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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...
"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...
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.
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?
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