky finger to the mouth) $1 million dedicated datacenter at the Exodus network facility"
You mean that if you have lots of money to throw at your servers and hosting, your sitell load faster? Wow.
Hence, @home via Akamai is saying to these companies that they will provide them fast(er) service to @home customers. But it will cost you. If these companies maintain their relationship with Akamai, then they will be essentially saying okay. Can't wait for the open access fights to start up again.
But most importantly, Victoria's Secret is an Akamai client. You know what this means.:-)
Isn't the next step, say a year from now, to be offering the customers access to peered routing for a premium? Say a pricing agreement whereby you pay $x/month to have premium access Financial Services online services, etc?
No ISP has tried this in the past? Are you joking? Every ISP does this with at least its own content, and usually that of several "partners" (think of AOL).
Back to the original poster--"the company that is for open access..."; is he high? E@H has never been for open access, they've been fighting it tooth and nail.
demi
There are of course serveral ways that this could be implimented by @home, priority queueing - correct spelling :), policy based routing, route maps, MPLS....
v ices\Tcpip\Parameters.
I wonder if they are using anything based on the type of service field in the IP header, this is very possible and combined with route maps its easy to impliment per (extra paying) customer. So, @Home customers, why not set your own TOS bits and see if it makes any difference?
Under WINNT (and I guess most MS OSes?)
Edit the registry to add:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Ser
Use the "Edit->New->DWORD Value" menu selection and type in "defaultTOS" without the "s."
Double-click on the new defaultTOS value and enter 20 (make sure the units are set to HEX).
Exit the registry and reboot the system.
A value of 20 sets the TOS to "priority."
With a Cisco....
add to your outbound interface:
ip route-cache policy (of course depends on IOS / if CEF is used etc)
ip policy route-map settos
Global conf:
access-list 1 permit ip any any
Make the route map:
route-map settos permit 10
match ip-address 1
set ip precedence 1
The above might be a bit wrong but you get the idea. 1 is the second lowest precedence, with 7 being the highest, 0 the lowest. Both of these will of course only work for traffic in the out bound direction.
OK, is this possible under Linux I guess so, but how?
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Besides, it appeared that the companies signing up (well, at least one that I am aware of, Akamai) distribute content, rather than provide it. They don't create or provide the content. They get paid by companies that want to have the ability to distribute their own high-bandwidth streaming media content. The content distributors have various mechanisms to achieve this, and one of the tools they need is, naturally, high bandwidth. What this means, is that companies that wish to pay more to get their own content out there will be able to do so because of this. If you cannot or don't want to pay to get the bandwidth for distribution, why should you have it?
How does someone manage to be offended by this? Unless I am horrendously misreading the linked article, excite isn't offering much more than some kind of peering service (Universities do the same thing often, even for commercial entities).
It's not as if @home is routeing packets to CNN at a higher priority than MSNBC, it's simply that if CNN has a 'direct' link to @home then @home subscribers will naturally see better service.
Look for a cause elsewhere.
Instead of getting angry, let's see if we can convince them to take this approach instead.
Want to work at Transmeta? MicronPC? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Can your IM do this?
Or pay Sony to make a radio that ONLY receives Infinity Broadcasting stations. Just like the cable modems that only connect to AT&T cable. Let's see how this one plays out if AT&T not only control your access - but your CONTENT too!! Beware Ma Bell!
And this is different how? If I have money, I sleep on a more comfortable bed, I drive a faster car, I eat better food, and I have better Internet access. Isn't that how America works?
--- Tao
I can't believe that the open spirit of the
Internet has been sullied by this obvious attempt
at crass commercialization. The Internet has
survived for the past 2 decades without charging
any money for access and providing equal levels
of service to everyone based on merit. This
could change all that.
What's next, having Internet access facilitated
by telecommunications carriers that will charge
$13,000 a month for DS3 access that is currently
provided for free?
I am shocked. We should all boycott Excite@Home.
What is the controversy here? According to the article, "those companies had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount per megabit per second in order to plug into the high-speed network." In other words, they are selling bandwidth. If anything, it is less troubling than the many 'preferred vendor' arrangements that have been on commercial networks (e.g. Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy) since the 80's.
By buying bandwidth directly to a network segment, these providers will get better throughput. If you look at the buyers (Akamai, iBeam and Microcast) in the article, you'd see that they defintely have an interest in eliminating netlag and other delays to cablemodem users (who can make best use of their services). I expect other 'wide pipe' providers to follow suit, and consider it both prudent, and a service to all customers. (The revenue stream is welcome, too: Excite@Home lost $1.5 billion on revenues of $337 mill last year. How long do you think they can afford to keep supplying service at current prices at his rate?)
There is a huge distinction between *providing* service* and *denying* it.
You might as well argue that high-bandwidth users are 'crowding everyone else off the Internet' (which has been argued). Howver, this doesn't have that nice conspiratorial anti-business ring, does it?
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
This is NO different from doing a CoLo (Co-Location) or an ISP doing peering. It's not news at all.
Why not make an announcement that "Search Engine X" or "E-Commerce Book Store Y" also has multiple connections to the internet? It's absolutely NO DIFFERENT.
This just some lame-o marketdroids attempt to get publicity, and somebody fell for it.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
This isn't new at all.
You seem surprised that ISPs provide you with a better service if you pay more money. This has always been the case.
Typically, it's the "Pay more for more bandwidth" scenario, which will make your site appear "faster" to the end users. Try and go over your allocation, and you get throttled. Nice.
It was only a matter of time before this was extended to routing.
Internet hosting is a business. Deal with it.
Exactly. The poster might as well have said "it's unfair that some sites can afford better graphic designers" or "better servers" or "to publish more content". If Excite users don't like it, they'll vote with their feet. If rivals to content providers don't like it, then they have to either make their content more compelling, or pay for similar services.
Either way, the consumer gets a better deal. That's why it's called the free market.
This goes under the heading, "you get what you pay for!" I routinely pay a toll on a toll road to get to work faster every day than if I took the parallel "free" road. It saves me hours every week. I think this is a great idea. You get premium service for extra money. It's like flying first class.
Although I know AOL does this, I don't consider AOL an ISP. They are a dialup content provider, and the only reason they have ever offered access to competitor and non-partner content is because their clueless users would bitch. 'But my freind has that cool Altavista thing on his AOL!!', the same reason they started to offer AOL users outbound connects at all..
Yeah, they kind of lumped onto the bandwagon when it became clear that AT&T, etc, were not about to just give them the same sweetheart deal twice. After all, if you can't have it to yourself you'de better make sure your competition can't either.
.sig: Now legally binding!
So long as Excite continues to maintain it's public Internet lines as well, I see no problem with this. Of course, if they don't maintain those lines to a reasonable level, all of a sudden their customers will suffer when tempting to get to 95+% of the internet - a sure fire way of losing customers.
You put your finger on the crux of the issue. Given lively competition among service providers to end users this is not a concern. However, what's more valuable at this point, 95% of Internet content or consumers connected at high speed? The value of the Internet to the big money forces now is not in current content, its future markets. This is why Excite@home can lose $1B, as the article says, right now the game is to jockey for position in future markets.
If E@h (or any other high speed provider) can obtain a dominant market position they can dictate terms to content providers. More insidious, if a content provider owns a service provider they can exclude other content providers. Aol/TimeWarner? Didn't TimeWarner try to play hardball with Disney?
This is what Aol would have like to have done with the dialup crowd but all phone lines being equal it wasn't very compelling to content providers in the way that high speed access to consumers could be.
We need a vigilant FTC. Check out The Media Access Project, they are part of a coalition that filed with the FTC to block the Aol/TimeWarner merger.
Exactly! (Somebody got it right!) This is how your long-distance telephone works too... Imagine a big n-ary tree, with lots of little local offices at the bottom. These local offices are connected to a higher level regional office, and the regional offices are hooked into a larger office, and so on and so forth, so there are about 5 levels to the tree. When a call gets routed, it goes up to the lowest level of the tree that contains both you and the destination.
If you were both on the same leaf of the tree, the call would be routed within that tree. If you were one hop away, your call would be routed one level up the tree, then back down to the leaf.
In some cases, a call may go up three levels of the tree and back down again. (Much like how IP is handled).
Eventually, the people at AT&T noticed that some of the main trunk lines were getting really clogged. (Like ones that run from NYC-Los Angeles.) These weren't exactly in the same section of the tree, and so they needed to work their way up to the top of the tree and back down, making it difficult at times to make that call.
So, what was the solution? A direct trunk line from NYC-Los Angeles. Calls that would normally travel up to the top of the tree were instead shunted out along this new line. The direct service not only improved the NYC-LA connection, but it also improved other conenctions as well, because the bandwith that was hogged by NYC-LA connections was freed up.
This is very similar to what we see here, except in this case, the cost of the additional bandwidth is only being absorbed by one "leaf" of the tree... those leafs willing to pay extra to have a direct connection to one of the main trunks... bypassing a lot of the hops on the way.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
The problem isn't when Excite charges money for fast service to it's subscribers. It would become a problem when Excite steers users to those sites, because it makes its money from the extra traffic. The financial incentive is to make those sites more temping to their users, and this can be done with both the carrot (fast service) and the stick. The stick is what is frightening, they reduce QoS for sites that don't pay the vigorish. Users visit mainly the prefered sites since they are fast, and shun other sites without deep pockets since they are on the thin little line to the Excite network.
This obviously doesn't have to happen, Excite may persue this as just a little lucrative business on the side. Or @Home users might not allow it to get out of control, by finding another provider and forcing Excite to keep the general purpose pipe fat to keep its customers.
Anyone remember who wrote the bit on hot potato[e] routing(SF author maybe?). It was another take on how an Old Boys Network could be established to regulate who gets to use resources. Packets that aren't coming from or going to a prefered IP are passed along to the next (other company's) router since they don't generate direct revenue. If everyone passes the buck, then the packet gets tossed around like a hot potato until it finally gets delivered or its TTL expires.
-sb
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
How is getting faster access to some sites, and the same access to the other sites considered "getting the shaft?"
It sounds like a great deal for the users.
Don't forget both of them have users. The site has both current users looking for faster access to their site, as well as potential users. If the ISP believes that their customers would benefit from a fatter pipe to their favourite sites, then, in effect, they are peer sharing their customers. It's not that different from going to a movie theatre and getting a coupon to a local fast-food restaurant.
So they pay more to get better connections. Big deal. This isn't new is it? This is just competition. I really don't think we'll EVER see the day that someone pays to cut out a competitor's site from an entire ISP. But, I have no problem with a site paying an ISP so they get a better connect.
In his keynote on Monday at SuperComm2000, John Sidgmore of UUNET declared that stand-alone broadband doesn't work as a business model and that UUNET isn't profitable despite the fact that it is the Internet's largest transport provider.
You might dismiss Sidgmore's comments as self-interested whining, but as Excite@Home's actions and the discussion here indicate, there are real issues. The fundamental question is what sorts of unequal treatment and service differentiation are likely to lead to the best competitive structure. As Justice Breyer noted in the Iowa Utilities Board decision,
Substitute "equality in packet routing" for "sharing" and you have an important comment on Excite@Home's action.As horrifying as it might seem to some, beyond best-effort "base level" IP connectivity, allowing service providers to be more closely tied to particular wide-area network infrastructure may provide a better competitive structure for advanced network services. I've explored these ideas in detail in some discussion papers available at http://www.erols.com/dgalbi/telpol/think.htm
I think you mean Slate. Salon hasn't tried to charge for access in my memory.
Would you all still be complaining if, instead of paying excite for faster service, these companies simply bought more/faster servers and faster internet connections? These companies are paying for speed to the end user, the same way they would pay for speed by purchasing extra equipment and bandwidth. What if Excite simply offered colocation services? Is there a difference if a company has its entire site cached for faster access (as would be the case for colocation), or just certain content that it bandwidth intensive. -Tom Hennen
Ok.. so whats wrong with wanting other companyies to pay for access to a high speed network?? Currently UUNet (as a example) requires non-tier 1 providers to pay for peering access. How is this any different? I'm sure many other Tier 1 providers do the same thing.
--Hired Net Grunt
Paying based on usage of private peering links is nothing new. Most of the large colo/ISPs have had to do this for quite some time (e.g. Digex, Exodus, etc.)
This was long coming. I expect we will see more and more levels of service on the internet allowing you to pay for certain better service or garentees (ie. for video conferencing etc).
You will search for the ISP's will the best contracts.
I think the client should always pay for the bandwidth. If the servers pay for the bandwidth, that takes control over what can be downloaded efficiently away from the end user.
If the client pays, then it makes sense for the pipe owners to upgrade the server's connection whenever it's needed. If the server pays, then a free site that gets too popular will be shut down by the bandwidth requirements.
Every move further toward making the servers pay for bandwidth creates greater pressure to make websites profitable, rather than merely useful or entertaining.
This sounds an awful lot like what most people running ATM networks do. They charge more money for guaranteed quality of service.
This is nothing new and has been happening for a long time. There is nothing wrong here.
It takes money to run a network, and it costs more money to guarantee service which is reflected in the price. It's just that simple.
It's obvious to me that the most important line of this article is:
Excite@Home lost $1.5 billion on sales of $337 million
Eventually, IT isn't going to be able to sustain itself on the grace of massive, undeserved investment capital. Eventually, some of these firms are going to have to start turning a profit to survive.
This may be a Bad Thing for the internet, but let's face it, enterprises that start out idealistic eventually have to consider their bottom line. I'm sure that the first Tower Records and Starbucks weren't evil, either.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I don't see anything at all wrong with this, and as an @Home user, I'm very happy with it. There is also a tremendous advantage here for large web sites.
Face it - @Home is massive. With well over a million people with multimegabit per second connections, you can believe that @Home generates a LOT of traffic (I did the math once, and they have over 5Gbps of peering alone). Now, let's say for arguements sake that at any given time, 30Mbps is moving between Yahoo! and @Home. When Yahoo! realizes that they can in essense, colocate a server within @Home, and save that extra 30Mbps, it may be much cheaper to do that than to use up their external peering.
There is an advantage for @Home as well - not only do they save money on peering since they need fewer external links, but also now @Home users have access to this content over much faster connections.
I see how you are saying that companies are paying for performance, but I don't see how that's any different from the current situation. Some companies can afford an OC-3 and can send 300KB/s to an @Home user, while some companies can afford a T1 and can send 20KB/s to an @Home user. Nothing's changing. @Home's peering will not cease to exist when this new service is being offered, so people who cannot afford to place servers on @Home will still be able to send content to @Home users at the same speed as they can now. Since @Home's peering is actually quite nice to most networks (most notable exception is UUNet), their end of the connection can handle as fast as yours can send it.
----
Bryan Samis
http://www.thesamis.net
I'll answer you with your own post.
The Question:
I don't mind if you have some masochistic urge to read news you hate on a site you don't like, but do you have to complain about it too?
Hey, they are free to do it [Write horrible irresponsible stories], but we are also free to talk or complain about it.
Thank You, Drive through.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
Ok, so they have extremely fast connections to pass content through. How does this slow everyone else's access down? In fact, it theoretically cuts down on conjestion by taking some of the streaming bandwidth off of the Internet.
Here's another point: How much of the internet can they speed up? Is this just the connections to their subscribers? Also, I'm certain that this will decrease conjestion slowdowns, but they still have to pass the data through the last mile.
No, I don't see how this will allow them to SLOW DOWN other's connections, nor do I see a significant increase in the time it takes a customer to download the information. Just an increase in the availability of the information. Many thinks to Excite@Home, though, for getting them out of our way.
Mythological Beast
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Excite is not charging users here, but rather the *content providers*. A provider can pay Excite a fee, and in exchange, Excite will route their traffic so that users visiting that site will have faster access. Of course this is the same as saying users will have slower access to sites that do not pay this fee to Excite.
Now think about where this is going. If this business model became the norm for ISPs, then only corporations willing and able to drop the big bucks will be able to pay these fees. For the rest of us, visitors to our sites will encounter delays imposed by the ISPs. It is inevitable that the corporations will attempt to erode what equality is left in the Internet. This is one of the most insidious methods I've heard of so far.
The good news is that (for now) any ISP can choose not to implement this business model, and I'm sure that a certain nonzero number of people in the online community would prefer such an ISP.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
I would certainly pay my ISP (my college?) for faster access / higher priority from my machine to certain sites. Bump up the speed to d/l places I go, cut back on junk sites I don't want content from. I see no problems with that.
If my ISP followed any such behavior they'd be out of business in a heartbeat. Their service is bad enough, and it's a miracle they are even around today! Internet users are becoming more and more informed, and if this were to fall through, Excite@Home would be Excite@Homeless!
This has been tried before, in different forms, and has never worked, and has just made the company who tried to charge a "toll" look stupid (the biggest one I remember was UUnet several years ago).
On top of this ignominy, Excite for years has been the SLOWEST search engine/portal out there, making it very ironic that they're now charging for speed. I thought their slowness might change after a couple of years but hasn't. They were also one of the first large web sites to deny pings to their web server, one of the first to jump on the dumb serach engine -> portal bandwagon and fill up their home page with a ton of useless crap and so forth. Therefore, this latest development doesn't surprise me. @Home is the same way, a company built on marketing (like AOL) in stead of engineering - you know where that gets you.
State College is a city in PA. Penn State's main campus is in it.
Finkployd
Who cares? The theatre owns the property and can let whomever they
wish in. If I don't like that policy, I have no right to demand being
let in with a Big Mac in my hands.
"Patience is a virtue, afforded those with nothing better to do." - I don't remember
I just don't see it that way. I see this agreement as akin to the movie theatre leasing lobby space at $100/square foot to Burger King, who previously was renting $20/square foot space at the same distance away as McDonalds.
How long will it be before the movie theatre denies entry to people carrying McDonalds in an effort to ensure that they can keep raping the Burger King for rent?
.sig: Now legally binding!
Adero, Akamai, AdForce, Inktomi, Yahoo, they all use this business model.
That's why when you load broken sites, you can often still get the banner ads
(we've all had this happen, admit it).
True ROUTING prioritization won't happen unless TCP/IP changes significantly,
because the packets don't contain enough information about the true originator.
It may not even be possible, because the security overhead would offset any reasonable gain
from the prioritization.
So if you like the net as it is, don't worry, be happy.
Steve Maurer
Think about it: Internet 2, the move towards optical switching for the net's backbone, multiple levels of DSL service: all these are going to be have v. have-not services. Even now, the web pages can afford it get acceleration through services like Akamai, while the rest of the internet groans under the weight of thousands of new users every day.
The rising tide of network speed will not lift all boats, and while that's unfortunate, you can't be surprised. As averse as we all are to consider it, this is the kind of situation where you look at a tax-flush federal government to make sure everyone can keep up.
-jpowers
-jpowers
Interesting...excite@home is turning the ISP business into a continuous series of collect tcp connections. Click on the url for x.com and x gets charged for your connection.
If corporations are willing to pay this, where will they pass the cost back to the customer? I know they won't just eat the costs...
Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgement or action helps create a climate that welcomes an
For years, services like AOL, Compuserve (before it was bought by AOL), and "Classic" Prodigy had content partners. When you wanted weather reports, stock quotes, or sports scores, you had two options: either seek out the information from the source of your choice (assuming you had Internet access with your on-line service) or use the content provider that won the bidding war with your service. For things like weather and sports, this is no big deal -- you get the same info with different presentation, and the cost is the same.
So now Excite@Home is doing this with audio/video services. Big whoop. You saw how miserably they've been doing financially: $1.5 billion in losses against $377 million in revenue. Hopefully these deals will encourage them not to go bankrupt and still provide Internet access. You don't _have_ to use their services, but they'll be made accessible to you as an instant-gratification option.
For more information, click here.
This is nothing new. The web, along with most of the rest of the world, has always been a better experience for those with more money. If you can afford to install an OC-12 into your house, you'll have a better Internet experience than I will with my cable modem, and I, in turn, will have a better experience than someone stuck on a 56k modem connection.
This is the way it should be. Money is, in theory anyway, an indicator of how much value you have provided to the rest of society. As such, those with more money should be able to enjoy the privileges that come along with it.
The trick is not to stop letting the rich purchase special privileges, the trick is to come up with a system where money truly is an indicator of the value you have produced for others. (and no, I don't happen to have a perfect answer off the top of my head.)
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Your only hope is to vote for Ralph Nader. Go ahead and do it. Along with the rest of your ten percent.
You wouldn't try to insult us if you thought that our opinion doesn't matter in politics.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Personally, I can't imagine why in the hell any of you people care whether or not Excite up's somebody's 802.1p byte between two locations on their internal network for stuff like VoIP that's really crappy without this service. It's cheaper than buying dedicated bandwidth and more efficient in the long run.
Your argument can be applied directly to other things that are already in place: Why should slashdot get a (zippy fast loading) 100K+ server setup and gobs of bandwidth when I have to host a pretty good website off a virtual hosted (slow dodgy) piece of junk behind an ISDN line? You janus-faced goons over at Andover would (and probably do) buy priority routing and dedicated bandwidth from your provider so as far as I'm concerned, you can take your whining story and shove it. If you have more money you buy more bandwidth; more priority; more promised uptime; more protection against D/DoS; more redundancy; more security. Is THIS FAIR? Put slashdot back on the old machine from which it was born and see how it holds up. Then eat your words.
What If some company goes out and buys so much bandwidth from a major provider that they dont even have bandwidth to sell to other people? Same thing only it's actually much much less likely to happen when a network is selling 802.1p bits.
Think! For the love of God, please!
~GoRK
Anyone remember the Italian ISP called VOL (Video Online) www.vol.it that implemented intercontinental QoS on the Internet back in like 1993?! I think they are now defunct, but this is definately not a new idea. I run this stuff over my LAN all day with good reason and little to no consequences.
~GoRK
That question is: When the content provider pays the ISP money, does the ISP use the money to create additional connectivity to that content provider, or does it merely allocate a greater percentage of its existing connectivity to that content provider? That's the million dollar question here.
There's nothing wrong if the money is used to buy *additional* infrastructure, so that connections to other providers are still 100% as good as they used to be, and connections to the paying provider are, say, 150% as good as they used to be.
On the other hand, it's highly unethical if what they are doing is taking resources *away* from non-paying providers and allocating them to the paying providers, without actually building anything new. (So the network responsiveness of the non-paying providers is less than 100% of what it used to be.) I say this is unethical because they are essentially opening up an auction where providers pay money whose only purpose is to hinder their competitors. ("Better pay us more money or we'll take away more of the bandwith to your site and give it to your competitor's site.")
Paying money for new bandwith is great. But holding the existing bandwith up for ransom is evil.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Rarely do I agree with most people's sentiments here, but this is a case of correct routing protocols vs. marketing.
Someone at Excite saw a new potential for revenue via a new product scheme. This goes against accepted routing behavior between ISP's. An IPS's responsibility to other backbones is to make the least amount of noise; route all packets correctly and deliver them on time.
Fortunately, much to the chagrin of the "less free enterprise" denizens of SlashDot, capitalism will prevail. There are dozens of equally, if not greater connected providers out there. If you are not happy with Excite, move.
It is hard to market low sales and fleeing customers. I have an idea this plan will bomb.
Very simple solution: Whenever someone from @home gets on your server show them a message that their provider slows down your traffic and you are therefore not able to serve any content.
There idea is surely a joke. Internet economics are as such that users pay for delivery and content providers for content. Excite is looking for a free ride - luckily they are not strong enough for this.
They better wise up soon. Cable TV operators need to pay for the privilege to carry certain content. Time for @home to pay up for sucking on other people's servers.
{andy rooney) Have you ever noticed on lots of web pages that the ad banners load up a lot faster than the page you are trying to visit? Bah. (/andy rooney).
They aren't "[paying] to cut out a competitor's access." Foo, Inc. buying a direct connection into the @Home network isn't going to prevent Bar, Inc. from being accessable. The only difference is speed and latency. This is no different from what many ISPs already do -- how many ISPs have private peering between each other? between themselves and Microsoft? The only thing is, they usually don't actively promote it -- and both sides are paying for it.
I applaud @Home's inventiveness. Might I suggest selling web proxies as well?
Companies and ISP's have been doing this for ages.
There are quite a few ISPs that give higher priority to packets from within their subnet and give less priority to those packets just passing through. Also there are a number of ISP's that give high priority to web traffic and lower priority to packets for things like Quake (in fact I remember an ISP who's major selling point was the fact that they gave higher priority to gaming packets in order to attract the gamers).
That Excite is now doing it for money (or, which is more likely the case, Excite is now doing it for money and actually got some press, as opposed to the other companies that have been doing it for money on the down low) is nothing big. And is perfectly fine.
My complaint is that this is one of those things that's perfectly fine, but if someone like AOL did it, people would scream monopoly for something that's just business.
And what? This isn't a "Your Rights Online" article?! FOR SHAME!
I'm not sure that everyone understands this, and I'm not sure that I do either. If my ISP charges more for a faster connection, then that's to be expected. But if my ISP interferes with my access to external sites that aren't paying tribute, then that's an outrage and I'll find another ISP. It would be like the phone company giving me busy signals because the person I'm calling is a low-priority customer.
It's sort of an experiment.
I wanted to see if a total and complete troll would get moderated up or down, and I wanted to see if the classic reverse-psychology "go ahead and moderate me down" would work, too.
At first, It seemed I had one, my ridiculously trolly post got moderated up to a 3 (from a two), and I had some hilarious responses.... Sadly, someone noted it was offtopic, and it was therefore moderated back down.
It will take a while for me to lose enough karma to not post at 2, so I might try this again sometime.
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
A DoS attack is a DoS attack, and IS a criminal offence in many countries. IMHO, it is IRRELEVENT as to whether that attack is through fake packets or adjusted queues. It is STILL a malicious attempt to attack a service, via access.
If Smurfing, or a DDOS campaign can result in years in prison, then bribing the network managers to block legitamate access should do likewise.
If you don't like that, tough. It's either one law for all, or no law at all.
Now, there's nothing wrong with guaranteeing a minimum QoS, PROVIDED it does not inhibit anyone else's QoS. As soon as QoS controls are used for malicious reasons, to harm others, that should be grounds for immediate arrest and inprisonment for all involved, and a sentance of up to life.
(After all, that's what these same large companies want for teenage geeks who DDoS their systems, or even posess the tools with which to do so.)
Last, but not least, DON'T blame some faceless "Slashdot". There is no "Great THEM" out there, just a bunch of guys, like any other bunch of guys, who hit on a cool way to read and debate the news. Whining about "Slashdot Journalism" (as if the "They" wrote the stories) is childish and immature. If you want to behave like a 5 year old, go run a Baby Bill. But if you want to be on a site aimed at readers with IQ's in at least double digits, act with the maturity you are (in theory) capable of.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I like to think of the "old west" in America as kind of a metaphor to what is happening with the internet in the past, present and future.
At first the internet was only available to the researchers and the educational facilities that were instrumental to the building of the protocols and basic infrastructure - they were the natives.
As home computers became more and more affordable, and ISPs became widely available, these new users began the migration to the internet - from places like AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy, etc. These were the settlers... people who often found themselves in huge "flame wars" with the aboriginal internet community.
Right now, we are in the "California Gold Rush" stage of the internet... everyone and every business is eyeing the internet as the great cash cow of the 21st Century.
What this article is pointing to is a opening up of the internet to broadband access, much like the first highways - often marked with toll roads and bridges. If you can't pay to take the shortcut to get the information you are looking for, you are going to have to go around.
I think we're going to see a major corporatization of the internet, with major ISPs creating VPNs that will only allow their customers access to their own resources. And the AOL mentality of the masses is going to prefer this to today's free-for-all.
Of course, I'm no psychic. Call Dionne Warwick for that. With any luck, I'm totally wrong.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Touche
:)
But you started it
Finkployd
I think it's more like a step in the wrong direction. The wrong direction being, if you DON'T pay, they won't allow your traffic on the network. I can see people squealing about that one, but, if they get enough companies paying, they can simply mail the remaining ones and say "hey everyone else is paying, we're going to block your sites if you don't ante up".
... it seems to me that that's the sort of direction they're heading though...
Broadband is almost in a monopoly position in many areas. I have TW Roadrunner at home and for a $53 bill every month I've got cable (60+ channels) and cable modem service. TW got into a dispute with Channel 10(CBS)/ONN where Channel 10 told TW that they would not allow them to give subscribers CBS if they didn't also add ONN (Ohio News Network) to the list. One of my friends who works for ONN gets Americast and Roadrunner (and pays a premium since he doesn't have TW cable) and if there was another broadband option I'm sure he would've changed.
So... legal? maybe, maybe not (INAL)
And if they can do that with companies, what about people who are using their connection for gaming? They can tell these subscribers that they'll get faster service (better routing) if they pay more per month. And the people will have to go for it if they like to game and there isn't another high speed option in their area.
crap, thanks, I knew I'd make that mistake.
Providing "enhanced" service to some doesn't mean you have to reduce service to everyone else. It's called adding an extra T3 line on the content provider's bill. (That's how I interpret this.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Like the article says, it's not to late to stop them. If you live in San Francisco, go to those meetings and make your opinion heard!
Free Hans!
Look at the companies that they are selling good links to. They are all in the business of providing redundant data servers for their clients in order to minimize transfer times, and distribute the load. It makes perfect sense for Akamai and the others to buy presences on large ISPs like @Home as many of the users who download from Akamai's clients are @Home users. This should mean @Home users will see better service from sites that use Akamai, and the same service from other sites. The article did not say that these reserved links were going to eat into the existing Internet uplinks from @Home.
How this can be a bad thing is - well, confusing.
Folks,
There is no news here. @Home has always had
a commercial ISP business (@Work) that sells
lease-line connectivity. All that is happening
here is that @Work is selling more circuits by
marketing the fact that @Home and @Work share
the same 5 Gbps nationwide backbone, so any
@Work customer has good access to @Home customers.
@Home isn't blocking access to any content and
isn't slowing down other content. So no issue.
As to the claim that Cox@Home has a mandatory
proxy, this is flat wrong. In all markets,
@Home has optional proxy servers deployed. In
all cases, all one has to do is go into
Netscape/IE and disable use of the proxy
if one doesn't want to use it. Because 99%
of @Home customers are not geeks, the installers
are trained to configure this by default.
Geeks can just turn it off after the installer
departs the house, if they care. In many
situations, performance is improved by the
Inktomi proxys.
(former employee of @Home Engineering;
now working for another firm)
This is a standard business service that most (if not all) ISPs offer. Telcos don't just sell bandwidth to ISPs, usually they sell an amount of traffic from a pool, with both hard and soft limits. For example, it is usually possible to purchase an guarantee of 45Mbps, with (short) peaks up to (say) 90Mbps. You are guaranteed the 45Mbps. If you can't saturate it, the Telco _pays_ you money out of the guarantee.
Even if this is a true QOS access guarantee between content providers and the ISP, again there is no problem with this. Traffic charging is a good thing. I would love to be able to differentiate my Quake traffic from my email, even to the point of getting preferential access to sites because I am willing to pay more for my traffic. It's called customer choice, and is a good thing(tm).
Personally, I don't think I'm as paranoid as some here on slashdot, so I think that exclusive routing agreements aren't likely to happen. Besides, that would be censorship, just the same as mandatory censoreware. Of course, if you aren't in the US, then this doesn't apply. :)
Also, feel free to vote with your feet. Your local Telco would probably be very willing to offer you ADSL service, if you don't like @Home cable.
Jason PollockExcite owns the network, they have the right to establish a special for-pay layer of routing. But the fact is, that allows money to buy you voice. And that's a travesty. Excite is the one establishing this inequity within their sphere of control, and that means Excite is committing the travesty.
Now, it's unclear from my reading of the article whether Excite makes *extra* connections for partners, or whether it actually prioritizes partner packets over others across the same network; it's unclear whether Excite is actually punishing non-payers [effectively].
But in the larger scheme of things, even extra-network special channels penalize those non-partner non-payer sites. Excite pours resources into their "fast lane", higher-barrier-to-entry channel when those resources could have been used for their standard channel.
Rather than have two channels now and let the standard catch up eventually (or maybe never), you prevent that second channel from forming. Is this right? Morally, yes. Ethically, no. Interestingly, this is no doubt exactly the morale for involving government in regulation! Yet I abhore regulation.
The fact is that for good to triumph ("good" as in lack of inequity accessing the network), the outcry against must make the moral overwhelm the practical. Excite must see its customers will be so upset if they implement this special channel, that they'll leave and thereby destroy Excite's ability to offer the special channel in the first place. This requires that Excite's core business be their standard channel. But the standard channel can be simply left in the dust and the fast lane made its primary revenue-source. Then the public loses its power over the network completely, except for marginal influences.
Lovely scenario, mm? But it might happen unless Excite decides to be bigger than their corporate britches, as I see it. Just a splash of cold water...
Ahh but they already do ban people from carrying Mcdonalds (or any other non concession stand food) to further twist your movie theater analogy how soon until excite starts limiting or even banning non-concession stand content?
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
In one respect.. it's nothing new... none of us 'own' the internet, and private networks are free to set routing policy however they want for whatever reason they want. And none of us should have any problem with that.
What we SHOULD have a problem with is places that offer 'Internet' access, but then proceed to screw people over based on bandwidth usage and/or content usage. If joe average purchases a connection, he should have a fair idea of what that means, not simply 'oh.. it's so I can surf the web'.
I'm tired of @HOME's 'no server' policy. If it's bandwidth they are worried about, put a surcharge on the bandwidth in question. THAT is fair. THAT let's people undersand the resources in volved, and ultimately, what they are paying for. Joe average doesn't understand? He damn well SHOULD! Network technology is the way of the future.. it's better that the public gets involved and leaves their ignorance behind.
@Home users are getting a *great* price for their service and modems.
A friend who works with them to some degree once told me that the @Home cable ISP idea and ADSL is not as profitable, if at all, than once thought. Lets give these people a chance to make some websites faster for us and make money at the same time, keeping *our* costs down.
You people are ridiculous, go ahead, moderate it into oblivion, I HAVE PLENTY OF KARMA,
This in a posting that has a been moderated up to three points. You must love the irony.
One of the great perils of brilliance, my friend, is that often we're so wrapped up in our own future innovations that we miss the value of our current innovations.
The world is our oyster. Let's focus our attention on neutralizing Microsoft. (Let's start by neutering Bill Gates.)
[BigBlockMopar raises a toast to a fellow genius]
:) Yeah, it's off-topic. I, too, have plenty of karma.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The big problem with this, of course, is that bandwidth is being allocated based on the resources of the content provider, not the desires of the content consumer. If the consumers have no preference between CNN or MSNBC, but MSNBC seems quicker, then they'll usually use MSNBC. But if content consumers find that sites they want to access are slow to load, while sites they don't care about (or dislike) load quickly, then they will start looking for another way to get to their prefered sites. And DSL is coming soon to a local loop near you.
Excite knows that they have to deliver users to content providers in order to keep those dollars rolling in. I suspect they will be smart enough to manage their bandwidth well enough to keep their subscribers at home (or should that be at @home?).
Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
Information is not Knowledge
Wow, someone actually gets the clue here... QoS features aren't being developed just because they are really neat. They are being developed because someday they are going to enable certain companies to more efficiently sell their network service. go read a goddamn book on ATM and learn what GBR, ABR, UBR, and suchlike mean. and understand why if you read the fine print on your DSL contract, your 1.5M/384K connection really only guarantees 128K/64K.
please, please, as relatively enlightened users of technology, understand the meshing of technological capabilities and market forces. don't just fear it, understand it.
Paid QoS makes a great deal of sense, from a capitalist perspective, as much as it might suck in terms of closing down avenues of communication for the less monied aspiring broadcaster/publisher. understandy why. understand how. then coherently assemble an argument as to why it's wrong, and how we can change it.
otherwise, shut your festering gob. you tit. your type makes me... oh you know the rest.
nathan
*urp!*
It's not clear to me from the article that your interpretation is correct. It sounded to me like Excite was auctioning off bandwidth on its own "last mile" network, which for all intents and purposes, is the Internet.
Anyway, even if your interpretation is correct, in a world where the applications keep getting more and more bandwidth intensive, providing "enhanced" service to some is the same as reducing service to everyone else.
I find this kind of development troubling because it portends a balkanization of the public Internet into a bunch of private, corporate fiefdoms.
It's always been a commodity. ISPs just never make it a news item. Peering agreements are just part of the game for real ISPs.
This Anonymous Coward is my kind of scum. Cheerful and blindly optimistic.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
...typefied by companies like InterNAP, who resell 'priority' access to major backbones for massive ca$h. Essentially, it's *always* been true that those who pay a network get priority over public peers. InterNAP simply pays for traffic on *all* the major backbones and then resells that bandwidth to you. Their 'hook' is that they have a routing system which continuously checks route speeds from all over the net to you, and tries to keep the route as 'fast' and 'short' as possible...so not only can you buy bandwidth from you outward, but from any clients you might have looking for your website *inwards*. This is essentially a more elegant version of what Excite@Home is doing...theirs is a simple B2B version.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
It's very sad to have been seeing this over the last few months. It appears as if all these "marketing managers" are starting to realise that ISPs have two core products only - COLO and bandwidth - and are digging into even deeper stuff just to keep their jobs. This excite@home thing is just peering - which ironically is the oldest thing on the net.
I would have thought that these guys would be peering already, because it would benefit both sides - excite@home for making faster access for their users, and the content provider for being able to offload their content even faster.
Congratulations marketing - what is going to be next? ** New Product ** Optimised ping priority??
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Well what i'm worried about is not being able to get to or having the bandwidth of a competitor cut. I don't want my isp to intentially slow down something just b/c they haven't recieved money from that company. That defeats the purpose of the high speed connection in my eyes.
And that my friends, is capitalism in all it's glory. If I don't care for all the crap, the three major TV networks are still free to anyone who puts up a big antenna. Same on the net...get a free account at NetZero and use it to your hearts' content or get high-speed access and take the good with the bad for a price. They call that a "FREE MARKET ECONOMY." Live with it, or move to a socialist country...those are the choices.
It's not funny till someone gets hurt.
Right. I see now. I just hope that improvements to service continue to happen. Even if it's late..
If I have enought money, I can make a billboard bigger than the new company without money... I see nothing wrong with this at all. Is it fair that the most money get the commercials on the Superbowl? You get what you pay for...
why shouldn't they be able to do this? who said that the internet has to the same speed for everyone. Certain people pay top $$$ per month to their ISP for high speed connections, while other people are willing to pay nickels and dimes and get shitty service. I think it is a good idea, and a good revune stream for them
...so now excite@home is going to have a 'premium channel' on a cable system - there's a new concept.
As a user of the @home service, I have watched their front-end migrate to Excite@home, and up to this point, I'm unimpressed. The tv ads that enticed me to sign up for @home promised stupid-fast audio and video delivery, which isn't quite what I got, and now I'll get the privelege of paying more to get what was originally promised!
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
--- Submission is feudal.
Case in point, Salon.com and their old days of subscriber-based content, which went the way of the do-do.
tcd004
Here's my Microsoft Parody, where's yours?
Could you please post the code for you parsing? Or email me with it? ccapt@yahoo.com -- Have you sued napster today?
Before the telcos were deregulated in 96 we had one local monopoly (ATU) two competing LD carries (GCI and ATT/Alascom) and one second rate cable company. Service sucked, it was an exercise in pain to get an ISDN to your home or business. Since deregulation both LD's bought switches and entered the local market, ATU entered the LD market, was sold and changed it's name to ACS. GCI bought the cable company and about two years ago gave us cable modems. In the last year ACS has gotten it's act together and started offering DSL. GCI appears to be rolling out cable modems to any town with more than about 500 people everywhere in the state they have cable. They just laid a new fiber to Seatle, greatly improving latency (my ping time to
The point that I promised is just around the corner. This seems to me to be the best way to run a broadband business, cable modems are already turning a profit for GCI, consumers are very happy and flocking to the new services in droves, and no one is getting censored or screwed in anyway. I don't know precisly how everything managed to come together in such an ideal libertarain way up here, but from my point of view the broadband situation in the "lower 48" is pretty broken and mired in troublesome politics.
Just thought I'd share one free market success story with everyone.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Buy your own internet backbone and go into business for yourself.
How is this any different than me paying $50 per month for a cable modem, my friend paying $150 per month for a faster cable, and my employer paying $600 per month for a T1? Money equals bandwidth which equals higher availibility and lower latency. This is nothing special. Same reason a Geo Metro costs a tenth of what a Dodge Viper costs.
Why the hell is it troubling? If it is, we better kill all those akamai schmucks.
They own the network. They have the right to control traffic on the network. If you don't like it, you go somewhere else.
What Excite is doing doesn't worry me a bit. It's a responsibility to provide good / reliable access to sites which pay more. Akamai does it even better. They provides a global array of mirrors and with sophisticated algorithms which does load-balancing well. Of course they concentrates on images, streaming media, etc. However most of our contents are images / streaming media anyway. Again I feel that it is right for Excite to do this and at the end of the day if anyone wants to host a website, they will look for different levels of reliability, speed, costs, etc. [JASON@CHAW]
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Hello there,
As far as I know, I'm not using any public resources to get from my PC to this fourm.
I seem to go from AT&T's private, corporate fiefdom straight to one owned by Exodus.
The wires and fiber that my bits travel across may be owned by telcos or any number of trunk owners (not necessarily AT&T or Exodus...) but I'm sure none of these lines belong to the government.
Even the vBNS (does that exist anymore?) was owned by MCI... public money did fund that, but I think no commercial traffic was routed on it.
Anyway, yea capitalism! The Internet wouldn't exist as we know it otherwise. And way to go Excite... I'm glad they're trying to keep high-bandwidth traffic on private nets.
Cheers,
-JB
Most of the posts happen to agree with your
point of view, but the point is that this is
an interesting issue. I'm glad I saw it posted.
Me and my friends can talk about this over coffee
or whatever.
You people who insist on labeling everyone who
posts on slashdot as 'you people' to this sort
of thing are be a little re-reactionary (because
the intial post was reactionary, get it?), and
hypocritical. Don't you think?
For those of you who don't have @home, you should know that they already make you go through their routors (mine is in chicago; 160 miles away)so they can collect information on what sites their users visit and sell the information to sites. Big Deal, right? Maybe if my ping doesn't go from 50 to 500+ in quake during peak hours (the price of cable, or poor business practices?)
All that Excite@Home is offering is to allow content providers to co-locate some of their equipment with Excite@Home so that the Exite@home users will be accessing machines which are closer.
An anology would be putting a vending machine in an apartment complex so the tenants would not have to walk down the block to the 7/11.
Content providers have been playing this game for years already; they try to get as close to users as possible by putting their servers close to exchange points and having server farms across multiple backbones. This is just the next logical step with the ISP providing co-location space to get the servers even closer.
Don't be supprised if AOL will offer the same service.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
And, to add a grisly twist, in the time it took me to post the reply from which this is excerpted, a moderator has scored the posting down by one.
Must be an excite@home employee.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
In the article, it is mentioned that Excite@home is losing tons of cash ($1.5 Billion, or something like that). Put yourself in the place of their execs:
PHB#1: "We have this huge, rapidly-growing userbase, and a kick-ass network, but we're losing money (damn ADSL bastards). We need another source of revenue... But we can't charge the customers more and stay competitve."
PHB#2: "We'll charge content providers for direct access to our networks (and thus our huge customer base). We make more money (or lose less -cough-), some content providers have better access to our customers, customers get faster access to some sites, other content providers notice no difference (except that their competitors have gained a speed advantage). We offer better service, and our price stays the same."
PHB#1: "Where's the downside?"
The downside is they get flamed on Slashdot.
This is precisely the type of thing that makes QoS (Quality Of Service) such a bad idea. All internet traffic should be handled on the first come, first serve basis, with no discrimination or preferences being supported along the way. Imagine being a system administrator, trying to figure out why your packets were being lost, when ping still worked, etc.
Equal rights for all packets!
--Mike--
I guess Slashdotters are still a majority of kids and morons who dont know the difference between paying for something and stealing it. If you want everything for free, look up Utopia in the Webster. Or else.. grow up and accept the world for what it is.
Rapid Nirvana
What you are seeing is an Internet company becoming a media company in a tangible sense.
Think about it. Excite is leveraging its bandwidth to allow clear transmission of Internet sites (programs) to users (viewers). The advertising for those programs in turn pays excite for its infrastructure and distribution channels. While this seems like a big deal now, it becomes even more important when you factor streaming media into the mix. For this to work realiably you have to use QoS services along the length of the pipe. With Excite@Home being the fatest pipe into America's homes, it can guarantee quality into the home. Without this, you have nothing but choppy unreliable streams. It makes business and technical sense, but is a PR disaster to those that think about it for a moment.
another $0.02 into the kitty...
It sounds to me like Excite is just selling faster access, not more accessibility. I know it sounds like these things should equate, but I think there is an important distinction between visibility/ accessibility and the speed at which a site can be viewed. It sounds like excite can help provide a competitive advantage to clients that want it, but not necessarily an unfair one. If a site wants faster access, pay excite more money or talk to your service provider.
If it seems unfair that access to one site might be faster than another, I don't agree. Speed of delivery is one thing I look for in sites I access. If 2 sites provided equal content and I could get to one 5 times faster, I would choose that one. I guess if you want my business, you need to try and provide me with the best product.
This is just @home saying "we have a fast backbone" and "hook directly into our net to reach our customers faster".
There is nothing new or newsworthy about this. It has nothing to do with routing/censorship blah blah. They are simply being an ISP.
I'm sure they appreciate the free advertising.
It's not like @HOME is going to e-mail all their customers and tell them this.
Hell, it can't even be found under today's news releases on the Excite@Home corporate site!
Excite@Home VP O'Leary said it all - "We are creating a new business that leverages two unique assets: our core network and our large base of broadband users."
In true corporate website fashion, there are no email addresses to contact officers, so I cannot express my opinion directly to him.
Excite@Home wants to be the next AOL. As a subscriber I am an asset to be leveraged, rather than a customer to be serviced. I view this as a Bad Omen{tm}.
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"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
One person said that it was a case of installing a faster dedicated pipe. (A bit like the old Local Bus scheme.) Sure, that makes things faster up-stream, but it does NOTHING to the pipe down-stream. So, either they have to prioritize the faster pipe, for any of the benefit to be seen, (in short, squeezing the smaller pipe by creating an artificial log-jam), OR they are going to end up fraudulantly selling bandwidth they don't have to sell.
(For those new to networks, think of a major 3-lane highway as the backbone. Now, at a junction, they have two roads leading off. So far, so good. Nobody is causing any problems. What happens if you now upgrade one of those roads also to a 3-lane highway. The traffic flow will all but shut the smaller road down.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Probably wouldn't happen anyway even without this stuff - since U(W) has already cut a deal with Bell Sympatico.
I'm using rogers and I get fairly snappy connectivity to the math servers, so I'm fine with it. Just don't try to run Netscape. Trust me on that one.
Bitchslapped. Neat.
Hmm... Isn't this what private peering agreements are all about? The only difference is, with traditional private peering, the IPP and the ISP share the cost because both have an equal interest in the peering. e@h doesn't host that many servers, but has a lot of high-bandwidth users that IPPs such as Akamai want direct access to.
This practice, or something like it, has been going on for a long time, in the form of "private peering." Very large Web hosting providers - even a few individual super-high-traffic sites, I think - have been arranging private, direct connectivity between themselves and some large dial-up access networks for a long time. Private peering helps connections between two networks move faster, and also takes what can be a large amount of traffic off the more general backbones.
I don't think that this is a bad (or even particularly new) thing. It will be time to worry when a site starts deliberately slowing down or denying connections to networks without "special arrangements," but it looks like that won't happen for a long time, if ever.
isn't the internet about linking location together? hence the word itself, interconnecting-network. or is some crazy story i read on /. a few months back, "computers unite via wires!"
Not just with us Geeks, who watch stuff like this, but the general public.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that in order to give "priority" to a site, then something must be taken away from another. In a time when cable must compete against the faster xDSL services, you would think they would not want to criple ANYTHING. Or even give the illusion that are slowing something down.
Or perhaps they are doing this on purpose. Maybe they are going after the computer illiterate who only uses the internet for stocks, news and mainstream stuff. They could pull bandwidth from the hardcore internet users (many of who are probably only using cable while waiting for DSL in their area) by yaking it from anything non mainstream, and giving it to the "big" sites. Giving the regular Joe Customer a faster net experience at the expense of anyone not using mainstream sites.
Wierd stuff
Finkployd
It's a simple point of looking at how much is it worth to move your data. Bandwidth costs money. At work, wehn we are doing H.323 traffic across the internet for a videoconference, we're willing to drop all the coin necesary to make sure we get a great frame rate and excellent sound. When I am at home, on my DSL, I don't expect that kind of throughput. I'd like a high-speed connection, but I don't need it to be satisfied.
It's not an issue of turning the net into a capitalist "I have money, so therefore my traffic gets through." It's setting up priorities, and it will strengthen the net by increating the size of the pipes for everyone.
I don't think this has the evil portents - I read the article and what I get is this:
Everyone on Excite has equal access to all sites (through the regular internet backbones) with some latency and bandwidth determined by that pipe.
Excite is getting companies to pay them for the privalege of hooking high-speed pipes directly from their servers to Excite's routers.
Request for them don't go to the internet backbone - they are routed over these new, direct lines. Faster performance to those sites (less latency, more data/sec., etc.)
Noone is given priority over another. No competitor's service is reduced - in fact it would also be enhanced, since some of the traffic is not going to that common backbone (at least a little).
Put away the pitchforks and torches for now.
I parse news from many sites to incoporate in my site. I have a battery of perl scripts that go out every half-hour and parse headlines from the likes of Yahoo! News, NPR, Slashdot, and Wired. My system has access to a T1, but it doesn't need it. All I do is grab text files and parse them for headlines which I use to link to the stories on their respective sites. This works well, I am a student who can't support those costs. I also parse CNN FN stock quotes for a more personalized experience.
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
This is ridiculous. I can't believe how many whiny hippie comments and stories show up here. I would be upset if I couldn't offer an ISP more money for better service. Otherwise, isn't it terrible that John's Bait gets 100% of the web business in Sometown, just because Bob's Bait didn't pay for a web site?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I don't see a difference...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Both their push for 'open-access' and 'pay-us-for-routing' are nothing more than trying to protect their bottom line. Their contract with several of the cable providers is up soon, and there is little incentive to go with them again.
This smells rather funny though. No ISP has tried this in the past, so there must be a rather good reason. I'm guessing everyone is afraid when the 'competition' starts screaming to Congress, Congress will hand down far more 'Thou shalt nots' than are needed to rectify the situation.
Congress has shown historically that it not like this sort of thing amongst the telephony and satelite data providers; Why should it like it when e@h does it?
The result? e@h makes a quick buck, and those that paid for 5 years of 'special' routing are going to lose it in a round of regulation.. e@h and the honest ISPs alike are going to have to deal with additional regulation laden on by every SIG waiting for the first ISP regulation test bill to show it's face..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Exclusive arrangements/agreements aren't news either. The competitor will just find their own ISP and make the same deal. But you better believe that those 2 ISPS will still route traffic to and from each other, so there is no issue.
It is perfectly natural for a Big Business to not want to do business with someone who does business with there competitors, for fear of less than preferential treatment. Would you?
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
I have been under the impression that this has been happening for some time with *all* the "search engines" (aka portals) on the web. After all, a lot of money goes into the maintanance of the "internet" (or as MCI/WorldCom/UUNet calls it "our network"). Who should get the most speed and most desirable routing? Those who pay or those who don't. The bottom line... someone has to pay. Although the internet is touted as being free, all of this stuff cost lots of money to run... not othat I agree with any of this preferential treatment stuff, of course. Look where the best streets are. In the expensive neighborhood. Why? That's where the tax $ and the influence comes from. Not that I agree with anyof this preferential treatment stuff either.
Ranger23
I'm currently an @Home subscriber, and lately I've been paying attention to their routing patterns. Simply put, @Home does some wacky things as far as routing. I try to reach servers on the east coast, and get routed through L.A. and San Francisco first. Yet, I try to reach servers on the west coast, and I'll frequently get routed through Chicago and MAE-East first. To reach another local ISP, I go through Dallas then Chicago first.
My suspicion is that they are choosing these routes over more efficient, low-latency ones because of high-bandwidth peering agreements. i.e. At exchanges, packets will ignore more direct routes in favor of links which can provide greater throughput. (This is unsurprising considering the purposes for which they advertise their service, such as streaming/multimedia content, although it strikes me as flaunting convention a bit.)
Not directly related to the article at hand, but I believe it provides some useful background...
I work for a nameless tier 1 ISP
Just this last month, a customer of ours asked if we could give them priority on our routers by using preferred queuing, access lists, or some other mechanism. We refused their offer.
We currently use an access list for quality assurance, that for the first ten percent of traffic on every type of circuit gets a higher prescience, and then the rest gets through if the normal prescience bandwidth is available. This particular customer was on a router in a city where we are seeing a lot of growth and our routers there are a bit taxed. We currently have new routers in the process of becoming active there.
The customer currently has multiple DS1s, and has a DS3 on the order. If the customer wants more bandwidth they will either have to pay for a larger pipe, or go to another provider.
My department was sensitive to this because we roll out new routers and order new circuits. This would not be an issue if we had the bandwidth to our routers OR our routers were not saturated. In this particular case it was a matter of a single router carrying far too many DS1, DS3, ATM DS3, and OC3 customers. We have known about it for awhile and have plans in the works. Thus, we have new systems going into place so that the backplanes of these machines will be lightened up significantly. After this happens, speeds should be up for all of the customers on those routers.
Simply put, after discussing it, we chose not to give any customer prescience on the routers. Everyone gets a guaranteed ten percent of their bandwidth ALL of the time, and we would not deprecate the traffic of other customers for any single customer.
I do not think that this was really what Excite@Home had plans to do, but it was the next step and what a lot of Slashdot readers probably thought is what was going on. I just want to make it clear that not everyone out there who carries major bandwidth has gone money crazy.
Company like Akami does contents caching business where contents provider provides heavy bandwidth multimedia contents through distributed servers where servers are selected by the proximation to the client's IP address.
It is strategically sound business to place those cache servers closer to large number of high bandwidth customer == cable modem/DSL providers.
It is just placement of caching servers and nothing to do with routing, so I find the /. translation of title sensationalistic.
Also, comment by chrisd saying The article in essence says that excite expects to make a lot of money from content providers for giving them "special" access to their networks is misrepresenting the article. Excite is making deal with those caching company != contents provider.
I work for a medium/large size ISP which now has a unique piece of technology in place. It is a giant web cache server, works kind of like a proxy, but is invisible to all our users. It works in conjunction with a switch that does layer 4 IP switching/routing/intercepting/redirecting. *ALL* our user's http requests on port 80 are intercepted by the switch and routed thru the proxy to see if they are in cache first, before they go out the main routers to the rest of the real internet. The cache's disk space is a few hundred gigabytes on a raid array and is getting quite full now. The initial purpose of this technology was to give the illusion of bigger backbone feeds and speed up user's web access, which it does well. Now the suits & beancounters have a brilliant idea: sell ads on our own portals and deliberately slow down/throttle bandwith to competing portals. Not only does the technology let us do this quite easily, but we can also just as easily compile and generate traffic profile reports to see where our users surf most frequently and use that info to our marketing advantage. Our biggest advertisement clients don't really care where their ads are served from just as long as lots of users see them and we give them a cheaper price to host their ads and steal their business away from our competitors (like selling tons of 99 cent hamburgers). We're not big enough (yet) to play this game with actual network routes via high-level peering agreements, but we can certainly play the same game with artificially speed up or slowed down access for all of our many tens of thousands of dialup, isdn, dsl and other dedicated connection subscribers.
I designed and built a frankenstein monster that is now running amok out of control and I don't know whether I should be proud or ashamed. Anyway, he's made me a lot wealthier that I was before.
coming from a guy who owned an ISP, i'll give you some insight. this new deal is quite likely a lot more to do with marketing guys than the accountants. @home promotes fast download speeds. the problem, however, is that to keep your cable modem flowing nicely, you need both ends to keep up. i'll bet they're finding that their network is not the limiting factor in "slow downloads" but instead it is the transport in between. they are just eliminating as much of that transport as possible.
As long as the normal internet content isn't slowed down to accomodate these new deals. If it does slow stuff down I will just change to another provider, their loss. It is their network, they can do what ever they want to it for better or for worse.
You know that's a load of crap....your ethernet card will max out at 1.5 Megabytes/s. Thats Assuming he has a 10Mbps card right? He might be using a 100Mbps card and that could do 12.5 MB
It works that way, you got more money, you get to drive better cars, have better house etc
Nothing outragous about it.
We're going to see a lot of QoS games on the Internet in the next few years. Most of these games are likely going to be tied with Voice offerings (there are a few companies out there doing this now). It's fairly straight forward to do QoS for voice, since largely speaking that's a UDP application, and you merely police the input at a certain rate and do some sort of admission control (ala RSVP).
It's quite something else to do this for TCP. What does it mean if you drop a high priority packet? In a UDP world something has probably gone wrong. But with TCP dropping is just part of the slow start game, and likely to happen under changing conditions, since TCP rates are variable.
This raises the question- how does one measure such a service? By drops? Or is it all done via 3rd parties, like keynote?
It makes nothing but sense from a monetary perspective (read: GREED) to sell "faster" bandwidth at a premium. It seems rather innocent and easy to understand. But then we come around to the realization that such practices will DEFINATELY limit small business, and in the end we'll end up with a very few, LARGE companies dominating everything, rather than vast amounts of small companies competing to offer better services to the customers.
The end result is that a small group of people get nearly limitless power, money, control and the rest of the world gets poorer service, fewer choices, and a homogenized internet that is skewed to the perspectives and agendas of the group in power.
We're seeing the same thing in the real world as McDonald's pop up on every corner in every country on every continent. Unless the people of the world unite against this rampant corporatism we'll be nothing but drones in their growing hives within a few generations.
Imagine a world where you're born in Sonyland, raised in Sony schools in order to get yourself a Sony apartment & Sony Job, so that you can purchase your Sony products at the Sony Store.
(anybody ever played Shadowrun? Read a William Gibson novel? Didja think that stuff was just for fun?)
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
ISPs have been doing this amongst themselves for a long time. Companies like above.net do this every day, albeit they host the servers on their site. On the surface, it simply looks like they're making their routing tables more efficient for customers willing to pay for the privilege. Certain companies that make caching servers employ similiar techniques for streaming media (i.e. cache those who pay the piper for the privilege).
Since it gets the content "closer" to the end user's (albeit of @Home), and doesn't negatively affect everyone else out there, I can't necessarily see this as a bad thing.
-- PhoneBoy
The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of anyone, including the poster.
The way I see it, this IMPROVES 'net access as it is adding more bandwidth between points and taking stress off the backbones. This has nothing to do with greed per se... only Another Random Business Decision(tm).
Considering that Excite, like most national ISPs, are investing in content caching systems I doubt the tool booth is going to be a big deal.
CNN and MSNBC will load off the cache server just as fast. When it comes to streaming audio and video then you're going to see issues. Maybe Real won't work as fast as MS.
On the other hand this isn't anything all that new. PSInet has been offering peering arrangements for some time. And ISP can have a direct connection to PSInet sites, and PSInet has a direct connection to the ISP. Depending on traffic considerations it may not be that bad of a deal. Then again PSInet hosts a lot of servers and T's. Excite really doesn't.
I think this is a pretty big non-issue. Excite is obviously trying to make a dime off high bandwidth video streaming. Somehow I doubt the Opensoure, GNU, FreeWare, Freedom of speech market is going to be hurt. Maybe one porno site will load quicker than another. More power to them.
How many times have we seen companies offer a standard version as well as a "gold edition"? If Excite@Home was intentionally slowing the connections to sites belonging to competitors of their clients, then we would raise a stink. A while ago, I know that somebody (Cisco?) was mentioning this in marketing materials so it is quite possible.
Also something you have to look at is the line "Excite@Home lost $1.5 billion on sales of $337 million." Those are some hefty losses, even for a tech company. They have to make money somehow.
-B
Personally, being a @home customer, I cringe to know that 'routing policy' and/or (i would call it) 'traceroute hops to destination' is becoming a commodity.
I was hoping, that sometime in the future I'd be under 10 hops from my @home to my university (in the same city) instead of the current, 20 hops.
Now, since it's a valuable commodity, and being a residental end-user (read: bottom of the line in corporate sense) I don't think i'll ever see that light of day, or will I?
Quality of service is somethign I value, but I don't want to fork out more dough just to get it.
I can see it now.. "add 5 dollars to your monthly bill to recieve faster, more responsive downloads!" -- and all they have to do is move me into a faster switch, or migrate me to a new subnetwork. Even worse, if CNN paid to be 2 hops to excite@home, perhaps the end-user has to pay to get such access? (so much for cache-servers)
*shudder*
I hope I'm not playing devil's advocate here, but it seems like this isn't a very horrible thing to do. While it does suck that they're giving priority to those that pay, most of them seem to be those that need the high bandwidth. Akamai, for instance.
Personally, I don't mind that my access speeds up when I go to download that 150MB file. Of course, this all depending on where they're getting the bandwidth.
If it means I have to put up with pages loading slower than than they normally would, yes it's a bad thing. But if it simply gives major content providers extra needed bandwidth that nobody's using, then so be it.