Web Thinkers Warn of Culture Clash

Passacaglia writes "The Washington Post is carrying an article describing some stimulating discussion from the Internet Society meeting this week, including comments from Vinton Cerf, Eric Schmidt, about the clash between freedom and commercial interests."

Comments

Technical Issues prevent that

[billstewart]

The technology doesn't work that way - some things are inherently symmetric, and some are inherently asymmetric, but they're not just allocating bandwidth on a shared simplex channel like an Ethernet or radio space. There are three common standards out there for broadband to the home:

• Symmetric DSL versions - they're symmetric, and bandwidth is limited by the electrical characteristics of the wires. They usually need dedicated wires.
• Asymmetric DSL versions - they play different electrical tricks to fit the signal onto the wire, and can line-share with analog phones, so they're becoming the most common home DSL. Typical speeds are 384/128, 608/128, and 1544/384.
• Cable Modems - Cable TV depends on lots of Funky Analog Electrical Tricks just to work at all, and cable modems do even funkier tricks, and it's easier to do these tricks downstream, where you've got one signal source, than upstream, where you've got lots of sources at different points on the same wire which all want to bounce around and echo and interfere with each other unless you tune the thing right. It's much worse than the old ThickWire Ethernet. So it's easier for them to add as much downstream bandwidth as they want to pay for, but upstream's much harder. However, they're not giving you as much upstream bandwidth as they could, for a couple of reasons.
  • One is that they developed a bad performance reputation early on because of some bad equipment in the beta-test city, leading to high packet loss and all those Web Hog TV commercials by competitors, so they'd rather not push the limits of the network, because Bad Perception by the public is a killer.
  • Another is that the upstream is a shared medium, with total performance depending on the number of people sending right now and how fast they're sending, and if they let you have a lot more upstream, which they easily could, some users really would hog their neighborhood upstream, especially if they're running popular Pr0n Web Servers (see Bad Perception, above.)
  • They could manage the bandwidth of excessive users by using packet shapers like Packeteer, but those didn't really exist when they started, and still cost money today.
  • They either have to set all users to a lowest-common-denominator speed that will work everywhere, or they'd have to keep track of each individual user's setting and do much more complex engineering for each set of cable, and that's way too much work for a low-price service.
  
  Most of the cable modem technology out there limits you to 128kbps upstream, but it could do more if they wanted to set it for that. Some of the cable modem companies offer business-class service with 256kbps upstream and much better repair time guarantees, but the economics of the consumer-priced services are based on the idea that it's really just television and if it goes out for a day or two you can read a book or go to the movies.
  
• Digital Cable - This is the Mos Eisley of kitchen sink bandwidth allocation protocols, doing a huge variety of ugly things with different parts of the bitstream under different conditions. You really don't want to go there; it makes those ISDN Q.93x protocols designed by French Telecom Bureaucrats look positively clean and simple.