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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.'"
This is one reason, for example, why Standard Timezones were adopted by the railroads, then telegraphy used to coordinate operations.
More than 100 years ago, there were elaborate protocols to insure that instructions were transmitted reliably and double-checked to insure that no error of communication occured.
Of course, the technology used (telegraph keys and, later, telephone) was not as sophisticated as now, but the essential principles (fail-safe, reduntancy checks, retransmission protocols and whatnot) were there.
It's always fun to watch young pups straight out of school try to solve a problem that was solved more than a century ago by the high-tech industry of the times: the railroads...
Here in the US, it's just taking off. Currently, the pricing is too expensive for most people to take advantage of the 3G advantages.
It is still advantageous for operators to roll out 3G networks. The usage of the spectrum is better, so more people can make higher quality calls using the same space as before.
Also, ATM is very commonly used in cellular networks. I'm not sure how anyone could claim it is a dud...but, like the parent, I didn't read the article...
Doh!
My inside connections at Verizon tell me the company is preparing to offer DirecTV in 2005 to get themselves known in the TV business. Then, by 2010 when they roll out FTTP (Fiber To The Premises), they'll be able to offer television over that. Is this what consumers want from a communications company?
The interweb has revolutionized the way we gather information. It has become a cheap, simple, and reliable alternative to traditional systems such as ancient 'libraries'. Once, many years ago, people would actually travel from their homes or workplaces, to these 'libraries' and browse the 'library's' limited selection. Today, there are far fewer information borders. I see it as evolution. At one time, people would even write on pieces of paper and have them delivered to other people. This could often take weeks, which would seem unbarable when compared with IM services or emails. No, I'm not making up stories, despite how unbelievable. Aren't we lucky?
Hi there
The problem with the networks that have failed is that they have not been able to improve on the status quo enough. A technology may be superior to the current standard, but it must overcome the laziness of the general public; they don't want to switch unless there is a clear and overwhelming advantage to be had by doing so. I refer to the rotary engine... The advantage of experience and existing support for a technology can overwhelm all but a clearly superior alternative.
------- "A true friend stabs you in the front." -Eliot
"but because they were not what users wanted."
*and* the users could get something they did want.
possibly that doesn't need to be emphasized, but sometimes it does. to a degree the net is flexible and allows a number of ways to do things. if it was an oldschool lockdown situation, any of those failed technologies may have "succeeded". not because they were good solutions, but because they were the only ones available.
don't like what your local pop40 station plays? tune in somafm or whatever. we didn't have that option before, and a lot more people listened to local just for the 1 in 20 songs they liked.
the trick for user studies (there's got to be a better term than that, but it's better than consumer) is to be aware where people go when they don't use your system.
ie, how many people don't have a land line telephone? every year a lot more people go to just cel and cable. but most of them are "new" customers fresh out of college, so the telcos don't see them in disconnection stats. there's lots of research holes like that one.
unemployment figures are full of them. up here there's a guestimate 200,000+ that left school then never showed up as employed or on welfare. that's a hella lot of people the gov't doesn't know where they are, and don't put in our unemployment figures because they were never listed as working...
Define "user" I know this guy is not referring to some average joe fiddling with ATM. Hell the average joe thinks a cell is where he's going to be if he uses Kazaa too long.
interface ATM1/0.2 point-to-point
description PVC to Kungfunix
ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.252
no ip directed-broadcast
ip access-group from_Kun in
ip access-group to_Kun out
atm pvc 3 0 33 aal5snap
Oh yea I'm sure the average user is going to bypass DSL or cable and go straight for the big guns. Sure, run an ISP in their own house... User? Define
MoFscker
ATM may not have ever reached the desktop but it is a very good backbone protocol. It was designed from the start for fast switching and has QOS features built into the protocol. Things like Gbit eithernet and 10gbit ethernet are available but ethernet was never designed as a WAN protocol and lacks features that ATM has.
I would say over half of the tier1 ISP's are running ATM on their backbones. That would make ATM a very succesful technology in the Internet.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Most of the features the telco's add are things that are just not well suited to the small form factor of a cellphone (Text messaging is fine on the receiving end, but I don't want sega-thumb from having to push all the damn buttons to enter a reply).
Whatever happened to the cellphone equivalent of the plain black telephone (occasionally available in hotline-red, ghastly-green, or jesus-what-shade-is-that-gray)?
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
An interesting passage in the paper reads:
"Introduction of artifcial restrictions on the Internet would be consistent with other
trends in the modern economy. In addition to legal measures (such as DMCA), the U.S.
government is forcing major architectural changes on the whole IT industry through the
requirement for the "digital broadcast flag." The computer industry is contributing to these
trends with its development of DRM (digital rights management) and "trusted computing"
technologies. The scientifc and engineering developments that gave us the openness of the
PC and Internet platforms are also enabling changes to these platforms that would restrict
what users can do with them."
So, differential pricing based on content, can be seen as another element in the effort to restrict what users can do with the internet or with their computers.
So what you're saying is, Bob the Dentist et. al. were making the decisions on weather or not to impliment QoS or ATM for IT network design?
That actually makes a lot of sense.
"Bill, we need to impliment an entirly new standard over our backbone. Let's call up marketing and have them do a focus group of a cross section of America."
"But the average Joe doesn't know anything about network architecture!"
"You don't want to keep your job, do you Bill"
The Internet is generally stupid
It's rare. One company I know of is Vodafone Sweden, for corporate customers who want to be able to predict their comms bill for the next year. It's one of the few cases where it makes sense for both the provider and the customer.
About 5 years ago, when I was working for a telecom consortium in Canada, one of the guys who was an expert for ATM was telling me that most deployments of ATM at the time were in purely synchronous mode due to the complexity of configuring the equipment to handle various types of traffic. Of course, what you ended up with is a very expensive switch with basically redundant capabilities.
ATM had a lot of promise but it's really an unnecessary technology relative to the amount of bandwidth available. Tons of fiber still lies dark. SONET switches and Ethernet are basically all that's going in these days for medium and long haul. Even for synchronous traffic, fast asynchronous transport can make the asynchronous nature of the medium transparent.
You are right. I was in a focus group a while ago (1999) for a Fiber-to-the-Home test by a large cable op. In the final group meeting they asked the 10 of us if they should continue the rollout. I was the most technical of the group.
Everyone else was very enthusiastic about it. My response was that no one in their right mind would pay more for fiber and a trench in there front yard if the speeds would not be much faster then DSL/cable and the usage was just as restricted. For that reason I thought it was a bad idea. (It really wasn't all that impressive compared to my superfast cablevision cable ISP.)
So yes, I agree. Either they really need to do better at focus groups or they need to ask people who have a clue about tech and know how much various services are really worth. (Fast internet on a small phone without getting a USB/RJ45 IP and paying $$$ is NOT worth it and will fail.)
The reason why it is successful is because it's based on CDMA, and provides more capacity for voice calls and works for users far from the base station, as opposed to TDMA based GSM, which has a maximum distance before transmission lag places you out of sync with the base station.
3G (the European backed UMTS/Wideband CDMA flavour that Hutchison has rolled out) offers little else that users actually want. At its core, it is still a crummy data network dumped on top of a voice network, and voice calls always take priority, causing latency that is only tolerable for simple web browsing or IM. Data rates are meager; despite the claimed megabits of access, realize that all of that bandwidth must be split between many users, some of whom are consuming bandwidth by making voice calls, and then there is the radio protocol overhead, and then the internet packet overheads, and the true data rate is not so hot.
UMTS also has battery life issues (not as if other CDMA based networks don't). And then the carriers are pushing colour displays, polyphonic ring tones, mini cameras, mp3 functionality, and other MIPS hogging features, all in a disturbingly small form factor, which implies a smaller battery.
All of this will contribute to a poor user experience. If anyone reading is from Japan and has signed up with NTT Docomo for their UMTS network, I'm interested in reading your experience.
What worked for railroads will not work for IT because the players have no interest in playing nice with each other. Each company wants to make their own proprietary version of everything and lock it up with patents and DRM.
Why do we have umpteen different voice and movie recording codecs? Why do we need so many DVD formats? Why didn't MS just use ldap and kerberos instead of rolling their own versions of it?
War is necrophilia.
I think you are saying that "QoS" is necessary to VoIP, because if VoIP is flakey, the end users won't use it.
I then think you are really saying that VoIP is a latency sensitive application, so the network has to be engineered to meet the latency requirements of VoIP.
The issue then is how you meet those latency requirements ?
There are a couple of ways you can do that :
So which solution do you choose ?
As a rule, simplicity usually wins out. Maybe not in the first instance, but eventually, over time, things tend towards simplicity. Simplicity tends to be cheaper, and everybody aims for cheaper. There is always a demand in the market for cheaper, and commonly, the only way to achive cheaper is to go simpler.
Costs of running a network are broken into two areas - Capital Expenses (ie. usually initial, setup costs), and Operational Expenses (ie. ongoing running costs).
Comparing the above solutions, the one thing the second has that the first doesn't have is a lot of active bandwidth management and measuring. This can be very expensive to do, when you consider the number of devices and links within the network. It can also be very complicated, as it increases the number of protocols running in the network, and the number of people who need to be paid to watch and operate the network. The QoS solution is not the simpler of the two solutions. The second solution has higher operational expenses than the first.
Comparing the two solutions using capital expenses, I'd suggest the initial set costs of the first solution would only be in the order of about 20% more than the second, accounted for by the additional bandwidth expenses incurred.
The question to ask then is "how long will the 20% cheaper start up cost of the second solution be absorbed by the higher operational expenses of the second solution ?"
My answer is "not all that long". Which indicates that the "throw bandwidth at it" solution, in the longer term, is both simpler and therefore will be cheaper.
As further evidence, consider the Internet. There is very little QoS management on the Internet, with the exception of a recommendation of a default queuing alorithm - Random Early Detection. The Internet solution is to "throw bandwidth at it". Yet most of the time Internet provides good enough "QoS" to allow people to make voice and video calls across it. Certainly good enough to sustain voice calls that are equivalent or better than mobile or cell voice calls eg GSM. Based on that evidence, you don't need to implement QoS technology inside the network to sustain the latency required for typical VoIP applications.
In the Internet, simplicity has won.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
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
You know, I was about to reply with "don't they ALL do it?" and I decided to check. I was wrong. Nextel does "unlimited everything" (24x7 cellular and nationwide 2-way radio) for $200/mo. There are 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month. Take out free Sat & Sun, and 7am-7pm Mon-Fri (4*12 hours, really), that leaves 28,800 "anytime minutes" per month.
AT&T caps out at 6,300 mins/month. Verizon, 5,500. Cingular, 3,000. TMobile has a nice plan with 5,000 anytime minutes but with a three day weekend for just $129/mo. Looks like Nextel is the only carrier I could find stateside that offers truly unlimited usage plans.
Thanks for making me look it up, that was interesting!
Intelligent Life on Earth
Railroads exist as a sad remnant of their former glory, due to being regulated in their innovation by government, and competition with a government run monopoly: roads.
Competition with a free road network did a lot to kill off rail in much of the US, but government regulation didn't kill them... it avoided killing people. If you want to talk about the urban streetcar systems, that's another story, but the "regulation" was what the streetcar operators agreed to in order to maintain a monopoly on a given route.
Regulated travel and transportation is far safer than deregulated. Take a look at airplane accident statistics pre- and post-Regan deregulation. It's pretty horrifying (and firing all the experienced air traffic controllers didn't help one bit).
Innovation is what keeps networks alive, the ability for new players to enter the market without hinderance is what allows the greatest innovation.
And in many cases, it's only through government regulation that new players can enter those markets unhindered. See Sprint/MCI vs. Ma Bell, for instance. How much better did telecom innovation get in the US when the government stepped in and broke down the monopoly? How much has the Telecom Act of 1996 allowed smaller providers to come in and do what the big phone companies are prohibited from doing unless they open their networks?
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Second, always compare with an only marginally related industry or discipline. There has to be enough of a connection to convince the readership, but not enough of one to disprove your preconceived notions.
;-).
Ok, I haven't RTFP yet, though I definitely plan to. Maybe he doesn't make the link particularly clear. But the analogies between transportation and telecommunication networks have long fascinated me, since shortly after I abruptly left the tech support field to get a Master's in Transportation Planning. (For example, if you consider that the basic traffic system has to be collision-avoidance based rather than collision-detection based, it explains a little about why transportation networks tend to be relatively inefficient and have pretty high overhead. You can't retransmit a car.)
Quick note: I'm a little irritated by hearing some American politician label maglev trains as "sexy science fiction" and "stupid". To me, it's part of a worrying trend I'm seeing in all too much of the US, where there is an apparent phobia of making any actual progress in anything. To me, progress is the certain bit. What happens to those who reject it - that's not so certain.
I did a search for this in the paper and didn't see it, so where is it from? I'm curious which politician that was, and which project they were talking about. Mostly because it sounds like they're quoting my advisor
But the fact is, maglev in particular is a somewhat inappropriate technology. Over shorter distances, it's wasted; you spend the entire trip either accelerating or decelerating. Over longer distances, though, it's much more expensive and difficult to provide, not to mention it's hard to find a solid stretch of right-of-way that you can take over preemptively full-time. Maglevs pretty much have to be fully grade-separated, and building an elevated track is about 10x the cost of building it on the ground (generally speaking; I don't know if there are any special considerations with building elevated maglevs).
It is a fun idea, but from everything I've seen it's not a practical component in our existing transportation infrastructure. It might be eventually, but at the moment, it's got a lot of issues.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?