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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.'"
In traditional /. style, I havn't read the article, so I don't know how this guy can already claim 3G as a dud. Here in Australia, Hutchison is doing fairly well, almost all of their handsets sold out within a couple of months of opening their "Three" stores and I'd say thats a pretty big indication of being exactly "what users wanted".
--
The last digit of pi is four.
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...
Perfectly stated. All I want and care for from an ISP is a good stable connection. That's why I've been with AOL for six montH^@@!0%$*ATDT[NO CARRIER]
One issue is that companies do not tell users what they are actually buying. Users do not want to buy "GPSM" or "3G" or "ATM". They want a fast network for a good price. Somehow companies have to tell them just that.
/better coverage. Users don't care that part of the trick is 3G and such.
For example, here in the US 3G services are sold by AT&T as "MWave" and Sprint as "Vision". Neither vendor actually explains users why they want these services.
On the other hand, Verizon is doing pretty well by just simply explaining users that they provide clearer calls
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
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.
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 power to price discriminate, especially for a monopolist, is like the power of taxation, something that can be used to destroy.
Sounds a lot like Microsoft to me....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
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
DSL is a form of ATM. I don't know if I would call that a "dud". I agree that we were hoping to move all forms of notworking to ATM and that didn't pan out, but still is one of the widest forms of notworking currently in use.
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.
"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
They're also selling it like phone sex - the posters each have a photo of a person not wearing much and the line "Call me" in big letters - funny really.
The paper seems quite light on the subject ("ATM" only occurs twice)...
but indeed Marconi sank billions of cash into it.
Not everyone was happy ;-)
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?
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
Now come on. 48 byte packes was a GRAND idea. After all one side wanted 32 byte packets and the other wanted 64 byte packets so they simply took the average of the two.
sigh...
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.
Seriously, multicaasting is enabled on most of the majopr backbones, but none of the major ISPs supply it - even to broadband customers - at any price. UUnet is one of the few that does. Their links aren't cheap, and from all accounts it can be very hard to get multicasting enabled, simply because a good number of their front-line support people don't know anything about it.
QoS is likewise serioulsy hindred. Oh, it's used in the field. The transatlantic link between the UK and the US has CBQ (Class Based Queues) enabled to maximise the throughput of important traffic, simply because there's so much.
Britain's JANET network has a highly extensive network of web caches. The theory being that one of the biggest loads on the transatlantic link is web traffic, and that the same site is often accessed repeatedly (eg: for University coursework), so that the most efficient solution is to cache everything.
While not strictly "QoS", caching can reduce access times for a web page at peak time from maybe an hour to down to 15 seconds, whilst also massively reducing the load on the network.
RSVP is a different case. That is known to not scale well over very large, complex multicast networks. (Too much overhead.) However, it is great for local networks, and I'm sure that it will gradually filter its way into Universities and mid-sized corporations, where videoconferencing is useful but bandwidth issues make it impossible to do without some QoS.
ATM is used by many xDSL companies, as it is a very efficient way to run a fixed-point to a fixed-point. To say it's not used is absurd and shows a degree of ignorance. It's also very popular in Europe, where people perhaps put a little more investment into infrastructure.
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.
How does this fit in? There's only so much bandwidth. Sure, Lucent is up to 3 Terabits per second, but with collapsing R&D funds and Lucent in enough of a financial mess, don't expect either a rollout, or a refinement, any time soon.
That's the absolute upper cap. The real limit is much smaller. Backbone connections are probably not much more than four or five hundred gigabits per second. (That is to say, about the capacity of two or three hundred well-made Pentium IV-based PCs.)
A relatively small Beowulf cluster could totally saturate a decent chunk of the Internet backbone. Most cluster-based computers, such as the Origin 3000 or the Altix 3000, with sufficient network links, could easiy max out the capacity of any part of the Internet, without much effort.
Why isn't the technology used? Because the customer doesn't want it? The customer has never been offered it!! Very, very few customers even know about it!! And ISPs, in particular, are keen to keep it that way. There is much more money to be made from serving people badly, because the customer'll keep paying for improvements and/or support. The ISPs can gouge the more foolish for years
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
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.
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
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
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?
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>