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Does Faster Broadband Matter?
tsa writes "There is an interesting piece on Ars Technica discussing the implications of faster broadband services for the users, and for the internet as a whole. From the article: 'Most online activities, like standard websurfing, are not significantly sped up by high-bandwidth connections, and the few that are, such as downloading, are not typically time-sensitive anyway. Many service providers are starting to prioritize their own content at the expense of those from rivals. Many countries have started or are considering blocking Voice-over-IP (VOIP) traffic in order to protect the phone companies from competition.'" How does faster broadband actually impact your Net usage?
The writer of the article seems to be worried most about a "two-tiered Internet" and how the networks are looking to prioritize some traffic over others. I don't see what the big deal is -- prioritization has been built into the IP protocol for decades now. Most network operators, however, have ignored the priorities.
The main reason for this is that if they started accepting priorities from their customers or peer networks, then their customers and peer networks would all set their packets to the highest priority. The end result is that traffic would be routed the same. For QoS to be of any use, there has to be a reason for people not to use it. And, money is the best way of doing this -- if you want to limit the number of high-priority packets going across your network, charge the people who put them there more than if they put low-priority packets on.
Streaming media requires a different type of service than do web pages -- if your GIF logo takes an additional 100 ms to load, you probably won't notice. If, however, a chunk of your phone call takes an extra 100 ms, you will notice it.
The problem comes in when Internet Video becomes widespread, because its need for high bandwith will overwhelm the rest of the content on the network. Prioritization won't help because almost all of the traffic will be video.
The real reason for allowing prioritization is that network operators won't increase their bandwidth without it. Think about it -- why would your cable company spend a lot of money on its Internet service so somebody else can use the Internet service to compete the cable provider's pay-per-view service? The only way the cable company will do it is if they can get a cut of the action.
I work for an ISP in the U.S. We have provided DSL at link speed since initial offering five years ago. That means, if the link negotiated at 1M by 6M, that is what the customer got. We configure all customers at link speed. We also have wireless Internet connections. They are configured at link speed as well.
Our observation is . . . that the faster the customers go, the faster they get on the Internet, the faster they get their surfing done, the faster they get off. And, the proof is in the numbers. With a sample of 500 link speed customers linked at an average of 800kbps up and 5000kbps down, we use no more than 5000kbps of upstream bandwidth on average and 9000kbps at maximum.
And, we have played with the numbers. Slowing customers down to 2000kbps was completely un-noticed by the customers. But, the average and maximum upstream bandwidth rose slightly. Slowing the customers down to 1500kbps was noticed by a few customers. But, the average and maximum upsteam bandwidth rose by 30% respectively.
So, by the numbers, the article is right. Customers use about the same amount of network no matter what. It is a matter of convenience/efficiency for the provider to give the customer a faster pipe . . . for their own benefit.
Does this mean that everyone is being manipulated . . . sure . . . but, it isn't the fault of the network guys. Blame marketing . . . They are the folks who like to manipulate people.
FIOS Prices
$200/month for the 30 down/15 up.
but only $40/month for 5 down/2 up. And gee...since Verizon turned on my neighborhood, my Cable Internet bill droped 35% ($55 to $40).
Competition is a good thing (tm)
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
And no, there's no simple way to reallocate frequencies and have more of it used for upstream capacity. Assignment of frequencies for cable video is a matter of federal regulation.
As a twitch game programmer, I disagree.
While what you say is right for the current crop of games, you are neglecting the improvments that game developers could implement if our customers had more speed. To put it another way, a higher-speed connection won't improve your Counterstrike game (much), since, as you say, that mostly depends on latency. However, if more people had more speed, there are many things developers could do to take advantage of that. Just being able to trim the amount of time we spend optimizing our net code would be a big help, allowing more time for bug-fixing, and preventing many bugs outright, as highly-optimized code usually means brittle code, which over time becomes buggy code.
So, everyone, take Gandhi's advice, be the change you want to see in the world, and always push for faster connections. If you don't do it for yourself, please, think of the developers.
Broadband offerings in Japan:
SERVICE PRICE DESCRIPTION NOTES
Shared fibre (new) 6000 yen 1 Gbit shared by upto 32 users
Shared fibre (current) 6000-7000 yen 100 Mbit shared by max 32 users
Dedicated fibre 5000-10,000 yen 100 Mbit single subscriber
ADSL 4000 yen 50 Mbit Upload speed slower
And of course, we really don't need all those gigabytes of ram, do we?
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Probably me :)
:) The one I'm with is one of the cheaper ones that use NTT's Flet's FTTH deal, I guess with OCN or someone like that I could probably get faster downloads ... but as I get most of my stuff from the US, I'm not constrained by local bandwidth but rather the congested international pipes.
:)
Local stuff I can get down pretty fast. Downloading FC4 iso from ftp.riken.jp at over 4MB/sec. I've not seen it go much faster than that so I probably don't get the full 100Mbit - what, 50Mbit?
But, its nice that my outbound is not restricted, so with a static IP I can host without being embarressed. They don't seem to have any restrictions about what you can and can't do with your line here (that I have found, at any rate) so hosting personal sites and mail is no problem.
Actually, it could go faster I'm sure if I didn't have such a cheap-ass ISP
I can get 800k or so from a good server in the US, but thats pushing it. Though, if I am downloading like 10 torrents at the same time I've seen it go up to 3-4MB/sec
So. Yeah. I think the more bandwidth the better.
Actually, the nicest thing is that I dont ever worry about contention. I can have my torrents running and STILL have enough bandwidth that my ssh sessions to work are not choppy. Without having to traffic shape or some other shenanigans.
I find it difficult to believe that you don't have slower options. Perhaps not from your current provider, but you can probably get dial-up or wireless.
What bandwidth and pricing tiers a given provider offers is a fairly complex and important business decision. While at some point, these are implemented by settings on switches, it involves a lot more than that. Provider capacity does not just magically appear. They need to upgrade infrastructure to support greater bandwidth. They pay for those upgrades by charging customers for higher bandwitdh links. If your provider offered a 1Mb service, they it would have to charge more for their 5Mb service to cover the lost revenue. If they want to upgrade to offering 100Mb or 1Gb service, why not set the basic entry point at 5Mb to help foster developement of higher bandwidth applictions.
The fact that most users don't use most of their bandwidth doesn't really matter. As available bandwidth increases, I think the amount of "unused" bandwidth with increase as well. But total bandwidth utilization is not really what anybody is or should be aiming for. If you want a responsive, reliable network experience, you don't want total bandwidth utilization; you want bandwidth on demand and low latency.
High bandwidth applications already exist. The basic "surfing" experience is much different over low bandwidth links today, and I think this trend will continue as the high bandwidth market grows. As all communications converge on IP and the Internet, the uses for more bandwidth seem pretty endless.
... queueing is. What I want isn't more bandwidth, it's QoS.
I have a cable modem (~4Mbps down, ~400kbps up) and I use it pretty heavily. I run a mail server and a web server, frequently use VNC when I'm away from home, VOIP when I'm at home and often have a bittorrent download running (usually getting some recent TV show), not to mention the normal surfing and downloading activity of a half-dozen computers.
My problem is that latency can get really bad for interactive usage when something else is sucking up a lot of the bandwidth. When someone is receiving or retrieving a big e-mail, for example, surfing can get annoyingly slow, remote telnet/SSH/VNC connections get unresponsive and VOIP becomes useless.
The problem is that one network connection may receive a burst of data that the ISP helpfully queues up for me, so they can keep my incoming pipe full. I also see problems when I saturate the outbound connection for a little while. It appears that they do a lot of outbound queueing as well. The symptom is that round-trip packet times across the cable modem link increase to upwards of _3000_ milliseconds.
I can use traffic shaping to prevent queuing at the ISP, but only by severely restricting my total bandwidth. It makes my VOIP smooth, at the expense of slowing down everything to about 1.5Mbps incoming and 200kbps outbound. For those who aren't familiar with it, traffic shaping basically involves using a router to prioritize and manage the network traffic.
Let me explain how it works (as I understand it, corrections and suggestions are welcome!):
Prioritization of outbound traffic is a no-brainer -- if the router has a VOIP packet, an SSH packet, an HTTP packet and a bittorrent packet all waiting to be sent, it should send them in that order. Management of outbound data volumes is a little less obvious, but still pretty simple: The router limits the rate at which it sends packets. It has very shallow queues and rapidly starts dropping packets which can't be sent without exceeding the specified maximum data rate.
Inbound traffic shaping is less obvious, but also works fairly well. It relies on the fact that every decent IP protocol is not only tolerant of dropped packets, but actually takes dropping of packets as a hint to self-tune. TCP is marvellously good at this. So inbound traffic shaping keeps track of the data that has arrived (both volume and type) and if a connection has exceeded the limit, the router drops the packets. It may seem wasteful to drop data that you have actually received, but doing it will cause the sending TCP stack to slow down the rate at which it transmits, resulting ultimately in a smooth, continuous flow of data at very close to the target rate. To prevent a big "stall" when the data rate crosses the threshold, Random Early Detection (RED) can be used. RED will randomly drop packets even before the maximum rate is reached, with the probability of a drop increasing as the rate approaches the maximum.
Ideally, I should be able to configure my shaper to limit incoming and outgoing data rates to just a little less than what my cable modem can handle, and that should ensure that my high-priority packets (like VOIP) always get through right away.
It doesn't work.
Why? Because the ISP does too much queueing, and does it with a straight FIFO... no prioritization. So while I actually can get a sustained download rate of 4Mbps, latency goes to hell in a hurry. At anything above about 2Mbps my latency goes through the roof and to reliably avoid queuing I have to keep the inbound rate at 1.5Mbps or below.
I understand why they do it... so they don't have to buy as much total bandwidth. Queueing allows the ISP to serve more customers for a given amount of bandwidth to the backbone (yeah, I know, it's not "a" backbone any more). It makes congestion on the ISP's network connection less apparent to the end-user. Suppose I'm doing a big download, sustaining the maximum data rate my cable modem c
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