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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Oligopolies can be illegal if they start colluding to maintain inflated prices, for example (the lysine market comes to mind). But rarely is a structural remedy imposed in such a case.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
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
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 $$$) so the providers have to make them pay $$
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
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.
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.
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
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