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Pricing and Internet Architecture
Frisky070802 writes "The Politech list recently posted a pointer to a new paper (pdf) by UMN prof Andrew Odlyzko, which compares the telecom industry to the historical transportation industry (railroad, bridges, and such). One quote, from the conclusion, is particularly interesting: '... the networking industry [has] devoted inordinate efforts to technologies such as ATM and QoS, even though there was abundant evidence these were not going to succeed. One can go further and say that essentially all the major networking initiatives of the last decade, such as ATM, QoS, RSVP, multicasting, congestion pricing, active networks, and 3G, have turned out to be duds. Furthermore, they all failed not because the technical solutions that were developed were inadequate, but because they were not what users wanted.'"
I'd like 3G, I just won't pay $10 a month for internet service for my 100x100 pixel phone, and I'm not buying screen savers and ringers that expire in 90 or 120 days. I'll pay that much for screen savers and ringers that I can keep forever, $1 to $3 isn't too bad compared to the time it would take to make my own, but not for something that the "owner" thinks should just be a temporary thing.
I don't understand this claim -
The wireless industry, in particular, has often boasted that it managed to avoid the mistakes of the Internet by avoiding the open architecture and flat-rate pricing of the latter.
Isn't it effectively flat-rate pricing when they give you X minutes for Y dollars a month? Most people pick a plan that gives them more minutes than they'll use, so they never incur the overage charges.
I think for the majority of customers, it's effectively a flat-rate system.
Learning from experience, users dont actually seem to know what they really want..
First they decide that they need something, so it gets done,
next they decide that isnt what they wanted. And now what was made is not good enough.
This happens every day in the PC world where we're forced to deal with endusers.
All of the above technologies were created through a demand for them, only to realise that they werent sufficient for what they wanted to achieve in the first place.
-Rob
QoS is far from being a dud - it is a critical part of any VoIP deployment and is now a part of any substantial core network engineering. QoS brokering between ASs (e.g. RSVP) has been a dud so far, but interdomain VoIP is still pretty young so there hasn't been much demand.
What about architecture changes that have worked? IPsec, ECN, CIDR (and the many changes that came from that, e.g. BGP4) and MPLS? It is too easy to focus on things that failed and ignore the things the silently work.
and say that essentially all the major networking initiatives of the last decade
Funny, becuase that's the opposite of what I see today. Networking/Telecommunications has never been bigger, and apart from a good portion of the net's underlying protocols, we are constantly surrounded by new networking initiatives that have been blindingly successfull. Since `94, the internet (as far as public use goes) has been a pretty successfull initiative. Let alone a lot of the behind-the-scenes initiatives, like enhancing transoceanic cabling.
The author of that paper is incredibly vague in his paper -, it's easy to pop off 10 initiatives that failed bigtime (like sattelite phones), but becuase your so used to them, you never notice those that have been successfull (Eg CDMA/GSM, and 3G is popular outside the US). I would go so far as to say that most telecommunication's/network initiatives have been successfull in the last decade, becuase as a planet, we are growing increasingly dependent on communication.
-Adam
#!/bin/csh cat $0
Its not that users don't want the telco's acronym soup of next-gen features, it's that they don't want to pay for those features. Providers are desperately seeking the fabled "killer app" that makes subscribers shell out another $29.95/mo. But consumers are tired of expanding monthly bills. And it doesn't help when companies slather on an encyclopedia of restrictions, fees, and service charges.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The layered approach to internet infrastructure is a great technological solution for decoupling the physical mechanisms for moving data, the protocols for managing data movements, and the high-level applications that rely on that data. Layers create natural zones of standardization and enable any application to run on any network.
But that technological architecture is a business model nightmare. All of the costs reside in the lowest physical layers. All those wires, fibers, amplifiers, and switches cost big bucks. Unfortunately, all of the value lies in the highest, application layers. Users want the application and don't care about the physical infrastructure. A layered architecture gaurantees that users don't have to care because the lower layers are interchangable and invisible.
The result is cut-throat price competition among infrastructure service providers (and the associated miles of dark fiber, negative earnings, high debt, and bankruptcies). Meanwhile, the application providers reap the profits while the infrastructure providers can't justify the expense of solving the last mile problem.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Reduce the problem to its simpilist equations
the telcos THOUGHT we wanted it because the focus groups told them " sure id like that on my cell phone" soo.. instead of getting joe six pack, bob the dentist, and suzy suburb homemaker to do the focus group..
Get...
jim the out of work IT, bitter, sarcastic, REALISTIC guy, who will say "i just want a cell phone to be as cheap and useable to replace my homephone but ill pay a SMALL bit more to have it be portable"
because as much as joe, bob, and suzy like these neat gadgets.. after the first week there not going to use them, and there not going to pay for them.
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
You and other customers might see it that way, but the carrier is ONLY obligated to give you a certain number of minutes for that price. From a business point of view, the issue is whether the provider has limited his liability to having to give someone an unlimited supply at a flat rate. Just because you commit yourself to a higher number of minutes than you know you want doesn't mean it's a flat rate. It just means that you're willing to commit yourself to paying for more than you'll use -- in order to have a predictable bill. That's something like telling your grocery store that you'll pay them a flat $300 a week for your groceries -- even if you buy less -- but you'll still pay extra if you go over that amount. Obviously, that's a little bit of an exaggeration (and obviously there is a presumed discount built in for the phone user who commits to a higher number of minutes), but cell phone pricing is NOT an example of flat-rate pricing -- unless there is a carrier I'm not aware of who provides unlimited service for one price.
What you describe isn't really about the "laziness of the public," but rather the laziness (or stupidity?) of the providers. It's not reasonable to expect the public to investigate the advantages of every new thing in every area and make educated decisions. People can only decide they want something when providers are explaining WHY they want something.
For instance, some automakers push things in their ads which don't explain a benefit to the public. I've never known what "dual overhead cams" are. I've never known why I should care that a car has 24 valves. I've never known why I should care about "independent front and rear suspension." I'm sure there is a benefit to all of these, but fewer and fewer people want to be mechanics in order to buy cars. We want to know about specific benefits, not about lists of technology that we don't really understand. We shouldn't have to learn about auto mechanics in order to decide whether we want a certain feature.
In the same way, consumers of IT products shouldn't have to know what 3G means, for instance. They just have to be sold on a network's ability to transmit a picture or whatever else it might mean to them. That's not laziness. That's simply reasonable in a world where no one can know everything.
Most of the features the telco's add are things that are just not well suited to the small form factor of a cellphone
Amen! The user interface for cellphones epitomizes the worst possible combination of design compromises -- trying to deliver a cognitively rich array of features in an inscrutably tiny screen space. Customers demand the smallest lightest possible handset and then are disappointed when the screen is unreadably small, the buttons are unusably close-packed, and the battery life (under real use) is pathetically short. Perhaps when eyeglass screens and virtual keybaords appear, then we will be able to enjoy full internet services in a visually large space.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In the 'golden days of railroad' that the grandparent comment referred to, it was ALL private.
So much for your rant about 'privatization' or whatever.
A Good Intro to NetBS
That joke was old 20 years ago!
Because I have glossed through it (a number of months ago), and none of the comments up until now show any evidence of people actually understanding Prof Odlyzko's arguments.
The goal of ATM was to replace network stacks such as TCP/IP, as evidenced by all the different QoS options available (VBR, CBR, UBR etc), as well as all the AAL layers (1 - 5, I've heard a AAL6 might be coming). Switched Virtual Circuits were supposed to be the dominant way connections were set up.
Why has it failed ? There are primarily two reasons :
Another technical restriction ATM has is due to the 53 byte Cell size. As bit rates increase, the number of cells per second increase, which increases the number of cell headers per second the ATM device has to process, which then increases the computational requirements of the ATM device. This is putting huge demands on CPU/ASIC technology, such that it is becoming impossible to build an ATM interface that can operate fast enough. For example, you can already get 10Gbps SONET and Ethernet interfaces, but I'm not aware of any 10Gbps ATM interfaces. They may exist, but they are "late to market", and very expensive, when compared to alternative 10Gbps techologies.
On a related note, the header per second processing issue is also going to be a problem with ethernet in the near future, which one of the reasons why jumbo / 9000 byte ethernet frames is slowly being adopted.
Finally, a note to those who think ATM is successful just because it is being used. You really need to consider and compare the original goals of the technology verses how it is commonly been used. As ATM typically isn't used at all for what it was designed for, then it is a design failure, and an over engineered one at that.
We all complain about how much our broadband Internet access costs. Unfortunately, ATM has contributed significantly to those high costs, because the vendors who have sold ATM want to re-coop all their R&D costs for most of the features of ATM that are never used, so they charge high prices for ATM technology. There are a few things ATM does that other technologies don't, and there haven't been any alternatives, so we have been stuck with ATM, and have been stuck paying for its over engineering.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Multicasting, as a standard service, has not been seriously brought into the Internet because of the difficulty of billing between AS's. There has never been an effective agreement for this (unlike unicast flows). You can imagine the trouble of not knowing how many packets you send out of your network for each one that comes in. Plus ISPs did not want to canabalize their existing unicast customers who might spend less through multicasting.
Moreover, multicast routing has never reached a level of technical competancy, in part because of the billing problem. No one ever really pushed Cisco to make things like PIM-Sparse Mode work properly, and as of 1-2 years ago, it still barely worked.
This brings us to legacy equipment, like dial-in routers and DSLAMs that are not multicast enabled. To turn on mulitcast everywhere you would need to make it a useful service would require something aking to IPV6 switchover (which also, uh, isn't happening fast).
Multicast is alive an well in intra-AS niches like satellite and DTV IP datacasting, as well as special large Internet customers on specific backbones.
Cisco aren't
Juniper aren't either
Neither of them are because either
They don't even go to OC48c or 2.5 Gigabits speeds with ATM.
ATM is being phased out of carrier backbones because it is overly complicated, and therefore overly expensive for what carriers need. Packet Over Sonet/SDH (POS) or Ethernet is taking over.
Just because a technology is being used doesn't make it successful, in particular when compared to its original design goals. It may only mean that there was not alternative at the time. As soon as something cheaper, yet as or more effective comes along (eg POS, 10Gbps Ethernet), the less effective technology will be replaced and / or avoided.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
cheaper to just throw bandwidth at the problem, and then avoid the operational costs of futzing around with proxy servers, with their inherent disk space, OS patch, proxy software patch, hardware failure, etc. etc., problems.
As commonly in life, in networking, complexity is the enemy.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Radia Perlman, in her book "Interconnections, 2nd ed" goes into a small amount of detail about the 48 byte payload decision.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
120 years ago, the railroads didn't work together (different track gauge for each railroad; incompatible couplers, and in England, at one point, there were 3 incompatible brake systems) because they had no interest in playing nice with each other.
Over time, the railroads who played nice with each other had an advantage over the ones who didn't, and legislation eventually did the rest, so, nowadays, railroads are 100% compatible with each other (to the point that engines from one road can be remote-controlled by engines from another road).
One big distinction between the information age and the railroad/canal/lighthouse examples is that there is a huge difference between information and other comodities. Unlike with physical comodities, information can be coppied without depriving the originator of that information and it is extremely easy to change form and type at any given instant. In addition it is always independent of the medium. For those reasons alone, the price discrimination, that he discussed at length (for content, at least) will not be workable in the information age unless you literally become a police state.
Under pre-1970s copyright law, all of this material about telegraphy would have come out of copyright. Someone would have scanned it and made it freely available, probably through Project Gutenberg.
I love these new copyright laws meant to spur innovation... by letting people and corporations get income in perpetuity while producing as little as possible, and locking out the material that no one wants to publish any more.
</soapbox>
Fortunately, we can reroute around this obstruction with open source.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.