Slashdot Mirror
Do 'Bandwidth Bullies' Abuse Their Positions?
Zannah writes "An article on Forbes' website talks about the 'bullies of the Internet': the few providers who dominate much of the internet backbone, and who charge -- rightly or wrongly -- smaller organizations for access and peering to the backbone. It raises the question og whether the Net really *is* as open and distributed as touted, or whether it's in fact dominated by monopolies. As someone who works for one of the mentioned 'bullies' (UUNET), I think it's a bit one-dimensional, but certainly worth reading." This articles raises some interesting points, especially for rural customers and ISPs. Of course, in much of the world it's far worse anyhow.
because the government steals enough money from us without our consent. The money will be better off spent on companies who really know how to manage bandwidth and links.
What would the world be like if major companies owned the highways and freeways? Well, I can see a little bit more PRIDE taken in building roads. The government's spending habits aren't always for the long run--they depend on spending the budget in a few more years to rebuild what's been built. From a politician's view, it's great. Every few years a new road (even though it's premature). Where a company would invest the money in building better roads that last longer.
When I was doing some reading about the backbone of the internet a couple years ago I ran into this same thing. Basically it's not that there are bullies on the backbones but there are two theories of backboning. The first camp thinks that getting rid of their packets as fast as possible gets them the most benifit. The second gets the packets as close to the destination as possible then dumps them. You can see how if everybody did one or the other it would work well, but the backbones are mix and match. The camps that want to get it as close as possible want many peering points and the 'dump the packets' camp wants just a few. Incidently these peer points are extremely overloaded at this point.
It has always been that you can buy special routing priveledges on these backbones, so I don't see the real point of this article.
On a side note, there is also other companies setting up 'internets' where they will garentee bandwidth, latency, and peer points to other networks, with complete security. I can't remember any names off hand, but there is a whole new demension starting to open up.
The separate question is whether IHighway is big enough to be a peer or if they've got to buy transit service. Most of the Tier I providers will peer with other large nationwide carriers, but will treat local ISPs like they treat other non-ISP businesses, and charge money for service unless there's a really interesting traffic mix.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>jerks who get their fancy new cablemodem and then
/dev/null.
>download 800 gigabytes of porn in one evening,
>starving off the entire feed for everyone else on
>that part of the network - or the xDSL guys who
>do the same thing.
I *PAY* for for 640K/640K bandwidth on my DSL line. And short of illegial activities such as spamming or DOSing, what I do with the dedicated bandwidth I *PAY* for is my own bloody business. Even if all I do is send 640Kbps of random noise back and forth to a friend who *PAYS* for the same rate and dump it all to
Now, if you want broadband on the cheap and want to go with a shared service like a cable modem, that's your own affair. You get to save some $$$, but, in exchange for that savings, you take your chances of being on a shared net. Got a problem with your performance? Reread your service agreement and see if you have a valid complaint. And, if so, take it up with your provider.
As for myself, I *PAY* for 640Kbps, both ways, no limit. And if I want to use the bandwidth I *PAY* for, that's MY own business, and I'm both legally and morally in the clear. If an ISP can't deliver the bandwidth it guarantees, then they SHOULD NOT SELL THAT BANDWIDTH!!!
john
Imagine all the people...
Look closely: the beginning example didn't even illustrate the point the author was trying to make: it sure sounded like the little-ISP's owner was complaining because UUNet or another T1 wasn't right nearby, and they couldn't afford to run a line to get to UUNet, not that UUNET itself is charging a lot...
A bunch of other posters have already commented on this, but I'll say it again: Tier 1 peers are "free" because they have pretty symmetrical flows of traffic. I work for a Tier 1 (not UUNET, and with two DS3s to Albuquerque) - trust me, when peers of any size, public or private, go markedly asymmetric, it's considered a problem. Public peers are the ones that get most abused, of course.
I could ramble on, but there's a nice article at internettelephony.com entitled " Can Public Peering Survive " that pretty much lays the whole dilemma out.
two final notes:
I remember when everyone predicted that the Net would die when UUNet first changed their policy on free peering. It didn't happen. If anything, it may have forced people to come up with more robust implementations of their connections, as more people shopped around for other providers and went multi-homed. This also obviously created a huge market opportunity for alternative providers, which helps the redundancy and capacity of the Internet even further... but it's still limited by the fact that
the cost of telco lines themselves is the prime driver of connectivity pricing. There's limits to the existing telco infrastructure, and it's definitely demand-priced. Remember the article's example? =) As there are still significant barriers to enter the carrier market(everything from rights-of-way to arcane telecommunications laws), I don't see this changing very soon.
Get off my launchpad!
Do you #$@! people have any idea how oversubscribed that bandwidth is? Yes, I do, 10Mb/s on an ds-3 circuit, as of about 5 minutes ago. My ISP posts MRTG graphs for all their routers and circuits. Works really great for keeping customers informed.
Actually this is great. Losers who bite other peoples resources, copyrights & bandwith for their own websites cannot complain when the item they direct link to suddenly becomes something else entirely. Although there are better ways of preventing this at the webserver level the quick and dirty approach is pretty funny and certainly gets results...
See, that's what happens when we let trollers like you take over. Next thing you know, you'll be the Hitler of this thread, and then the Internet will be destroyed, and then the trifecta of clichees will be completed!
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Australians pay by the megabyte for ALL traffic, except for certain "blessed" carriers, into and out of Australia. If a web site in Australia is visited by someone from the US - we pay. If a web site in the US is visited by someone in Australia - we pay. The US giants claim to be the originating point for all the internet traffic in the world - and that's a load of the brown smelly stuff.
An 128k {2 B channels} permanent ISDN connection to the net would cost me approximately as follows from one of the cheaper providors {Optus, a subsidiary of Cable and Wireless}, based on a quote I got a couple of months ago.
ISDN line rental and call charges - $450 a month
Internet data - $100 a month minimum, 18 cents per meg for data downloaded
{C&WO is one of the "blessed" carriers - they don't get charged for stuff sent to the US by the parent company like everyone else does}.
So, for $550 a month I'd get about 550 meg of data downloaded to my site/server - and everything else would cost me $18 for every 100 meg.
ADSL is almost unheard of {coming RealSoonNow, according to the Telco's}, cable is only available at outrageous prices, ditto satellite.
Count your blessings, America.
I've been thinking recently that the States, particularly those without a lot of high tech industry, should lay a bunch of fiber between the population centers and take bids on who wants to run it. A winning bidder would have to guarantee peerage with all the big boys (UUNet, SPRINT, ATT, etc. etc...).
This would sure give IntraState eCommerce a big boost and make the State a more attractive place to build an eBusiness.
These days, you are more likely to be closer to a business in San Francisco than a business in a city 20 miles away in terms of Internet topology. If the states did something like this, it might help the local economies.
With good connectivity, you could run your eBusiness hub practically anywhere. Heck, if getting top technical people to relocate to West Virginia is a problem, you could leave the people in San Francisco and move the computers, phones, call center drones, etc. to wherever you can get the cheapest real-estate, power, phone lines, drones etc. and remotely administer/develop from Silicon Valley.
You can't get cheap real-estate or ANYTHING in Silicon Valley, that's for sure.
Seems like building a hospitable eBusiness infrastructure by laying some fiber is a cheap way for the States to help the business/jobs climate in that state. All this available bandwidth tends to help your schools, libraries, and people too.
There are SOME things that governments do well, like Dams, roads, etc. It's a chicken and egg thing. You can't get SPRINT to lay lots of fiber between Charleston, and Parkersburg, WV until there's demand, there'll be no demand as long as the connections are too slow to support eBusiness.
I'm not too worried about the States laying lots of taxes and regulation on the segments that they paid for. After all, if people find one State too oppressive, they can always go to another state where the environment is more friendly.
-Jordan Henderson
Its never nice to be greedy.
"I want to be able to have the power that if I provided the hardware and everything on my end that 'they' would let me hook into the internet directly."
'They' (that is, the big boys who own the network) already do let you hook into the internet directly - for a fee. In the article, Uunet is willing to lease what appears to be a 45 Mbit, 530 Km pipe for $120,000 a year, which is quite possibly reasonable by US standards (I know it's dirt-cheap by Canadian standards). I have no idea how many billions of dollars the big boys sunk into the infrastructure to enable such a connection, but I'm sure it's a lot.
It sounds like you want 'them' to hook you in for free. Does your telephone carrier let you hook in for free? Your sewer company? Y'see, regardless of the value of the content content (be it bits, or crap), it costs money to transmit stuff from A to B. This is true even if you own your own hardware (be it telephone, or toilet). If you want a premium connection, be prepared to pay a premium price.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
It's true. .it just can't be done.
It's also amazing how many don't realize that, given the current network architecture, there isn't enough core bandwidth to give everyone even 1Mbps clean..
At least your provider is up-front about what your services are. I'd rather they say 'here is what you get for $x/month, and here is what it costs if you go over' rather than 'You have been busing your connection. Please refrain from abusing it by running servers or we will discontinue your service'.
The guy in the article is referring to a leased 530km line. This is what we ran into when we looked into starting an isp. I could get a t-1 from mci or sprint easily, but to lease a line to get the t-1 from the termination point to our location was going to cost almost as much per month as the t-1.
The guy in New Mexico would have to pay for this leased line and _then_ purchase the t-3 bandwidth. Your argument is flawed.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
He's right. Anyone who says cable is shared and DSL isn't needs to go check again. I had a friend on GTE with DSL and they oversold their connections so much he had a 500ms ping to his first hop router at his ISP.
"Get a bunch of us to form a utility company and employ thousands across the US, we'll use our [own] resources and create a new free network."
It appears that you think that building a "free" nationwide network is as easy as developing a "free" operating system. I don't mean to belittle the huge efforts of many people over several years who have constructed the Linux operating system - however, the cost and effort required to build this "free network" would be several orders of magnitude bigger. Why?
1) Scale: do you have any idea how many thousands of kilometres of fibre are in the ground right now? Do you have any idea of the effort required to lay just one kilometre? Linux, at its core, started out as a one-man project. There's no way that this could.
2) Cost of physical plant: you'll be paying billions for fibre and networking hardware. Linux development has no such needs.
3) Cost of Rights-of-way: billions more.
4) Individual contributions: if you want to participate in this project, you'll have to quit your day job. Oh, and you won't get paid for a long time, if at all (remember, it's going to be a "free" network).
5) Individual motivation: I can see where several people would be interested in devoting some of their spare evenings to write a cool image manipulation app, or even a device driver for Linux. Do you think you can find many people willing to dig trenches on the weekend?
Still think its such a good idea? Maybe it is, but certainly not for free.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
No, you're a web hog!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I've used 5 gigs in a week. And that's light usage. They expect people to not use that much in a _month_? Time to switch ISPs, I'd say.
True, but do any of them work to develop a new type of steel that will revolutionize the railroad industry?
Again, this brings up the issue of a rating system for topics. We need some kind of system to rate the accuracy of the article.
Also, if we saw these in a queue, couldn't we get some kind of spellcheck, grammar check, topic truth and accuracy rating system?
I am only making suggestions to make Slashdot better.
jas
http://packetnexus.com
Television isn't free.
First, you have to buy the television. That costs you money directly.
Second, you have to pay for programming. Assuming you are using the "free" transmission consider that TV stations are staffed with engineers, technicians and administrators. They operate sophisticated receivers and transmitters. None of this is cheap or free. To operate, they sell advertising space to companies. Those companies then pass the cost of this advertising to the consumer (you), so, indirectly, you pay for programming.
What's free about it?
No. Tv is free because some of it is broadcast-- from old TVs or spare parts in a junkyard you can make a Tv and watch abc or nbc or whatever channels are broadcast. You pay for cable.
The internet needs a conduit (phone line, fiber, cable modems, what have you.) Since you need a conduit, and the conduits are owned, you have to pay to use them. There's a BIG difference. The same difference between cable and broadcast tv, really, is the difference between the web and free television.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
We're in the wrong environment. They paid for the early internet highways, but these days the social benefit principles that built the old highways are a little scarce in the legislative branch. They're building internet 2 stuff, but it's not really for public use. Any future projects of this type by the government would involve unacceptable amounts of monitoring in the name of national security and protecting IP, so I think it may be better if we leave it in the hands of companies who will cut corners (read: not pay for monitoring) to save a few bucks.
Incidentally, grandparents may really be a font of wisdom after all: mine says the old highways were a giant jobs project in the name of rapid movement of defense equipment, note that all major thoroughfares and offramps are large/strong enough for tanks to drive on at full speed, certain three-lane strips are extra wide and flat for use as emergency airfields, etc. The suburban sprawl part was what the automobile industry would call a "happy accident." I thought all he knew was baseball.
-jpowers
-jpowers
A T-1 line around here costs about $500/mo on average with something like a $2,000 install fee. That is only for a point to point line in the same area code and exchange.
My question is how much does it actually cost to provide this line? Somehow I don't think it comes close to that.
Let's take a look at other so called telephone "services."
I could easily go on about how these scumbags abuse everyone, but I'm sure that I'm just preaching to the choir. Why should these people be allowed to gouge everyone with their monopoly? The fact is there is little cost difference between analog and digital services. Most of them use the same copper that analog phone service does so why the big price difference?
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The article says it'd cost $120,000 a year to run a T-3 600 miles to Alberqerque. Isn't that what a T-3 would coust anywhere?
$10,000 bucks a month isn't unreasonable. Find ten local companies who need(or think they need) T-1 access and you've already payed for the line.
- My password is slashdot
Why should an ISP block Napster when they can charge their users per byte for it?
I would recommend that anyone even remotely interested in this issue read the aforementioned article. I learned a great deal spending an hour or so reading it.
A bunch of people have commented that the article posted was a little skewed, so I would just like to clear some stuff up (at least for my own personal sanity). First off, AT&T, MCI, UUNET, etc. they own pieces of the core Internet backbone, correct? Now if I wanted to buy a T1 or T3 for my business I could go to either UUNET (etc) or I could go to a smaller company in my area. What is the real difference between these connections other than the fact that the UUNET connection will be $1200 and the smaller ISP will give me one for $999? Doesn't the smaller ISP have to hook into UUNET at some point, or is it just connected to other small networks? If this is so the real analogy works like the Interstate highway system. UUNET is a big four lane highway that is direct, while the other ISPs serve as local and state roads. Can someone confirm this?
"Capitalism"
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
I knew someone was going to try to sound superior by bringing up history.
Well now, we wouldn't want to be doomed to repeat it would we?
Look, we all agree that government involvment in the initial protocols, but was ARPANET popular? No. The internet only grew AFTER it was released into the 'public domain' as it were.
Just because A follows B, it doesn't mean that A caused B. I would argue that the Internet grew fastest after the development of the World Wide Web and GUI web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape made it easy for most people who were intimidated by Usenet, Gopher, Telnet, and the like to use the Internet. Government was largely irrelevant in either case; it neither helped nor hurt the growth of the Internet.
Is corporate control better? Of course not, but one could argue that there is no corporate control over the net. There is only government control at the request of corporations (and who would turn down a request from your contributor?)
One can make that argument but realistically, there is some level of corporate control over much of the Internet from the big corporate-owned backbones, down to the corporate owned websites that flow through their pipes.
Even Slashdot has corporate ownership these days -- granted, Rob and Jeff had a good lawyer who ironed out good contract that guarantees their independence, but I think you see my point. Large, bureaucratic organizations like government and large corporations will always seek to control. It's often desirable to have them acting as a check on each other rather then letting one of them run hog wild and do whatever it wants.
Does this
Actually, it already is subsidized by advertising. Like, for instance the "Get Blazing B2B" banner I see at the top of this page as I post this response.
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
InterNAP is also patenting doing it right.
Whoops.
What I would like to see happen is where you share connections to each other. Like it used to be. I want to be able to have the power that if I provided the hardware and everything on my end that 'they' would let me hook into the internet directly. Building your own network, if you have enough resources you should be able to have IPs and start your own portion of the internet. I don't want a few companies to control is all.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
Now, you could say the Net isn't just about the commercial operations. But the good noncommercial pages are as likely to be on a local ISP (or, these days, on a Linux box on a DSL line) - and there's as much e-mail sent as received per customer no matter what size the provider (except for the spammers favoring UU Net lately).
I'm standing on this road. I'm bigger than you are. I can beat you up. So give me the money.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
You know, I've heard this spin before, and I feel the need to debunk it. What the carriers are doing is exactly what they should be doing with the information they have. As you put it, What the big guys do is dump your traffic off at the local public exchange point at the soonest opportunity. Which is exactly what they should do. If the packet is destined for one of their customers, they should get it there directly. If the packet is not destined for one of their customers, they should get it off of their network ASAP. Why? Because the carriers have no idea what each others network looks like. Not at the BGP level. All any of them know is what AS path they should use. In other words, they don't know how many hops away a destination is. They just know which carriers the packet needs to go thru. So they get it to the proper carrier as quickly as they can. Would you rather that UUNet bounced your packets around for a few extra hops instead?
To make this more clear, let's make up an example. Say an MCI customer in Washington DC is sending a packet to a Sprint customer in San Jose. Let's also stipulate that MCI and Sprint peer in DC and SJ. Someone needs to carry that packet across the country. Who should that be? The answer is Sprint, not MCI. We can complain that MCI is dump[ing] traffic at the soonest opportunity, and we would be correct. Because, MCI has no way to tell that the destination is in California. Only Sprint knows that. So, MCI gives the packet to Sprint ASAP (in DC) because the alternative is for MCI to bounce the packet around it's own network at random. Remember, only Sprint knows where Sprint customers are. Is it "fair" that Sprint has to carry the packet, and that MCI just dumped it as fast as it could? Maybe yes, maybe no. It doesn't matter. The way backbone routing works mandates that it be done this way. Don't like it? Feel free to try and improve on BGP.
Don't do it.
This is the same thing that happened to the early railroads. The government "gave" land to a rail was and gave them exclusive rights to it. And what happened? The bigest monoply of US history.
Let the market take care of it's self. It will work it's self out. The worst thing that could happen is that the government get involved.
Think about it. If ONE company is the only company (or one of the few) that can provide access to the people and is supported by the government and the court system. That would make M$ look like a small business.
The government should stay out! The market WILL take care of it's self. This is no diffrent than the rail roads only a diffrent meaden.
You can learn alot about the future by looking at our past. The past shows the facts.
Will
-damn I can't spell
I'm seeing this term used rather loosely lately on slashdot, and I thought I needed to comment. First of all, the nature of the term "monopoly" implies that it cannot be plural. There cannot be monopolies of the phone/backbone industry, because if there are multiple powerhouse firms, we have an Oligopoly. Oligopolies do screw the consumer (Gasoline, Automobiles, Backbone providers); however, the exsistance of oligopoly is not illegal.
My company had DSL service via Concentric. In the six months I worked there and the service was available, we had one outage, lasting over 12 hours (!).
In our new location, we have a spiffy new UUNET T1. So far, it's been great. The people are good, the service is super-fast, I'm delighted. Of course the service has only been on for three days, but so far, I'd say it's worth the money.
A company you've never heard of will give you a T1 for around $ 999 a month. UUNET's T1 was $ 1,300. Considering that the line is a pretty hefty percentage of our business, I thought the price premium was reasonable. It used to be much higher (like 200%-300% over what the cheapest vendor would charge). Note that the complaining former UUNET customer was in the UK, where telecommunications costs are much higher, which distorts the picture.
I thought the article was muddled and confusing. The problem is that it costs a lot more money to drag cables to remote areas, so naturally direct T3 service is not available there, at least not at a price you might want to pay. Even with peering arrangements, you have to pay big fees for space in the cages and access to the other players.
I would certainly get a UUNET T1 to my house if and when I could afford it.
D
----
On what I was trying to say can simply be summed up as: I pay for my portion of the internet, you pay for your portion.
If anyone knows how if I build my own fiber infrastructure in my local/rural area I can tie into the larger infrastructure for no or very little cost.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
If I see one more Ayn Rand comment today on slashdot, I am going to light the entire state of michigan on fire in your name.
Must you invoke trite, putrescent, meta-stupid, malformed idiotic pseudo philosophies for bleating morons to get your point across?
this post brings up a very interesting point, IMHO :)
the internet is simply a collection of networks.. I can create my own internet, you can create your internet (commonly reffered to as an intranet, these days).
what's my point? We chose to let them be our backbone providers, it made sense at the time.
We also chose to have our IP addresses assigned by a central authority
The internet is not owned by me, its not owned by you, not by anyone. What they offer is a high speed connection - but it would be very easy for us to tell them to get lost. How?
Its a wonderful tool called ipchains
SSL Certificate
Who says they are only allowed to make their money back? This is capitalism, remember? If you're willing to take the risk at laying out the infrastructure, and customers are willing to continue paying for your foresight and daring, who are we to say they can't continue to rake in the dough?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Most peering (even among the big boys) is based on traffic equity. If you are pushing more than twice the traffic you are pulling from a peer you will probably have to pay a "settlement" fee, based on the imbalance. All backbone operators
try very hard to maintain a balanced traffic profile with their peers.
The long-distance backbone market has been getting more and more monopolized for a while, and some people have tried to draw attention to it. But not many people noticed, because it's a sector that's not obvious to a layman.
Don't forget, these companies didn't "build it all themselves" like they claim, and are not innocently trying to get a return on their investment. Some, like phone and cable companies, were granted their monopolies and rights-of-way by our government, supposedly to use them for the public good. It's like broadcasters "owning" a broadcast frequency. They now claim to own what was originally public property by its very nature, either tangible or intangible.
Megacorps are no friends of freedom either - their vison of the net is essentially TV with a "buy" button.
Neither the state nor the multinational corporation is your friend. Our best hope is to keep them busy fighting each other so they won't have much energy left to fsck us over.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Dude your website doesn't work.
http://packetnexus.com
What is it they are whining about? That sprint gets UUNET connections for free? Or that UUNEt gets sprint connections for free? Or that they don't? He's mad becaues he has to pay if he wants high-speed access where it doesn't exist already? He's mad because Sprint won't pay for it?
Well... the market *IS* free, and anyone *IS* free to start their own network, lay their own fiber, and sell their own bandwidth. If the big boys want to peer with each other, what's the problem? They could always just bill each other, but it would probably just cancel itself out, and they would end up spending more in paperwork than anything else...
What? no bandwidth is available in Buckwheat, Kentucky? Oh.. perhaps, then, there is MONEY TO BE MADE if someone were to finance a big, fat pipe back to civilization! Or perhaps not.. and if not, tha'ts probably why it isn't there in the first place.
One place I used to work I was involved in a migration of the companies IP link from uunet to another provider - the reason was quite simply cost. We already had a low-bandwidth connection via uunet (REAL low, it was 128k!) and we wanted to boost it to 2M so that the increasing www traffic we were getting (higher profile, more web-delivered product, blah, blah...) didnt slashdot us out of existence. UUNet, in the person of their UK subsidiary Pipex, wasnt prepared to offer a rate we could afford, the other guys (whos name I cant remember - its been a while) were. Sure they didnt have the guaranteed latency limits and all the other nice frills and features of UUNet but they delivered on everything they did promise us. We got what we paid for. If we had felt that the extra service of UUNet was worth the extra cost then we'd have gotten what we paid for there too.
Of course, having said that the folks who are screaming loudest about this kinda thing are not end-users of the internet service, not even corporate end-users. They are the folks that resell service, the ISPs - they have to take the prices they pay and add all their own overheads, plus having to compete with others in one of the most cutthroat marketplaces there is. No wonder they are getting grabbed by the nuts and squeezed till they scream.
Big corporate accounts are what keep ISPs in business, much more than individual customers do. The backbone providers are not only selling the ISPs service they are also competing directly with them for these large corporate connections - and for the same price a backbone provider can give a big company much more bang for the buck. Only way a reseller ISP can handle it is to offer a slightly lesser service but do it at a low enough price that its still attractive whilst covering their network costs... its a very fine line with bankruptcy waiting if you swerve too much either way.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
That is a great commericial!
In the old days the MAEs used to be based on shared Ethernet 10 Mbps, later evolved into switched FDDI (100 Mbps) access. The problem with that architecture was that no QoS (Quality of Service) was possible. I.e. you couldn't limit the amount of traffic you wanted to exchange with somebody else. To get around this problem a new architecture called MAE-ATM was put in place, where customers could buy DS3 (45 Mbps), OC-3 (155 Mbps) or OC-12 (622 Mbps) physical ports into the MAE and then configure via a Web-interface how big the pipe to another peering partner should be.
regards,
Heiko
P.S.: For some MAE information you can take a look at http://www.mae.net
Exactly why they charge, sometimes though to nose, for ACCESS to those 'prohibitivly expensive' lines. They paid for them, and are charging according to the cost to maintain and provide those lines. But the point is, that you are by no means FORCED to use these supposed 'bullies' lines. Several alternatives exist, all which cost MORE then they do..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
It's been a while since I last talked about backbones and their interconnects with those who know, but I don't think things have changed much.
We have a central Finnish Commercial Internet Exchange (www.ficix.fi), which is an organization that keeps one system, backbone router, up and running. Members of the organization are ISPs, universities, and other internet backbones. There are some basic requirements like not routing international traffic through FICIX, that the members must be internet backbone providers and have their own international links, be participants in RIPE (European Internet Council or something like that), some other organizational and technical requirements. But the traffic routed through FICIX doesn't cost a dime. It's peering. What costs, is membership in FICIX.
So, small ISPs can't participate because they don't have their own international links, or perhaps they can't fullfill some other requirements.
Now, I live in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. It's easy to get internet access in some areas, while a bit harder in some other. Anyway, if I ask for 10+ Mbps connection, I'm likely to get answers from only the four or so major ISPs. Their prizes will be fairly similar, too. The differences will be in international traffic. Also they have different classifications for domestic and international traffic - their own network is usually considered domestic, and may span either Finland or whole Scandinavia. Or more. Domestic bandwidth is usually guaranteed, FICIX and international bandwidth are best effort. And buying guaranteed intl bandwidth costs quite a lot - something in the range of 5kUSD/1Mbps/month, whereas 10Mbps with best effort intl costs about 2kUSD/month. 100Mbps isn't much more expensive than 10.
So, in Finland I can easily see why small ISPs can't participate in peering: they can't fullfill the requirements reg. RIPE participation and guaranteed intl. bandwidth. The difference between small and large becomes telco or not. Telcos have many requirements about their QoS in phone lines imposed by the government, and they already need intl. bandwidth and agreements with intl. phone carriers. So extending those services and agreements to cover data bandwidth is easy for them. For small ISPs that only provide data even those QoS requirements are too costly, so they rather buy the bandwidth from telcos (big providers) who guarantee certain QoS reg. their agreed bandwidth and infrastructure.
I believe that peering is good, but it must have requirements. Those set by FICIX in Finland are IMHO good enough. Peering costs money even though it doesn't show in traffic costs. Somebody has to pay for that, in some way. Membership fees and org+tech requirements of FICIX guarantee that those capable and financially sound enough can participate in peering.
Having a look at their web site this page mentions that "* The P-NAP, and its ASsimilator technology are proprietary and patent-pending " - so we really don't want these guys to be the future of the internet. No matter how good their technology is, if they are moving such basic internet standards to proprietry forms, they are not a company I feel people should support.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
Algore(run together on purpose) was pushing for just that but was givin the big cold sholder by silicon valley who he was corting.(rightly so by the way for reasons mentioned by others):)
Which is exactly what AOL/timewarner want you to believe. Lawrence Lessig has a bunch to say about exactly this misconception. It's really worrying that people will stick to such dogma while the corporations take advantage of their blindness to further entrench themselves.
Visit www.dslreports.com and check out the highest rated ISP.
That is the reason I am going with www.megapath.com.
BTW, I would get a T-1 if I could afford it. I am too far from the CO for any decent DSL speeds. I am suffering with 144k.
jas
http://packetnexus.com
Of COURSE they do. They're into PROFIT,
not really providing any SERVICE.
It should all be nationalized, and
guaranteed access for everyone.
>Buy UUNet stock. You cant (yet). But you can buy Worldcom's (the parent company) stock (WCOM).
I can understand why would be pissed off about people "abusing" their bandwidth because I'm a little anoyed when my cabela ccess is slow too. But when I signed up for @Home they said it was unlimited access I should be able to use it as much as I want. If they would have included bandwidth limitations at signup time than maybe it would be a different story. If people want to actually use the service they pay for and the result is a slowdown for other users then the ISP is the one that needs to do some upgrading.
The first TV that I can remember my family owning had all these stickers on the back. A couple of times a year the a representative from the county would come around and collect a TV tax and add that years sticker. It's only with the cable co's that consumers had to stop paying this. Now the cable co's are required to pay for the translator stations that broadcast the signal via air.
The US government can barely govern itself properly. I'd hate to see government run backbones, imagine the red tape and other bullshit.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I subscribe to xDSL, and pay a lot more for it. If I want to use that connection to download an entire Linux distro in one shot while playing EQ on another system, then that's my business. If my ISP could not handle the traffic, then they would not sell me the connection.
I'm sure you would like things the way they were "back in the day", when we all were using the Internet for nothing but Gopher and Newsgroups, and nobody transfered anything at speeds above 9600 baud, but that day has passed. Try to get over it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The rail analogy can be taken further. Rail companies regularily share traffic over their lines. The in most cases, empty cars are sent back to their origin in the exact reverse order they travelled to reach the destination.
This results in empty cars travelling less than optimal routes back to their origin. The purpose of all this is to ensure that the companies who profitted from moving the loaded car, pay for moving the empty.
I believe a similar business model is being applied here. The backbone providers share their loads more or less equally. The little guys have little to contribute in terms of large scale inter-connectivity so are out of the game. But a packet is a still a packet, it is never empty or full like a boxcar, all packets cost something to send and receive no matter how large or small the connectivity provider is.
This leads to an interesting possibility. The smaller providers could charge the Backbone companies for access to their customer base. The big providers won't find the smaller markets profitable, but as a group, the smaller providers would represent a good piece of traffic. Podunk may not count for much, but 10,000 Podunks might make a Chicago.
>Ditto to the smaller country players who whine
>about paying for bandwidth to US peering points.
>If they had content that the US providers though
>it was more vital to have, then they might split
>the cost.
Problem is, it's a vicious circle. Because of the jump the US got on everyone else they have the most content that people want to link to. Thus other countries' ISPs end up paying for international connectivity whilst the US ones don't. This makes hosting in the US cheaper than elsewhere, which makes more people from abroad locate their content in the US, which makes the international traffic even more one-sided etc.
Yes, but that's not what they're doing. If you look at the matrix of UK peering agreements, you'll notice that UUNet doesn't peer with quite a lot of the other Linx members. All Linx members are backbone ISPs, not small local outfits, but UUNet (and some of the other larger players) still refuse to peer. And that's refuse to peer, not "we'll peer with you if you pay us". Because at the end of the day, refusing to peer with the smaller guys protects their monopoly, and that's far more valuable to them than the income they'd get by selling peering agreements.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
What does NAT have to do with ipchains other than offer some overlapping functionality. The correct way to post a flame to the previous comment, I believe, would be something along the lines of "Out in the real world, we call that firewalling" since NAT has very little to do with firewalling and everything to do with "Network Address Translation".
-Ryan
Great Britain, or perhaps some other Commonwealth country. You had to pay a 'licence' fee each year for your radios and TVs, to pay for the BBC. Don't know if that is still true.
--
And just like the airlines can not blame the passengers when they all show up, you can't blame somebody who is paying for unlimited broadband for actually using it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Please
Anyway, service providers shouldn't advertise an amount of bandwidth that they can't supply.
If I see one more Ayn Rand comment today on slashdot, I am going to light the entire state of michigan on fire in your name.
I hereby christen Chiasmus' rule: All Slashdot stories must eventually become a discussion on one of five topics:
1. Linux and the Open Source movement.
2. MP3s and intellectual property.
3. Ayn Rand.
4. The War on Drugs.
5. The inadequacies of Slashdot itself.
It doesn't matter what the story is. It will become a discussion on one of these five topics.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
I imagine they'd be cheaper, better-maintained, and probably safer: try suing the government for negligence in maintenance or for letting drunk drivers on the road and see how far you get...
I'm not saying there is no problem. Clearly there is. But whining about things that clearly are available is not going to solve the issue.
Quit griping about other users "hogging" the bandwidth, gripe instead about greedy ISPs that way oversell their trunk networks, don't monitor them, and don't add bandwidth as needed to meet peak hour demands.
This is the crime -- they're so busy selling how "fast" xDSL or Cable is, but then they don't back it up to keep the pipes running smooth. I think it borders on fraudulent business practices.
If I buy xDSL advertised to me as 384K I expect to be able to get AND USE 384K all the time. If Joe Schmoe on my DSLAM suddenly can't post his rant about JonKatz on Slashdot 'cause I'm downloading Rocko MPEGs, I say tough shit blame the ISP -- they're the ones that are supposed to be guaranteeing the network.
Unfortunately what you end up with is the ISPs backpeddling: "Well, this is a residential service, not a business service, tough bounce, we're gonna keep trunking DSLAMs with fractional-speed frame relay cause we're cheap and dishonest."
Yes... your freedom is exactly that: what you can pay for. You don't get to tell other people what they can and can't do with their fiber lines and IP packets. If you want to control a network, you can buy one yourself and put whatever you want on it.
Now, if you think we would have a better world-wide IP network today if the government had stepped in a few years back and monopolized the whole thing, I think you're wrong. The big telecom companies (and the ones that were small and got big because of the explosion in worldwide data traffic) have spent billions of dollars building a pretty darn impressive network. Despite all the grand proclamations of Al Gore and Co. about a government-funded "Information Super Highway" we haven't *needed* one--where there is demand, private money has been invested, the network has grown and grown, and smart people have gotten rich for investing their company's money in the right projects.
It may not be exactly what you want it to be, but I'll put the success of private-sector communications networks against any government-funded program or system you can name.
I would like to point out that the utility companies -- electric, water, and other less interesting -- have looked at what it will take to provide very wideband server. Some have announced the deployment of huge-pipe services.
You can bet that Sprint, AT&T, and so forth will have to pay to use that bandwidth. Indeed, PacBell thought they had bought bandwidth (but the deal fell through) so packets routed through that peering arrangement were dropped on the floor. From Nevada, I was blocked from most sites in Northern California, and was forced to set up a router of my own to divert traffic from PacBell's network to Concentric's network. (Lots of fun, and at 3 AM to boot.)
Nothing stops a company from providing wideband transport and competing with the Big 5.
The ISP I have signed up with for my DSL does not oversubscribe their service at all, or so they claim.
In fact, my hookup is on hold for the moment while they wait for their upstream provider to set up another DS3 (== T3).
Surprisingly, they are not much more expensive than other ISP's I could have chosen.
Anyway, I won't feel bad for using 100% of my assigned bandwidth any time of the day or night that I feel like it. That's what I'm paying for!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
The internet didn't get it's explosive growth spurt until the government got out of the business.
More details regarding what was being requested in the way of service from UUNet would have been nice. It would seem that if UUNet did not have the facilities in place to offer this customer service, the potential customer could have still got his access to their network through his local LEC by ordering his T1, DS3, OC-3 or whatever through UUNet and then having it delivered to his premise through the LEC. Seems like what this person may have wished for was to have a smaller circuit (T1) delivered to his premise by UUNet. This would require UUNet to extend fiber to his place of business and place hub electronics at the premise. A bit of an investment for a T1. What I don't understand is why anyone would think that access to a multi-billion dollar network should be free??? Also, the fact that carriers exchange services with eachother without charging one another is mute. When exchanging access between networks, why charge? Each provider is getting something in return for that access. It seems that a popular growing trend among ISPs is to whine about how this should be free and that should be free, but they aren't giving away access to their network for free now are they?
I pay extra for this high speed line and can only use it to refresh pages like yahoo instead of moving large amounts of data like it was designed? Maybe you should switch ISP's and find one that has a properly designed network. My DSL is never slow, its been the same speed for 6 months.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"Uunet and the few other giant data haulers that dominate Internet traffic don't have the fat, 45-megabit lines Brown would like in Albuquerque"
/16 block from uunet (cut from their /8) you don't go ask psinet if you can peer with them.
translation : mom and pop isp is in an underserved market. so what? welcome to the midwest. most isp's don't own their own wires/fibers anyway. their t1/t3/oc-whatever still rides on phone company equipment.
"Without Uunet, a Net service can slow to a crawl"
what no mci, verio, psinet, etc?
"These few behemoths have a cozy arrangement for swapping traffic ("peering") free-of-charge among themselves"
peering is not about swapping traffic. peering is when 2 (or more) big isps link together and set up BGP routing relationships to exchange routes for their entire ip address space in a summarized format.
"--but they charge stiff fees for the very same service when dealing with smaller players."
i don't know what this is about, a small isp gets their address space from a larger isp (who gets it from the numbering authority). if you get a
...also threatened to fire people for taking the bus to work, instead of buying one of his cars.
for Slashdot to come up with another whiny 'they abuse their positions' article, although I commend them on their rapid response in digging up another villian now that MS is going to spend a while in appeals court before winning the anti-trust case.
So let's see: Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, Large Internet Backbones, the US Government (except when they are breaking up MS of course), anyone that criticizes Linux, anyone who says something positive about MS, anyone against illegal distribution of mp3's, anyone who forms an opinion of someone just because they have pink hair and wear T-Shirts that say Frag 'Em All and Let God Sort 'Em Out, Intellectual Property (except when the IP is related to Linux/Open Software), The US Patent Office, Amazon Books, Network Solutions, Jon Katz (I wish) and fast loading minimal web pages...did I miss anyone that Slashdot is against?
Once my DNS provider gets the kinks out of the server, surf on over to www.malign.net and probe a few ports. Let me know whatcha think. =)
BBN was an old, old company when they got involved in the Internet. They had been an accoustics company before hand.
Not tanks. Nor particularily were they designed for size/strength. Nor was it highways. It is freeways you are thinking of. And they are designed such that they can be driven on at a particular speed (75 MPH IIRC) and still be drivable. Thus we have things like gradual turns, banks, limited inclines, etc.
nope, no causality found.
----------------------------
DSL is not guaranteed bandwidth. The link between the CO and the ISP is shared, and can as easily oversubscribed as the link between a cable modem (hate that term) and the cable head end.
If there's only a handful of companies, big companies, who handle the backbone of Internet traffic, isn't there this as a potential scenario?
Problem: Some people are being critical of the government.
Potential solutions:
1) Go after every single ISP and track every offending file (Not workable - there are too many)
2) Go after every user who traffics in such information (Not workable - there are too many)
3) Install a "Net nanny" type software on the backbones (targeting four, maybe five backbone providers) to filter out/squash said information.
Apart from FreeBSD/Linux/Slashdotters figuring out how to wire up small dishes to the side of their boxen and aiming them at a community sponsored bunch of satellites to handle transmission of said data, there appears to be no way to thwart said scenario...
I remember the days of WWIVnet - where people actually uploaded and downloaded packages of posts and mail from BBS to BBS via modem. Try filtering that one.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Not in the UK it isn't - in Britain you need a license from the government to watch TV.
No, this isn't a joke.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
There Is No Cabal!
:)
The problem is that these companies aren't playing by their own rules. UUNet's rule is in order to peer with them you have to have four geographically diverse POPs connected together with a backbone of at least 45Mbps (DS3).
I was hired as a consultant by a company trying to peer with UUNet. They had three POPs (SF, Chi, and NYC) and were looking to build a fourth all connected with T3's. We started talking to UUnet and they said they were no longer establishing any new peering arangements.
They did offer to connect to us via a DS3 for only $50K per month.
The Economics of Website Security
Albuquerque is remote but it's not that remote. New Mexico is poor and as a result we have suffered from poor connectivity. That's no one's fault but it is shortsighted.
;-).
I'm not aware of ATT currently offering connections to anyone locally. The pop you are referring to must be brand-new or not yet active.
That said, I work for a company (osogrande.net) that does have UUnet and Qwest connectivity. You don't have to resort to the Verios of the world just to get Internet connectivity in Albuquerque. You also don't have to pay $10K extra per month for a DS3 (you just have to negotiate well
As an aside, John Brown moved back here from California about 3 years ago, so he does know what he's missing.
Cisco produces routers - hardware used to route traffic on the Internet.
Cisco hardware is used by most national ISP's.
Cisco does not own its own backbone or anyone elses.
Cisco may have a high valuation due to the value of its stock, but that is subject to change on a daily basis.
Which is exactly what AOL/timewarner want you to believe. Lawrence Lessig has a bunch to say about exactly this misconception. It's really worrying that people will stick to such dogma while the corporations take advantage of their blindness to further entrench themselves.
I don't buy Lessig's argument. It seems to me he's saying that the internet was successful because open standards prevailed and users were free to do what they wanted with their bandwidth therefore we should not be afraid of government regulation of the internet designed to protect this freedom.
Put aside the fact that most of the government regulation we've seen so far (or at least heard the most noise about) is of the "Won't someone PLEASE think of the CHILDREN??" variety...I don't see any way to "protect" everyone's freedom of choice on the internet through government regulation.
Regulation is about keeping things the same: we know how to properly process meat so it doesn't make people sick, so there are regulations that attempt to ensure this is always done; we know how to build highways so they don't erode away in a summer rain, so regulations exist codifying this knowledge.
We don't know what the internet will look like in 5 years... Lessig's example of gopher vs. http is a good one. But there's no way for regulators to forsee these changes either--the only way progress is made is when someone has an itch and someone else finds a better way to scratch it.
AOL/Time-Warner paid for cable lines to people's houses and networking hardware to connect those cables to the internet; certainly the government didn't attempt to fulfill people's desire for a wider variety of TV programming and high-speed internet access--a corporation did, and that corporation deserves the fruits of their labor. If people don't like it, they don't have to pay for it.
Now I'm sure Lessig would argue that various municipalities gave Time Warner the land to run their cable along and they have a right to expect they'll use that cable for "the public good"--but Time Warner should be bound only by their contract with those municipalities, which may or may not give the municipalities legal recourse--if not, it's their own fault. It's certainly not the business of the federal government what a private corporation runs over wires they paid for.
The fact that some people remember the "good old days" when there were more .edu's than .com's and you could get a domain just by asking nicely is a good reason to go play with Internet2, not a good reason for the governement to come in and fix whatever "the public" doesn't like at the moment about a private network they never spent a dime on.
Yikes that was a rant... sorry I just haven't been thrilled with Lessig's arguments since one of his (many?) papers on why governement was the salvation of the 'net was passed out in my systems engineering class.
And if the taxpayers pay for it, does that not give the government control over it essentially creating a government run monopoly?
Same bird, different funding.
This is sad, but I can recall participating in all topics listed ... in the past month :)
It's really amazing how far the Internet has come without settlements between the backbone carriers. It started without settlements because it came from a DOD/NSF background, and continued that way because nobody could agree on settlements should work.
> companies who really know how to manage bandwidth and links.
Sure, if we can *find* any.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Here in Kentucky, we like to have governments as small as possible. We have the third highest number of counties in a state, the only states above us are Alaska and Texas. I live in Jeffersontown, a "rich" city that makes up part of the Louisville area. Jtown has spent a lot of money improving the town... they've built a nice baseball park for the little leagues, and just completed two gyms for basketball and whatnot, they've even within the past couple of years rebuilt the Jtown Public Library and purchased our small subdivision's 'club' which almost went bankrupt or something to that affect. The town has even paid to help get some of the roads better building new sections and such without using federal money. I was thinking along the lines you were... only, I was thinking on a smaller scale. Louisville itself has been working on a project called e-Mainstreet to renovate Main Street and try to bring in more tech-centric companies... I think that the state and city governments could offer to pay for more of a high-speed backbone to run through the state from more "backboney" cities like Chicago and St. Louis. I think that they could also offer tax incentives/rebates to local ISPs if they offer lower prices to local businesses and people. I think that Jtown could form it's own Coop/ISP and offer very low cost/free access to T-1/T-3 lines for local business and people, wiring the town just like with any other utility. I've heard that a few other cities have taken this approach. I think it would work, and it would certainly change the face of the Internet... heck, why pay lots of money for space in the Silicon Valley when you can get cheaper space in the Ohio Valley?
WorldMaker
I looked over InterNAP's web site, and I fail to see how they are doing anything special. It appears that they simply want to run the large access points. However, changing the legal structure of the access points doesn't imply any real change from a technical standpoint.
What's really needed are simply more peering points. If InterNAP can help throw a few more into the mix, that's great. But I don't think they are doing anything special from networking point of view. When you get down to it, peering points are difficult to get started. It costs a backbone provider real resources in terms of cost, equipment, and time to drop a connection into a peering point. Unless it's already a popular point, why bother? I mean, who wants to be the first one into a peering point, right?
It's also important to keep in mind that there are a lot more peering points than just the MAE's. Some are big, some are small. Some are popular, others are pretty much failures. Sometimes big backbone companies peer with each other multiple times all over the country. Other times, there are egregious failures of companies to peer. My favorite example is USWest and Qwest, which are in the process of merging and both have HQ's literally within blocks of each other in Devner, but don't peer!
So while peering can definitely use some improvement, I don't think it's all that bad. In fact, I would hazard a random guess that most slowdowns are due to the smaller ISP and web sites on the edge of the net. A lot of ISP's grossly oversubscribe to make ends meet. A lot of smaller web sites can't afford the bandwidth they really need if they get popular or a flash-crowd hits. Actually, a lot of days I'm amazed that this thing still works at all.
Duh. I bet you feel all important now. The fact is that in common usage a "freeway" is what was being talked about. Using the phrase "highway" is insufficient to distinguish between a roadway that has limitted access, minimum speed limits, and meets certain specifications for grades, turns, embankments, etc. I would assume that someone as anal retentive as yourself would prefer accuracy of communication of the second term.
You cannot drive a tank at speed on any commonly deployed hunk of road without breaking down the actual road surface such that it would be better to drive on than any other random stretch of levelled ground. It's not a matter of narrow lanes, or weak bridges. It's a matter of the actual road material being unable to withstand the forces involved.
Yes the freeway system was specifically meant for defense purposes. No they do not drive tanks on it. Would they in the event of a local war? I'm sure they would if necessary. In any other event? No. That's why they have wheeled carrier vehicles to transport tracked heavy equipment.
I like this idea we can start a wireless solution. How far can it transmit? It is like 10 Mb too. What is the cost of it Homemade and bought.
atto
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
I'll bite.
The interstate highway system. One of the few major projects that worked out. Where there's not enough immediate demand for the corperate sector to fill, at least an incentive is in order.
If rural areas arn't getting fiber, open up rights-of-way between the points that are desired and give huge discounts to any carrier willing to lay there. As soon as you get dark fiber in the ground, someone will turn it up.
As an aside, the article is awfully shallow. There's so much network buildout that there is a major fiber shortage. Nobody is getting as much as they need, so it's getting prioritized. Move to a networking center if you want a network. Almost any major city will do.
--Dan
No they probably wouldn't drive tanks on the highway/freeway. Most tanks drive to slowly anyway, IIRC the M1 is the fastest tank in the world and it only has a top speed of ~60kph. The interstate highway system was designed to handle tank carriers. Big flatbed trucks with a tank or two stapped to the back which would let you move the tanks quickly into the general area of the fighting drive them off and let them proceed on their own. This cuts down on wear on the tanks, saves fuel for the fighting (trucks take less fuel to opperate than tanks) and speed up deployment.
Buy UUNet stock when MCIWorldcom decides to divest in UUNet.
That pisses you off, eh?
Know what pisses me off? Someone selling me a 2Mbps connection, and then trying to make me out like some kind of asshole for actually *using* it.
That, and people who tell me that 'internet' access = 'web' access.....
Yeah, they have this ever-so-vague-and-subtle thing saying "reasonable measures" ... to "ensure network integrity" which I was brought up to speed on after a 3am mirroring session of ftp.redhat.com spanning across 3 days.
Anyway, MediaOne atleast is a #$@! bunch of #$@! sorry.. even slashdot doesn't deserve to be blessed with my description of their service.. but in any event, let's just say they say unlimited but limit the hell out of it. I'm paying for unlimited.. I don't get unlimited. Which I have mixed feelings on, ironically enough - I hate paying for something I'm not getting, but by the same token I am rather glad that people can't abuse the bandwidth..
We already have a USENET 'law' that establishes the first person to bring up Hitler in a conversation. Now do we have to have one for Ayn Rand?!
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
See topic of your message.
----------------------------
My fellow slashdotters, a serious issue has arisen that will affect every person on Slashdot. For years now, I have been posting stories on how I've pured hot grits down my past. I regret to inform the slashdot population that I am stepping down. I am moving to Montana, to a small cabin far from civilization, to pursue a writing career. No TV, no radio, no Slashdot. With best regards, -Troll
The bottom line is cost. (I work in the NOC of a very large ISP)
Since a T1 costs 40 times as much, ISP's place that much more priority on issues involving a leased line than a telco line.
Since DSL lines are usually put in place by the local telco, they are considered a "consumer" service, and most likely get an SLA guaranteeing service in a matter of days, or weeks!
With a T1, most SLA's have service guarantees in a matter of hours. The ISP takes a great deal of responsibility for the circuit, with the option for many corporate services that are not (yet) offered with DSL.
Maybe in the future, once the DSL demand is reigned in by local telcos, the technology will replace more costly T1/E1 service. But until it does, the T1 will remain the best and most stable choice of businesses.
i pay my cable modem access fees to get blazing speed all the time/ and ANY time i feel like it. If there isn't enough downstream bandwidth, THE PROVIDER needs to get more bandwidth, I'm not going to worry if everyone else has had their turn at the bandwidth merry-go-round.
It raises the question og whether
OG not like pay backbone company. OG raise question.
OG get Invalid Form Key. Og try opening other browser window with IE5 Win98. Og hit submit now. Og hit Cowboy Neal with club if not work this time.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Fortunately (?), many ISPs that provide ADSL or cable are beginning to agree with your point of view. We recently moved here, and our ISP let us take our ADSL service with us. However, instead of just hooking us back up to the same old discontinued service with no caps, we are now on their newer ADSL service. Our top speed is still capped as it was before (1.5Mbps down), but we also now have a total monthly transfer cap of 5 gigs (up+down). If we go over, they're going to charge us $20 per gig that we use.
This is a bit of an inconvenience, but I actually (sort of) agree with them. I've heard of people pulling several gigs a day on the university resnet backbone (probably warez), and it all does add up. I'm just waiting for ISPs to start port filtering out napster services to try and limit their bandwidth consumption on the high speed access.
--C
It's only software!
My Friend let me tell you about DSL. DSL is a nightmare. It takes a long time to set up.... Mostly incompetent people... I had a nightmare with flashcom.com., Bell Atlantic, and Covad. Search /. for flashcom.com. You'll find a discussion of cable v dsl v T1..... Unfortunately, most people are having the same problem.... www.flashcomsux.com.... The problems are every where: http://cnnfn.com/2000/06/12/soho/q_alice_col/ AnyLoveIsGoodLove
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
And that is what is fscking the Internet over, too! I don't like being a socialist, but I'm tired of giving authority to those who dedicate their lives to their own greed. The way I see it, commercialization of the Internet has added virtually nothing. Sure it's convienient to be able to order virtually anything without leaving the comfort of your home, but torrents of spam and sites whose only purpose is to coax a CC number out of you have congested something that was originally a means of distributing meaningful information. Supply/demand serves only to level everything to the lowest expectations, not to promote development.
So how does this make government regulation any better, you ask? Well, at least I am paying for the service directly, and I have some say in what is developed. In a laissez faire scenario, my only freedom is as a consumer, where choice is limited by what is on the market and my influence is proportional to how much money I have.
I don't understand how government providing/regulating internetworking would in any way compromise individual freedom. It isn't like this is a suggestion for regulation of content. With government control of internetworking service, we wouldn't have problems of ISPs failing to back their users when they are threatened with lawsuits or DoS attacks.
As for complaining about taxes, I prefer to pay money to an organization that I have some actual representation in, after all, believe it or not, we still live in a pseudo-democracy. Blaming the "goverment" for anything is the same as blaming yourself. If you are going to gripe about anything, at least target bureaucracy or the innefficency of the system!
-- nath
Well, some places, DSL or cable is not available. Also, ADSL that is run to most residential areas, from what I've seen are over ATM, and have an unspecified bit rate. On top of that, DSL tends to be rather flakey at times.
A t1 is classified as a business circuit, even if being run to a house. If a T1 goes down, chances are, they can get it repaired within 4 hours, usually faster, even if it goes down at 3:30 in the morning. On the other hand, if you 1500k x 256k residential ADSL goes down, there is a good chance it could be a few days before it gets repaired.
Sure, there is business class DSL, but it doesn't cost that much less than a T1! Why? It is a business circuit, so it costs more. And why is that? Simple! When it goes down (since it is DSL, it will go down, trust me), the telephone company will get it repaired much faster than residential DSL. Also, well, atleast BellSouth's implementation of DSL, has a set bit rate, as well, which why it costs more.
For me, I live in a place that will most likely never get DSL, and cable service will probably never materialize. Although I would be happy with ISDN, that is unavailable as well, due to the fact that my local telco can't justify the money that would be spent to upgrade equipment to support ISDN. What is left for a person like me? Get a T1. Fortunately, I work for an ISP, and won't have to pay for service, but just for the line.
...think of web services as trains, bandwidth as rail; everyone wants to start a new train company-- great discounts, beautiful dining cars... all the perks. No one wants to lay new rail, and they all complain about having to pay to run on the extant rail. Yeah, it takes capital, but it's the price of freedom.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
I'm sorry, but their ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If you can't afford to be an ISP, sell your buisness to someone who can.
--Dan
If I'm not mistaken, the companies that provide the so-called back bone to the internet have to pay hard earned money to pay for all the fiber, staff, land, etc. that they need to make it happen. Unless they start getting these things for free, let's not jump to the easy conclusion that they are "bad guys".
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
I hate to say this, but it appears that you are missing the point: it is a common misconception that all we need to do is "peer" more, something I think the telco's spread to their broadband access customers, who are often linux fans and gaming subscribers. But just because you can run traceroute doesn't mean you understand some of the larger architectural issues present if you dont step back and look at the backbone providers and the model they have set up. Jon Postel was a godsend, but now we have to clarify and refine his model...
Many people here in Seattle also complain because this or that company won't peer with that one, and they watch traffic go all the way down to California before bouncing back to here. ATT's @home customers in seattle, when trying to reach the University of Washington (who may be across the street) get to the meet-me room in the Westin Building, go out over some backbone down to the California MAE-west to the closest peering point that @home (a minor BB player who can only afford peering at open exchanges) shares with someone like UUNET or Sprint or whatever. The logic by the end customer is "Why go to the Westin, bounce to california and then bounce back to the Westin building, 20 feet away, all just to cross the street?"
That's braindead, but the problem is that the peering model itself provides no motivation to the larger players to correct the issue. Sure, the customer service department for @home takes a few more complaints, but overall they really don't care to lose the money it would cost to peer privately with someone like oh INTERNET2, who connects to the University, at the Westin Building. Furthermore, @home residential customers, who likely are making low demands on the outbound pipe, but pull large datastreams back (think of the http request model, for example) are unlikely to bring anything of value to those they peer with. Amazon.com employees don't really need a faster way to get to @home customers, they want @home customers to have a faster way of reaching them. So unless Amazon can PAY large sums of money and change the BB providers' mind, the BB provider like UUNET has no incentive to offer or allow peering at closer more convenient and sane peering points. Like one only 20 feet away in the meet-me room.
So do the large Backbone Providers bully smaller ISP's into doing what is best for THEM, for their bottom line? Absolutely. Anything less would be against capitalism. But is that necessarily what is best for the customers, or the largest number or the public? Probably not. So it appears necessary to re-design the public peering model to better serve all participants, Backbone providers, ISPs, content providers, and of course, the shareholders...
I thought it was an interesting article, myself...
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
When I was pricing a T1 for my home I checked out uunet and the other carriers. Granted, I don't live too far from a hub, but UUnet's pricing wasn't too far above everyone elses (about $350 more than other local carriers once I got done negotiating).
Plus, they were the only company who guaranteed latencies in north america and transatlantic, as well as constant server monitoring and free paging for detected outages. That and a free days credit for 1 minute of downtime, whether on their end or the local loop.
I couldn't afford the price then, but when I can, they'll be the guys I go with. Yes they're more expensive. But you do get what you pay for.
Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable unix network is no challenge
Just like television is free, the Internet is free. You have to buy a tv to get the 'free' signal, so you have to buy pc and 'rent' the cable to the Internet, but once you get there, its free. Isn't it?
Looks like I didn't check my facts close enough - no need to be so damn rude though. I had misunderstood and assumed that "The P-NAP, and its ASsimilator technology" referred to the entirety of the methods you were talking about - being busy as all fck, I didn't read every word on the website. Any how, just because you'll never meet me, there's no reason to call me clueless and reactionary based on the contents of one post. Read the Advocacy FAQ - the post above would have been more compelling without the derogatory first two and last sentences.
tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
postmoderncore - art and creation are a higher purpose
1)"Gimmee" ......"
2)"Gimmee Now"
3)"You do all the work, and I'll
4)The Classic 'Problem of the Commons"
5)Pointy Haired Managers, and other similar mutants.
heck, you complete the list.
although there is the example of some of the big industrialists (Henry Ford) who deliberated over paid their employees in order to develop their own market.
So there is alot to consider here.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Oh for God's sake. Quickly, call in Janet Reno!
Regulate early, Regulate often.(tm)
Fuck it, let's just take antitrust a logical step further and nationalize the Internet so we don't have these nasty peering issues and pesky corporations. I sure would feel much better that way.
I just want to remind those who ARE NOT READING THEIR MODERATORS GUIDELINES that I will metamoderate as unfair any such stupidity as this. A fairly harmless comment by an AC put down to -1 for no real good reason. I'm doing this for two reasons;
1. If you browse at 0 you should be used to offtopic and uninteresting blather. This and also plenty of AC comments that are plenty insightful but never got moderated up due to some crackhead getting his tokens, moderating unwisely and effectively censoring a good AC comment.
2. Most people browse at +1 by default. At least this is how it is supposed to be set up. This includes journolists who visit the site, people visiting for the first time who just set up their account and a lot of folks who want to never mind the bollocks.
This part is just my opinion, but -1 should be considered a *really* special area. One for repeat offenders, obscene or completely (racist, revisionsist, etc) remarks that are *completely* without any merit. Those who offend to a primal level deserve -1, otherwise 0 should be sufficient to help sort out the chaff. Get a clue, use your points wisely to moderate up the stuff that deserves it (and no *this* does not deserve to be moderated up either) so that folks visiting can read it and also so it will be archived, or risk losing your karma point at a time due to metamoderation.
In closing, I just want to say that yes this comment is offtopic to the discussion, and yes the AC above is a completely stupid comment. The point is that there are others in this conversation who could use that point. Consider your crackhead selves warned.
this got me thinking - why doesn't the government start building public "roads" for the internet with tax money? They've been doing it since cars were invented, in real life, so it should be a natural progression, right?
Just think what the world would be like if major companies owned all the main highways and freeways?
Hell, I don't think this'll actually happen anytime soon, but it's a thought.
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
If I got this striaght.. UUNet. Sprint.. AT&T and the likes allow traffic from each other to freely flow over each others networks.. which seems to be qui pro quo... You let some of my traffic use your network and I'll let some of your traffic go over mine..
But the problem as Forbes sees it is that an ISP complains because they want access to this bandwidth so they can make money. but don't want to pay the access fees ??
I guess I don't follow..
The bigger guys seem to be trading services, but the little guys have nothing to trade (besides $$$) so the providers have to make them pay $$
speling haz noting two do with the mesage, if you can under stand it
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
I appreciate the insightful commentary for once...
...
However, I would like to point out something: I'm not saying that anyone is doing something they shouldn't, I am saying that the public peering model is fundamentally broken, and that what we currently have results in asymetric routing and high packet loss at peak times. Why should traffic hit these bottlenecks if it isn't necessary? Why not use private peerings with multiple backbones? Extra hops are introduced, and eficciency is lost. That's why I think what they are doing over at InterNAP is so cool: they want to re-architect the system so that all participants receive maximum benefit. I'm not a nutcase, and I know I keep bringing them into this discussion, but if you ever hear their CTO talk, you'll get chills at the ideas they work with....
These large backbone providers are essentially advertising (Qwest, for example) "We have the largest, fastest backbone in the world!", but who cares? If you get dumped at the competitors network immediately, you spend all your time in transit as a freeloader on someone else's network. BB prov's don't pay each other for this transit, so it gets lower priority on everyone else's network. That's not a good system, because participants have competing agendas.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
Quake doesn't need that much bandwidth. Even for cable modems you shouldn't be needing much more than 5KB/sec. 10KB/sec at most.
:).
And you have to keep in mind the bandwidth of the quake/game server you're connected to. If say 30 players try to do 10kbytes/sec to a 1.5Mbps server there'll be packet loss problems - 30 x 10kbytes x 8= 2.4 Mbps! Most servers don't seem to deal with this very well, they don't drop packets fairly, seem like they just pick a player at a time to ignore.
Quake will be fine once you can get a _committed_ 40-80kbps of bandwidth, what you then need is lower latency - that is, "ping". And that can be rather important for real time multimedia interactive networking applications
Cheerio,
Link.
Actually, The company is now a business partner with Qwest and will soon be lighting up a new OC-48 (2Gbps) network. UUNet still want to charge for peering.
The Economics of Website Security
MAE-East and MAE-West (metropolitan Area Exchange) handle 70-80% of all traffic that goes from one backbone to another., and are paid for by the government.
Although the NSF "designated" several NAPs (Network Access Points) including the MAE-East, I'm not sure any tax money went to support their operations, and very sure that there was no financial support after the end of the NSFNET.
The MAEs are now onwed by MCI/Worldcom, and you have to pay to collocate a router there or run bandwidth into the facility.
I wouldn't say 70-80% of traffic flows through the "public" (i.e. anyone can connect) NAP switches any more. Things are far more complex these days. Every large Tier 1 provider has private peering with several other Tier 1 providers. Besides the MAEs there are all kinds of hosting facilities aimed at attracting routers from various ISPs to exchange traffic in various geographical regions of the world.
For more info on the history of the MAE East, you can watch a "Mysteries of the MAE East" show I did, it is on the bottom of the linked page.
Nothing wrong with the spirit of the posting but if this is going to be rated as insightful, someone should get the facts right.
Take note of the fact that UUNet and Sprint are both owned by MCI. MCI is still negotiating with the government antitrusters as to whether they get to keep sprint plus some of their other aquistions. Many tears in the corporate boardroom.
So where is your competition when they all get bought out by Time-AOL-MCI-ATT-TweetyBird-... ?
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
First off, that statement makes no sense, obviously it's not a monopoly if there are a bunch of them.
Second, what is it with the people who are submitting these articles? They are pointing out things that happen on a daily basis and try to get everyone upset because "th man" is keeping us down. Why don't you write the New Jersey state government and complain that they are charging you to use their turnpike? Or perhaps the airlines because it actually costs money to fly on one of their planes?
It seems to me that that is perfectly fine to do. Why would a company build an internet backbone if they aren't going to be able to charge people to use it?
Seriously, it's called a business model. Or do you not pay for your ISP?
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
If the provider advertised truthfully, then:
a) Customers could use all the bandwidth provided to them in any (legal) manner they see fit, and:
b) The provider would take technological steps to limit customer bandwidth usage to an amount that won't have a detrimental effect on others.
Unfortunately, providers are selling more bandwidth than they have capacity for. It's a heavy temptation, when you have tons of customers who do light surfing for an hour or two a day. You can make a lot more money by selling them bandwidth that they will probably never use. Of course, sooner or later, someone actually does use it, at which point the provider backpedals and bends its terms of service to somehow restrict this person's usage (which he/she is actually paying for).
Personally, I'd rather know I'm paying for limited service and leave it at that. Sure I'd like huge bandwidth. But I'd rather have less bandwidth with a straightforward policy, than "unlimited" with strings attached.
Best regards,
SEAL
Now hold on a second, there.
There's a very underreported problem with the way that peering is set up right now on the network. "Peering", as it has been, is only going to become worse and worse, because of the kludges we have had to provide to keep things just as they are aren't enough anymore. 90% of all routed traffic going from one backbone to another goes through one of the MAE exchanges, or in other words, through a public access node that is paid for with tax dollars alone. This being the case, those facilities are massively insufficient for the load they bear, which is why on peak times, you can get 20-30% packet loss. This is absolutely unaceptable. And the worse of it is, the more loss, the more traffic, as the TCP protocol simply has hosts re-send what didn't get through...
Some people in the high up networking world are getting a clue, and have actually solved the problem. For more information, a better and more thourough explanation, and more technical details on the solution, go to this site .
To continue, the tier1 providers refuse to peer with smaller ones, as the article suggests. UUNET gets pretty much whatever it wants because they own 30% of all the destination ip-space. What the big guys do is dump your traffic off at the local public exchange points at the soonest opportunity, making their competitors carry the load. But of course, since they all do this, everyone gets a worse QOS unless they just happen to be going to someone located on their own backbone.
Thats not good, and that is what I think this article is (rightfully) pointing out.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
Bell Canada sells Internet access via 1M modem to end customers for a total of $29.95 Canadian per month. Supposedly it will sustain 1M per second, or so their ads claim.
1Mbps costs me, as an ISP, $1000 per month plus fiber optic connectivity costs (about $10 per Mbps, conversely).
Scratch your head over that one.
...Steve
People only download at the rates and bandwidth that the ISPs provide. It is up to (and possible) for the ISP to engineer their network to keep this kind of problem in check.
BTW, if you are paying for best effort data and someone else pays more money for guaranteed delivery/data rates then they will get the better delivery/data rates at your expense.
"A sample size of one is really just statistical masturbation."
I hear ya brother. I visit K5 frequently. Its all about quality over quantity.
http://packetnexus.com
We have to do something about this. This is the first article I have seen in years relating to what I have been griping about. It's a great article, but what is going to happen about it?
I believe we need to form together and get things changed or create another nationwide network. Get a bunch of us to form a utility company and employ thousands across the US, we'll use our won resources and create a new free network.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
"Even for cable modems you shouldn't be needing much more than 5KB/sec. 10KB/sec at most"
In general you shouldn't need more than a few kilobytes per player. However, since Quake uses a unicast model (*), the number of packets flying around on the network grows exponentially with each player that joins the network. A Quake game with between 8 and 16 players can easily chew up more than half the available bandwidth on a 10/100 Mb LAN, never mind the internet.
"If say 30 players try to do 10kbytes/sec to a 1.5Mbps server there'll be packet loss problems - 30 x 10kbytes x 8= 2.4 Mbps"
With unicast, a game server has to send the positions off all players to all other players individually, thats why the required bandwidth grows exponentially. So with 30 players, it's more like 30x10kbytesx30 - thats more like 270 Mbps. Of course, 10kbytes is no doubt an overestimate, it's probably more like 2 or 3 KB: 30x30x2KB = 18 Mbps. I don't think I've ever seen a quake server with more than about 10 players on. 10 players gives you 2 Mbps, which is about where it starts to become reasonable. Servers like Counterstrike can handle more players at a time because its a much slower game, needs fewer packets.
Basically, with anything less than DSL/Cable, Quake will use up all your available bandwidth, and most of it with the higher bandwidth connections. All the time you're on. It's not easy to use so much just by downloading porn, unless you set up your box to auto-download entire newsgroups in the background (i.e. downloading lots of porn, what Signal 11 was complaining about.)
(*) Three options with sockets - unicast, broadcast and multicast. broadcast only means anything on a LAN, and will totally waste any subnet, so virtually no games use it. Multicast can also waste LAN's, and doesn't give you enough advantage to use on the Internet. So Quake uses Unicast.
My job involves writing these types of sockets applications, so I do have some idea what I'm talking about, at least I would like to think so :)
Anyway, cheers ..
The Tier 1 backbone ISPs are today competing in a free market. No price regulation, and no monopolies. So the price is what the market will bear. "Peering" is done for mutual self interest. UUNET needs good access to Sprint's subscribers, and Sprint needs access to UUNET's, so they peer for free. That's how the handful of Tier 1s work -- it's in their mutual self interest.
Now you have little guys who have no content to speak of. So it means little to UUNET or Genuity to have good access to them. Yet they want free peering just like the big boys! Hey, I wish my house had free peering over a T3 too, but somebody has to pay for the Tier 1s! They <B>sell</B> backbone service to smaller ISPs. If it were free, where would the money come from? Repeat: This is a free market. The price is not set by the government, but by haggling until both sides' mutual self-interest is met. Not the way some Americans might be used to it, but the real world is full of bargaining. BTW, smaller backbone ISPs (Tier 2s, who almost by definition are the ones whose web sites call themselves "Tier 1", don't always pay a fixed price for Tier 1 upstreaming. They negotiate based on mutual self-interest. As they get bigger, they acquire leverage.)
Ditto to the smaller country players who whine about paying for bandwidth to US peering points. If they had content that the US providers though it was more vital to have, then they might split the cost.
My gripe is with the jerks who get their fancy new cablemodem and then download 800 gigabytes of porn in one evening, starving off the entire feed for everyone else on that part of the network - or the xDSL guys who do the same thing. Do you #$@! people have any idea how oversubscribed that bandwidth is? Your little FTP suck-it-down-fest just took out more bandwidth than 100 users aggregated!
*THAT* pisses me off - these people ought to have their home addresses published for doing this, and the ISPs should be more liberal about inserting a few extra ICMP calls to slow down Mr. Hog's connection. Look, I got this thing for e-mail, quake, and ocasionally pulling the latest ISO for my linux box (which I am polite about and do at 3am). Yes, that extra bandwidth is nice.. but during prime time, I want either a premium service called UnHog Supremus or a policy that lets me know with certainty these people will be dragged out into the street and clubbed for doing crap like that during prime time (that is 4pm - 11pm for those who didn't know).
Okay, I'm done now, please adjust my karma.. :\
If I were running an ISP, I would frankly be a lot more worried about the chance of Roadrunner Cable (and the various DSL providers) shutting me out of the broadband market than the possibility that my parent connection is gouging me for a few extra bucks.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
You're flat-out wrong. Sprint is NOT owned by "MCI"! MCI Worldcom owns UUNET, and is *trying* to buy Sprint. But it's far from a done deal. When Worldcom (UUNET) bought MCI, they were required to sell off MCI's Internet (to Cable & Wireless). It's almost certain that the same would happen with Sprint; they'd keep UUNET or Sprint's ISP but not both.
If they did get both, then peering WOULD break, because the combined UUNET/Sprint would own more than 50% of the backbone and it would have no incentive to do peering with anyone. It would literally be without peer, and a monopoly-power situation on the backbone would occur. Fortunately, this problem is well understood on both sides of the Atlantic, and neither the US DOJ nor the EU are likely to allow it.
(Obligatory cheap shot: in the same vein, maybe Microsoft should rename itself "Novation." :-)
--
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
The major issue with this that I see is when do you reach the point where you're peering rather than purchasing bandwith?
You join the peering crowd when you 1) have connectivity at every major NAP 2) have enough traffic that other Tier 1's start calling you up and talking about peering agreements and 3) your traffic is not asymetrically outgoing, because no one wants to peer with someone who is just going to send them lots of traffic and not take any (i.e. hosting providers).
Of course, it is not as easy to get to this level as it was four years ago (when a few million would have launched you to Tier 1 status). Today, it may take hundreds of millions.
Peering itself is still an unsure issue. There is always talk of major Tier 1's dropping peering agreements for settled exchange.
The Public Exchanges? MAE-East and MAE-West (metropolitan Area Exchange) handle 70-80% of all traffic that goes from one backbone to another., and are paid for by the government. It's the one place where everyone can peer for free, so it is where the smaller backbone providers peer at, so they don't have to pay exhorbitant rates to UUNET or the other fatties...
InterNAP is getting it right, and is beginning to get noticed around here and elsewhere. Check out their web page for a good explanation. They provide to some of the biggest blue-chips in the country, including M$ and Amazon. They have a different way of doing this stuff that solves the public peering problem.
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
It appeared to me that the article failed to distinguish the difference between local loop charges and bandwidth charges. It also failed to note the improvement of the backbones since the early 90's. The bottom line is the Tier 1 providers have spent billions of dollars to upgrade the backbones to DS3s to OC3 to OC12 to OC48 to OC192 to eventually OC768 and beyond. I would much rather pay more for my current access speeds than have a 1mbps line for free that is shared with hundreds of others. If the gvt had built and paid for the current fiber infrastructure then I can see the outrage for charging such rates for bandwidth but they didn't and bandwidth is getting cheaper by the day with out the gvt being involved. If a company spends billions on infrastructure and millions per year to maintain it but then allowed any isp to use their access for free or dirt cheap then everyone would be out of luck when they go out of business.
How many times do we have to tell you people,
THERE IS NO CABAL
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
The major issue with this that I see is when do you reach the point where you're peering rather than purchasing bandwith? For example: You start a small ISP. You buy a T1 or a T3 from a backbone provider. As you grow, you add a few other connections and multi-home your network. At what point do you become big enough that those pipes to the backbone providers become peering points, and should be free? If peering was free for anyone, once you got big enough you, you'd get all of your bandwith for free? Even if you only apply this rule to providers with a backbone, what constitues a backbone? What if you have two datacenters across town from each other? That could be considered your "backbone". The way I see it is that providers shouldn't have to give free bandwith unless they recieve something in return. That return could just be faster access for their customers to reach sites hosted by the opposing company. Once an ISP gets big enough, other ISPs should have no issue at all wanting to do free peering with them, which in most cases is how it works at this point (in most cases). Gah. Ok, I'm done babbling.
goes through the MAEs or NAPs is bogus. If somebody's
paying you to deliver traffic for them, there's no way you'd want to deliver through the heavily overloaded public peering points if you've got a working private connection to the destination carrier, because packet loss is too high, except for overflow traffic and disaster recovery. The reason you build private peering connections is precisely to avoid the NAPs, as well as to save costs and occasionally deal with geography.
That doesn't mean that the peering isn't in the same cities as the NAPs - The Tier 1 providers have a lot of bandwidth there, so a packet may occasionally go more distance to get to a peering point, but the connections are still private, so the load management depends only on the two carriers involved, not the entire group of users on the NAPs. I don't know UUNET's peering objectives, but AT&T's objective is to deliver at least 90% of our off-net traffic using private connections, and only use the NAPs when there isn't a better way to get somewhere.
(I'm using the term "peering" to refer to the technical aspects of the connection, not whether money changes hands in the process - that's going to be driven by traffic balances, special applications, and whatever ego-based negotiations happen between contract lawyers :-)
Hosting centers are clearly changing the balance of traffic on the net - Exodus and the non-carrier based hosting centers connect to several major ISPs, and most of the major ISPs either run hosting centers or are partnering with them, and they're being built as fast as the real estate mavens can get them built. (Who'd have guessed that Bay Area building contractors would be one of the industry's critical resources? :-)
Also, the emerging caching business may skew traffic levels differently between NAPs and private peering - I'm not sure which direction, and some of the skew is affected by different caching architectures - some caching systems put big shared caches on the outgoing side of a multiple peering point as opposed to more but smaller non-shared caches on the incoming side.
Ryandev's assertion that UUNET owns "30% of all the destination ip-space" isn't very clear - they certainly don't own 30% of the IP address space, though their market share for direct-connection IP customers is probably about that big, depending on which pieces they get to keep in the merger (e.g. they sold of much of MCI's business to Cable&Wireless during the Worldcom-MCI acquisition.)
Also, the MAEs and NAPs don't just run on public money - they charge for connecting to them, and I'm not sure if the NSF subsidy is still there. The important issue is that they're a finite solution to a near-infinite demand, and traffic can grow faster than they can scale. While lots of traffic has moved off to private peering, they're still a huge and critical resource, so they both need to use bleeding-edge technology and cause real havoc if the technology doesn't work well enough - and there's nowhere else to test it adequately before using it....
Internap does have some interesting BGP path-manipulation technology; I've seen it described but haven't played with it directly. Their business model is to buy transit from the big fiber-based ISP carriers and sell services to end users, so their success depends largely on how well they can manage and implement their networks, as well as on their BGP technology. Unlike the Fortune columnist whining about how mean and nasty UUNET is and how Somebody Should Do Something, they're going out and building competition, and good luck to them. (Hey, it's the Internet - they're our competition and our customer also :-) And no, they don't have a POP in Albuquerque either - their closest is Denver.
(Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, though I primarily do Layer 2 and Layer 1 technology rather than Layer 3, so I may be out of date on some details. This is my personal opinion; if you wanted an official position, you'd be reading a press release or talking to a sales person, not reading a rant on slashdot... :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's not dominated by monoplolies, for one reason. Anyone, *ANYONE* can setup a highspeed connection between two access points. It doesn't make sense to say that these guys are bullies. You can buy this kind of access from *anyone* who wishes to offer it.
I could, right now, buy a fiber line from one side of the country, and start piping data from here to there. That's it. That's *OPEN*. And heck, people could start routing their IP packets over my line, no effort on their part.
This is just a story for the sake of writing a story. There is no basis behind this. PERIOD.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Second, the Internet became commercialized when BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) was created (if I remember correctly) specifically to sell NSFnet to. BBN was the first commercial backbone. Everybody else got blocks assigned by IANA and either built their own or leased from BBN. Nobody "chose" that format, it just grew that way.
I remember a few years ago the screaming when the big boys announced that they would begin refusing to peer with smaller networks. It makes sense if you think about it -- you have to draw a line somewhere. There comes a point below which you aren't big enough for big backbones like UUNet or AT&T to care if they lose all your traffic.
The flip side of this is, big sites like eBay or Yahoo have leverage because everybody wants access to them. There's opportunity for them to leverage their popularity into lower or no connection fees if they're savvy enough to manipulate it.
And really big sites like AOL are now backbones in their own right, to the point where magazines like BoardWatch rate AOL's network as a backbone provider.
-- Old Man Kensey