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Does the Internet Need a Major Capacity Upgrade?
wiggles writes "According to the Chicago Tribune, the recent surge of video sites such as Youtube and Google video are pushing the limits of the Internet's bandwidth, or soon will be. Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, says that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands. Further, a recent report from Deloitte Consulting raised the possibility that 2007 would see Internet demand exceed capacity. Admittedly, this seems a bit sensationalist, but are we headed for a massive slowdown of the whole internet?"
As the article has a quote about it, here's specifically WHY I am against "Net Neutrality" -- the ISP has no control over throttling particular sites or protocols that can have major negative effects on their overall user experience. I've already noticed some network slowdowns, but in the past 60 days I dumped broadband and rely primarily on my EDGE connection from T-Mobile (200kbps). Latency isn't too shabby. When I use my T1 at the office though, I have noticed some slowdowns.
The solution isn't just more bandwidth. We're not talking about more users accessing the same sites, we're talking about more users accessing more sites -- significantly more. The "long tail" of the web is exploding in access; all the blogs, vlogs, MP3 downloads and videos are across a huge incongruent group of sites. The solution is to nix net-neutrality legislation and allow the consumer and the producer to come to terms on need versus price.
At home, I'd be more than happy for a Port80/Port110 prioritized connection, with other ports reduced in speed or performance. Sure, videos come over Port80, but the vast majority of cable users in my neighborhood are downloading torrentz and other similar protocols. I don't see a reason why everyone should pay the same price for different service. Sure, the telecom industry is scared of Net Neutrality because they WANT to ban Skype and VoIP, but that is why the FCC needs to back off on over-regulating the opportunity for competitors to enter the market. There is a huge opportunity for more wireless providers and more people bringing FTTH or other options.
I know, I know, you were promised 160 Mbps and you want every last speck of it. Those ads will change, I think, as more people do get connected. I'd be happy with lower latency than higher data-rates, and I think this article forgets that it is latency that is just as important (if not more so) than just pure bandwidth speed.
The Internet doesn't really have "bandwidth" limitations, because all it takes is more ISPs and more backbones to come into being. If the pro-Net Neutrality parties have their way, though, we may see significant restrictions in investment on both those fronts. The companies who invested in offering new limbs on the internet took great risks -- and some made great rewards. We want to keep that risk/reward ratio uncluttered by excess regulation legislation so others can offer us more options for who we can connect to.
I'm sure if YouTube/Google had it their way, they'd get special consideration for providing more bandwidth -- State-paid consideration maybe? I sure hope not.
When things slow down, it will give new competitors reason for entering the market. 20% more backbone speed interconnecting some Level 2 ISPs and things will be fine, until the next slowdown brings another run of entrants into the game, or gives the old companies reason to expand their network. Envision 2010: "Is your latency too low? Comcast Ultra offers you 50ms or less ping times across the board, guaranteed!" It may sound fishy, but who would have thought 10 years ago that we'd hear about Mbps on basic cable ads?
The last paragraph is the most insightful part of the article:
Any service degradation will be spotty and transient, predicted (John) Ryan (of Level 3), who said that underinvestment by some operators may "drive quality traffic to quality networks."
EXACTLY.
Sidenote: That damned GoogleBot sometimes hits my sites 5000 times a day -- maybe Google is doing a little more to aggravate the problem than they want to admit? Thankfully I use server-side compression and caching, so things aren't hammered too bad by the bot, but there have been times when things on my end were running slow and I had 100 "Guests" all registered at Google's IPs.
Yes!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Qwest is one of the companies speaking out against net neutrality. The CEO even went as far as to call it "really silly." Could it be that the CTO's comments are politically motivated?
I, for one, think so.
Easy fix: systematic caching of bandwidth-intensive content at ISP level.
;)
Disclaimer: I'm currently working on such a project.
YouTube is clogging all the tubes!
... save the bandwith used for spam.
The main bottleneck is the link from the isp to the user.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
The answer depends upon where you live.
In the USA: yes.
Other western nations: probably not.
America's internet is being slowed down by MONOPOLIES not reinvesting their profits back into improving the USA internet backbone.
Yeah, there's going to be a crisis because a half-baked story (without a single hard number) by a Chicago Tribune staff writer says so. I can imagine how this story evolved: "Hmmm...YouTube is popular, people like downloading stuff, what if there's an Internet crisis? That headline will get us plenty of clicks. I kinda know stuff about the Internet because my computer is plugged into a jack on my cube wall..." Heck, Slashdot probably posted this story for the same reason: so people will click around on the site and post about how stupid the article is.
Then the author tosses in a few quotes from people with fancy titles. Add in a few counterpoint paragraphs - not out of a desire for fair reporting, but to C.Y.A. for using an alarmist headline to get readers.
The sad thing is people rely on this for tech news. How about hiring some real reporters who can write articles that don't rely on generalizations or industry talking heads for information?
It sounds to me that we're approaching a problem that reliance on Moore's Law won't fix, and it'll be the domain of Software Engineers to find better ways to manage the data. This may also include development of a new class of even more specialized video compression technologies.
Bandwidth can always be bought (but latency can't)
The internet will continue to grow in capacity and as it has new products will come out to fill the void.
My biggest issues with youtube are at work in our main office. We have a large application hosted in data center. It is a major hub for internet connectivity for the region. Given that we are so close to some big vendors we can get lots of bandwith for relatively low prices. If my employees where sitting in that facility they could surf youtube.com all day.
Now at home I can also do it. I pay Comcast a big more for the extra bandwidth and I can download over a meg a second from some sites. Verizon is going to be laying fiber directly to houses and businesses soon.
Get into our offices and it is a different story. We have dual t1s coming in and only 60+ employees, but we are constantly saturated. Combine that with the fact that Cisco Pixes have horrible throttling support and you end up with times when I can't even access basic websites very quickly. The issue here is that T1s and DS3s are freakin expensive compared to a simple cable modem. We have been tempted to get Comcast bussines ( which makes me shiver a bit ) because I can get larger down pipes for general internet surfing. We only host a few services such as email here so it isn't like we need megs of up bandwith.
Throttling would go along way to solve this issue. Youtube could buffer people down quite a bit, you would just have to wait for the movie to buffer a bit. For shared internet connections and ISPs this could allow for better QOS.
Distribution models will help a lot. Youtube should have replicated servers in major market. As more players get in the video game I'm sure they will be setting up shop in several areas. Video doesn't change that much so when one person uploads it can be replicated throught out the network. You can still host the main links from a centralized place, but then stream the video from the closest location as it becomes available. This takes all the traffic from the west coast and keeps it there keeping people from the midwest from saturating the big pipes that connect the regions. Less hops also means less latency which is good for everyone.
People have been saying this same thing for ever. Telecom companies are just afraid of admitting that they can't charge up the ying yang for DS3s anymore. They are also going to have to invest in their networks which there shareholders hate. It is also the local telcoms that irritates me. Although dealing with Sprint is no treat, dealing with SBC/ATT/other momma bells is huge pain.
Networks are distributed by nature, so it just means you can't pipe all the data thru centralized routers. You are going to have to setup an infrastrute that can do very basic routing in a spider web. You can route packets very quickly if you just look at the first octect...and forward along to another router. All 1.xxx.xxx.xxx thru 5.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx can be piped to a router that knows about those routes, and even breaks it down further. If you think about it they don't even need to do that they can just take the packet and load balance to many other devices. I think it'll be a while before we can't route faster...it is not like faster switching rates is completely dead.
If anything video is just forcing the issue of increasing the capacity, which will always need to grow. Eventually we will be streaming high end video content, and this article will be a long forgotten joke.
This is kinda silly. On the fiber side, a pair of fibers is rarely used to transmit more than about 40 gbps, fiber has proven to handle speeds closer to a terabit and its trivial to run multiple fibers in parallel. We won't run out of fiber capacity on the trunks this century, let alone this year.
The equipment side is a little harder, but only a little. It turns out its relatively hard to switch more than 10 gbps. Doable, but hard. So what? If A connects to B, B connects to C and B is overwhelmed with too much traffic then you add a connection from A to C so that the traffic moving from A to C doesn't have to pass through B. There's always a way to split the traffic instead of increasing the individual trunk. Always.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Backbone ISP's that can't keep up with have to either upgrade or lose business. Same with local ISP's. This is called a "free market".
What needs to happen is a two tiered bandwidth scheme, sort of similar to the local-vs-long-distance telephone issues.
1) incredibly fast access from the ISP to their customers (similar to local phone service).
2) slower access to other ISP's.
It is insanity that I pay one price for relatively slow DSL that works the same whether I am connecting next door or to Japan. We should all have 100 megabit links and be connecting to local caching devices a la Akamai or whatever Google is up to. Local ISP's can also provide these services.
OH NOES!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Raise prices until the underclass can't afford it. Then they'll drop off and stop clogging my intraweb tubes.
Consolidation of ISPs and centralization by telecoms have crippled the Internet. In the past, redundant routes and competing ISPs were commonplace. Today, everybody wants to play gatekeeper and charge for traffic. Less routes & pipes = less bandwidth & redundancy.
... almost every other country (even 3rd world ones), have better network infrastructures. The ISP "dream" is to charge per kilobyte on the sending AND receiving end... like cell phone companies charge per MMS.
For the record: ISPs are making plenty of money on YouTube traffic, they simply want to ALSO charge the consumer. How many $millions per month does YouTube pay? How many $millions per month do broadband subscribers pay? That, we're led to believe, isn't a fair enough arrangement. We must ALSO pay for usage because the ISPs can't live up to their service agreements.
The state of the U.S. Internet is the epitome of greed. Europe, Japan, China,
The Internet needs continual technological upgrades and effective capacity planning... not throttling and surcharges.
"Net Neutrality" is the way to go.
Once you start instituting "tiers" you take away ANY incentives to increase the available bandwidth.
Instead, the "innovation" will go towards extracting the most revenue from the smallest pipes. And "innovation" is in quotes because it won't be real innovation. It will be accounting tricks and tier pricing.
I don't understand why people keep equating T1's to fast internet. Your office has the equivalent of about 50x dialup connections for about 60 people. It doesn't take a veteran sysadmin to understand why that is a problem.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Your argument doesn't actually make any kind of sense.
Personally, I think we should do whatever the fuck it is the Europeans are doing. They've got more bandwidth for cheaper prices and frankly that is just embarrassing. The French are kicking our ass. We've got a serious bandwidth gap going here and it's GROWING. We need more bandwidth for cheaper prices. It's that simple. We've got the demand, our telecoms need to provide the supply already.
P.S. My home computer is saturating my cable modem with torrent transfers over port 80 right now, you lose!
Ted Stevens, what are you up to now?
A push for widespread adoption of multicast could significantly reduce the burden on large sections of the internet's infrastructure. Support for multicast is a requirement for ipv6 so a lot of networking equipment out there will already support it. Apart from the obvious uses for streaming "broadcast" type data, with a little imagination it could be used say for file downloads, where you would join a download being broadcast and a wait until a complete loop throught the file had occured, when the client would join the two sections. With YouTube, poplular videos could also be broadcast (perhaps multiple copies with staggered start times) in an endless loop.
This appears to be yet another atroturfing attempt.8 25230/
See Slashdot post: "How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?" Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 15, @06:19PM
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/15/1
(please remove the silly extra space slash adds to the url above, just before 25230, it breaks the link)
Clearly we are going to be treated to this bogus bandwidth crises bullshit approximately once a week, probably to collect some supportive comments for the need for more control/cost/etc.
Please don't feed the trolls, or help them lay more Astroturf for Net Neutrality.
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
The estimated bandwidth required for television is about 15 Mbps/house, to support a 9 Mbps High-def channel and a few low-def channel at the same time, and the various high-speed ADSL flavors mostly get about 20-50 Mbps depending on distance from your house to the green concentrator box, and there are similar bandwidth constraints to cable TV modem concentrators. The green box has fiber back to the telco office, and a typical telco office handles 10K-100K houses. Fiber-to-the-home systems have more bandwidth from the box to your house, but there's still typically around 25 Mbps per house between the box and the telco.
So if everybody's watching TV at 8pm, and they're all watching different channels, the telco office needs somewhere between 150 gigabits to 1.5 terabits per second. That's *way* more than it's getting today. After all, TV watching has much different statistics than either traditional Internet web+email content or even occasional Youtube watching - it's full bandwidth for a couple hours of primetime.
On the other hand, if the video signals are coming in as television-style content that's multicast, an OC48 2.4 Gbps feed could handle something like 200 high-def channels and 300 low-def channels. Internet-style multicast might or might not be able to handle it - as you start getting more people subscribing to content, it's going to hit the wall and choke at some point. On the other hand, if the telco or cable modem company manages it like a cable TV company selling channels, they can make sure everybody's got access to the "500 channels and nothing's on" vast wasteland of American television, and it'll work. It's not net neutrality, it's cable TV, but it works. There are hybrid models possible (e.g. the telco makes sure there's 100 channels of basic cable subscribed to the multicast feeds and the rest is first-come-first-served, with equipment enforcing the number of channels that get carried so it all fits in the telco office's available feed), but it's not clear that the telcos know how to sell that sort of thing. On the other hand, if they do too good a job of emulating the cable TV business, everybody's going to ignore them and use satellite dishes plus Youtube and Bittorrent.
The real trick with net neutrality is going to be getting the telcos to realize that they should sell you the non-TV part of the new bandwidth they're deploying as Internet bandwidth, with a pricing model different from "it's twice as big as your current bandwidth so we'll charge twice as much".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When he's concerned about bandwidth demand outstripping computing power, that's not a fiber count problem. That's a router problem. He's saying the routers aren't gaining capacity to route packets as quickly as the number of packets to route is rising.
No amount of extra fiber will help if the routers can't keep up. Setting up more routers in the same interconnect centers will bring either bigger routing tables or higher latencies depending on how they're connected to one another. Setting up more interconnects which are more geographically dispersed and which route more directly between the endpoints will help, but that's a very expensive option. New buildings in new areas with new fiber running to them and new employees to man them simply cannot be made into a small investment.
Mesh networks, P2P content distribution, caching at the local level, multicasting, and some other technical measures can all theoretically help, too. So can spreading out the data centers of the big media providers and routing their traffic more directly that way, but again centralization of data centers saves a lot of money.
If demand is really growing too fast to handle (I have my doubts about the sky actually falling) one of the best ways to assure that bandwidth demands are met is to slow the increase in demand. The quickest and easiest way to slow increase in demand for something is to raise its price. That's an ugly thought for all of us on the broadband price war gravy train, but it's basic economics. Let's hope for a technological solution (or a group of them) instead, if it's really a problem and not just hype to hit our wallets in the first place.
I want proof the bandwidth is suffering dramatically. THis all sounds like doom and gloom, not actual numbers.
But because of the bandwidth situation most SA ISPs have invested in massive cascaded caching infrastructure all over the country and at the so-called logical borders where the links exit to the US, Europe and far East. I continually monitor HTTP headers to check the cached status and easily 70% of the regular content I surf comes from one of the local caches.
Even websites within South Africa are reverse-cached, i.e. the ISPs put caches in at the foreign landing points to speed up access (and lower return bandwidth costs) to foreign surfers.
I sometimes think that the rest of the world has forgotten about caching due to the apparent abundance of bandwidth available in those countries. Maybe we'll see a return of caching polularity?
--deckert
The front page of the Business section of the Chicago Tribune has a graphic showing the burgeoning use of the internet over the last decade -- the trouble is I think it is off by several orders of magnitude. The graphic is labeled something to the effect of "Gigabytes over major internet backbones per month" then lists 2006 as 700. 700 Gigabytes per month? With some people downloading HD content there are a significant number of users downloading 700 Gigabytes all by themselves per month. Maybe it was intended to be Peta-bytes per month or Gigabytes per minute or second.
Does anyone else have a more reliable estimate for Bytes the internet is currently carrying per some unit of time?
Letter To Iran
In the UK broadband pricing has fallen to the same level as dialup used to be. At the same time traffic limits have been imposed which are very harsh. So in the Uk the demand won't be a problem as ISPs will disconnect their users or ask them to pay more.
The trouble is, such broadband starves the ISPs of money to develop their networks and broadband should cost more than dialup used to.
YES!
I'm getting sick and tired of waitng 2 minutes to download porn!
"The Internet King, eh? Maybe he can satisfy my need for faster nudity." - The Simpsons
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
A technological solution to the bandwidth problems is not a miracle we're waiting on. It's an eventuality that is almost guaranteed to fulfill its own mission to put money in the pockets of those who make money on bandwidth. While it gets more and more expensive to make the next technological steps so does the target market. There's a lot of ways to potentially deal with bandwidth problems. Better peer to peer, better caching and compression, and many other areas of research are going to step in and keep things sane. There's a huge, vested interest in it.
generated by companies that do not want net neutrality.
Make people fell like there bandwidth is in danger,
Blame it on those kids that don't have a life and download videos all day,
regulate priority.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You know, porn, which takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, is highly highly repetitive. I'll bet you there's a great porn compression algorithm out there that can reduce the whole hour of pumping to a few megabytes.
Let's see...Google owns how much dark fiber?
Joshua J. Kugler
is that a connection is between two points - it's only 5 Meg if it gets from A to B at that speed.
I've got a 24Mbit connection to my ISPs DSLAM - although it does tend to connect a bit slower (I'll forgive them for this).
Anyway, that 24Mbit is max speed - but most IPs I connect to don't give me that throughput.
Now I could blame my ISP for not peering properly to backbone, but that's only half the problem. There's the other leg from the backbone to the B-end.
You connect to a server with 10M NIC, or even a 100M NIC and it doesn't take that many connections to swamp the thing. Look at slashdotting - we don't all feel the need to write to our ISPs to complain about the speed as we've smoked a server.
Even if you limit yourself to replicating the distribution points with a protocol such as SRM or NORM (NACK-oriented Reliable Multicast), you eliminate huge chunks of totally unnecessary Internet traffic. However, there is no reason to limit yourself like that. The latency involved over long-distance Internet connections must exceed the interval time between requests for high-demand video content, so by simply waiting a little and collecting a batch of requests, you can transmit to the whole lot in a single go. No need for a PtP connection to each.
Then there is the fact that video is not the only information that eats bandwidth for breakfast. Static content - PDFs and other large documents - also devour any surplus capacity. So all an ISP needs to do is run a copy of Squid on each incoming line. How hard is that? It takes - what - all of 10 minutes to configure securely and fire up. You then forget about it.
There are people who would argue that it would impact banner ad revenue. Well, banner ad revenue is typically per-click, not per-view, so that is really a weak argument. Then there is the problem of copyright, as the cache is keeping a copy of text, images, etc. Well, so is your browser. Until a major website sues a Firefox user for copyright infringement for leaving their local cache enabled, it would seem that this is more paranoia than practical. As writers have noted for many centuries, we need fear nothing but fear itself. It is our fear of these solutions that are creating our existing problems. It seems the height of stupidity to create real problems for the sole purpose of avoiding problems that might be entirely fictional. "Better the devil you know" is a weak excuse when the devil you know is unacceptable.
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)
You appear to be blaming the Internet for the results of having 60 people on a ~3Mb pipe, when in reality the problem is that you have less than 1/20th the bandwidth per person than they do at home. Of course it's going to be slow. As usual, the problem in the U.S. is incredibly expensive client connections. If the Internet was the problem, you wouldn't be able to send your email or even get to youtube because everyone else would be clogging all the bandwidth. Throttling your tiny bandwidth probably won't help if most of the users need to use the web to do their job. Modern sites just don't work well at modem speeds, which is what your bandwidth averages out to.
Networks are distributed by nature, so it just means you can't pipe all the data thru centralized routers. You are going to have to setup an infrastrute that can do very basic routing in a spider web. You can route packets very quickly if you just look at the first octect...and forward along to another router. All 1.xxx.xxx.xxx thru 5.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx can be piped to a router that knows about those routes, and even breaks it down further. If you think about it they don't even need to do that they can just take the packet and load balance to many other devices. I think it'll be a while before we can't route faster...it is not like faster switching rates is completely dead.
Once again, the problem is client connections. You are the one in a star network with a single provider serving lots of other customers in the same way. Fix it. Set up BGP another couple service providers and then you'll not only have redundant hosting but a more distributed routing model as well.
The solution is to nix net-neutrality legislation and allow the consumer and the producer to come to terms on need versus price.
That's not what net neutrality is aiming to regulate. Net neutrality is about the structure of the business relationships, not the content as such. The current situation is that customers pay the providers to which they connect. Providers have peering agreements. Small providers pay bigger providers, providers of equal size have cost-neutral agreements. If a provider can't satisfy the bandwidth requirements of his customers or peering partners, he needs to invest in upgrades. He will then negotiate higher prices with customers and possibly reevaluate peering agreements. The business relationships are among people and businesses who connect their networks and servers directly. Network neutrality is about keeping that system.
The providers which are against network neutrality want to charge remote parties and throttle their packets as an "incentive" to pay up. That is a massive strike against the long tail of the internet as the intended and likely effect is that only big sites and service providers will even have enough manpower to negotiate with all relevant end-user providers, let alone be able to pay them, so the small providers will have to close up shop or consolidate.
Your provider could still offer you a cheaper plan based on your network "consumption". He just can't have it depend on the type of sites or on the specific sites you will be communicating with. And why should he? It is not whom you communicate with or on which port that kills his network, it's how much of the network capacity you use and when.
The ... Business section of the Chicago Tribune has a graphic showing ... use of the internet over the last decade ... The graphic is labeled something to the effect of "Gigabytes over major internet backbones per month" then lists 2006 as 700 Gigabytes per month? ... Maybe it was intended to be Peta-bytes per month or Gigabytes per minute or second.
Hey, it's the MSM, so cut them some slack. We all know that they meant to say Jigawatts.
640K ought to be enough .... You know who. Sorry if this was already stated.
Dual t1s? is that you gramps? is it 1996? Get some fibre for gods sake! oc3s like what, a few grand a month? For 60 employees doing internet related business thats nothing!
Either that or put a dns entry in for youtube of 0.0.0.0 , or block it on your fancy ciscos. Honestly, if you are at work you should have no expectation of youtube working. I can think of no honest way that watching youtube could be considered work.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Why use Cisco for throttling and other stuff when OpenBSD does it all for free and more, and better too; seriously!
A week ago many Pipex ADSL users received letters telling them their bandwidth usage is too high, citing the Acceptable User Policy (AUP) and Fair Use Policy (FUP) documents on their website which they want the letter recipients to sign & return saying they understand and will comply with the AUP and FUP.
But there's a couple of problems there. The users are on Pipex ADSL connections which are stated as being unlimited, the FUP says it doesn't want its users to download during peak times (weekday 6pm-12am, weekend 9am-12am), effectively putting limits on an unlimited service, that is limits beyond the actual connection speed of the ADSL modem/router. They haven't explicitly stated what they consider 'fair use' in terms of data downloaded/month, and why do Pipex want users to sign something that they're already tied down to? (the FUP came into effect middle of last year and they've been actively bandwidth shaping to reduce 'congestion' during peak times)
Yes this is nothing new, before ADSL became the norm for net connections in the UK, several ISPs who sold dialup connections advertised as being unlimited chucked lots of users off too for going over their undisclosed limits.
Pipex ADSL speeds in peak-time are now a joke anyway, Google Video, YouTube, Metacafe etc. are almost inaccessable during those times because even on a 2mbit connection the video downloads slower than it plays in realtime.
I know the heavy downloaders of torrent/usenet are being subsidised by the majority of casual webbers/mailers paying for the service but I can't see how throwing off the heavy users will improve the service in the long run when streaming video, VOIP (maybe), gaming, torrent, usenet etc. are steadily becomming more popular when people discover the ever growing selection of "OMFG YOU GOT PWNED" streamed video clips etc., people trying VOIP (but what's the use when your ISP speeds are shite during peak-time just when you'd want to talk to friends) and with a little effort users outside of the US can watch films before they come out in the cinema and tv shows before they're aired.
If the net needs anything it needs Quality of Service routing at the customer access point.
NO, I am _NOT_ talking about a non-neutral net. I think net neutrality is mandatory.
What I am talking about is an end to TCP Retransmits in our lifetime. (Ok, that is overstating it a little 8-).
At my home I put together a QOS gateway that throttled my _outgoing_ packets to the speed of my cable modem _and_ made sure that if it had to drop something it would _not_ drop outgoing "mostly ACK" packets. (e.g. outgoing TCP packets with little or no data payload get best delivery.)
This action lowered my incomming packet count and got my effective download speed to closely approach the bandwidth tier I am paying for. This was a 3x to 4x improvement in throughput. This, when combined with the lower packet count, implies that previously I was wasting 2 out of every 3 packets due to unnecessary "recovery" (read useless retransmits).
That cost must, then, have been paid at every step along every trip etc.
Then I turned on HTTP Pipelining on all the (forefox) browsers in my house (etc).
I suspect that if we could do something about the waste ratio, and generally speed up each transaction by squelching the noise and getting better effective throughput, "the intertubes" would be a lot clearer and the capacity wouldn't fall apart so readily.
[aside]
If we could (pie in the sky) get the porn and ewe-tube traffic onto the mbone with smart caching near the client so that each person didn't have to get each part "the whole way" from the provider even though everybody else is watching the same top-ten clips of the day, we could make more progress. This falls apart because it messes up the charging model for porn and advertising, and ewe-tube gawkers couldn't possibly stand waiting 2 to 6 seconds to join a synchronized swarm...
[/aside]
This is very like the whole thing where a guy with half-flat tires is standing around complaining about his gas mileage.
Collision detect style arbitration falls apart when you saturate the link, and cable providers screwed themselves with the way most cable modems fail to buffer outgoing traffic. Penny wise and Pound foolish of them to make the default devices so cheap. Iterate as necessary for businesses and ISPs with their underpowered gateway machines terminating their PPOE (etc).
As for the part where that failure to schedule packets at the most basic level will be turned into "demonstrable evidence" for the "need" non-neutral networks... That will be the "WMDs" of the net neutrality war.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Funny, i coulda sworn that email was gonna bring the 'Net to a grinding halt. And then IM was gonna. And then MP3 downloads were gonna. And then file sharing was gonna.
But hey, far be it from me to question the wisdom of our corporate overlords... if video sites are gonna destroy the 'Net, then We Must Pass Laws!!!1!
Then there should be no lag in WOW anymore.
I've already seen it and I've already sold it to a major international firm (house hold name) for their internal use. It's already been proven and is ready for a major role out. If you are interested, please contact me at trader@fullnet.net. Thanks, GC
You can easily solve that problem by blocking the website called slashdot.org.
On a more serious note, you may want to investigate the benefits of a proxy server instead of directly increasing bandwidth since most of your internet use should be for web pages.
Net neutrality is communist and it'll fall. Why should everyone have equal access to resources? Not all resources are worth the same to everyone. To some email and basic http could be enough.
The question is how to do it without giving too much power to large corporations which will stunt the internet growth. Internet innovation belongs to small companies that are not afraid of taking risks and care about individual user instead of statistics.
my 2c
It's not like we can't easily get that kind of actual data and it's not like we don't have our own personal data to use as a reference point. Instead you get a bunch of proselytizing corporate jackasses. If this was so much of a problem, then digital television people would be positiviely wigging out over HD TV, but are they? No. They're rubbing their hands together with glee at all the revenues from the switch over and the new services they will be able to provide on their fat pipes.
Blah, blah. Corporations should shut up and solve the technical problems. That's how they make their money. If they can't do it, well some other guy will come along and do it and make bank. All this really is, is a pathetically thinly veiled attempt to get more money than they deserve. "If you would just let go of that whole network neutrality thing and let us charge you arbitrary amounts not based on the actual technical cost but rather on how much you want it, we could make so much more money, OMG! Please won't you let us, really...it's too hard the other way despite all the evidence to the contrary, honest, we swear."
Well of course you can rob people blind once costs are arbitrarily fixed by human desire and capacity to spend rather than actual cost of production. Every monopoly ever created is based on that; look at software. *snort*
Looking at my company's network statistics most of the traffic that hit our firewall is unwanted probes and junk on our network. What stuff that goes through the firewall is still has some junk like spam, brute force attacks, and other limited probes. I think at least 50% of my traffic is junk coming from my ISP and removing that junk takes up most my time and if we can eliminate most that junk traffic we can have a more useful internet without expanding existing network infrastructure. In the meantime some time to create a expandable internet without changing too much infrastructure.
Bandwidth is food. Application that eat up bandwidth are customers eating the food.
Current situation :
- Restaurant advertised "All-you-can-eat buffet" for XX.XX$
- Telco are advertising "24mbits connection" for XX.XX$
What Hapened :
- As people get more obese, there are more and more people buying the "All-you-can-eat buffet" option. In fact much more people are buying it as there's food on the buffet. The buffet gets empty before all customer have eaten.
- Broadband get widespread. So much that, at one given time, there are much more people downloading stuff (say 1'000 people x 24mbits each = 24 gbit total) that the provider himself can provide (he's connected 10 gbit to backbone - not even half of what people are trying to get). Line is overloaded, everyone's connection is too much slow and packets get drooped.
The bad stupid solution (a.ka. end of Buffet Neutrality) :
- The restaurant still offers an "all-you-can-eat buffet". But introduce a new rule that in fact people can't only fill their plate maximum twice, no more (it's not all-you-can-eat actually). Or even worse, decide arbitrarily who can refill the plate and who can't based on people's weight. As fat people aren't fashionable nobody complains that they're discriminated against. And the store that provides raw product to restaurant may pay extra to help sell some un-sellable crappy wine and force the client to drink only that one.
- The company continue to advertise a 24mbits plan. But in order that a happy few be able to download their e-mails at 24mbits, they decide to throttle bit-torrent and VoIP. As "only pirates use bittorrent and only terrorist use crypted VoIP instead of regular phone", nobody dares to complain. Some company bully small providers to force them pay for the right to distribute content on the net, and big providers pay extra to be sure that their on-line product is better distributed as the one from the concurrence.
That the solution that would have made sense :
- The restaurant should have :
1. Stop calling it "All-you-can-eat" and call it "Buy one eat 2 for free" !
2. Raises the price to lower the demand.
3. Invest money from "2" into more stock in the cold room.
Otherwise, selling "All-you-can-eat" and limiting the servings is just plain False Advertisement (and there're law against it, at least in europe).
- The internet provider should have.
1. Stopped calling it a "24mbits" connection and re-name it as "10mbits" (or in a more twisted way "up to 24mbits max*" - with the * small print admitting that only 10mbits are guaranteed all the time).
2. raised the price per bandwidth to lower the demand.
3. invested money from 2 into a better infrastructure that could handle the required bandwidth.
Otherwise advertising 25mbits and then throttling is just pure false advertising.
Now I can submit it to the "worst analogy" contest.
Ever heard of something called robots.txt ? It's exactly for that purpose, and works with other spiders too.
If your server can handle some load, you shouldn't post the URL on
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not only spam but also the DDoS attacks.
The ISP knows the IP addresses on their network. There shouldn't be any reason for a forged packet to go out over their routers.
Right now, there is no reason why the ISP's cannot charge different rates for blocking/opening outbound connections on port 25. The average home user won't be running an SMTP server INTENTIONALLY and will happily take a $5 per month savings for having such blocked.
There, two of the worst problems on the Internet are significantly reduced. THEN we can start talking about whether ISP's aren't making enough profits.
And that is what "Net Neutrality" comes down to. The profits.
> meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to
> keep ahead of their capacity demands.
A wise man once said that the Internet was not a dump truck, but that it was in fact a series of tubes.
Just pour some drano in there. Start with your local phone or cable box by your house or apartment. The sparks and smoke are just the internet cleaning itself. Presto: more bandwidth.
(Disclaimer: do not do what is suggested above. The person referenced also isn't a wiseman, fortunately...)
Why would Internet NOT need a major capacity upgrade?
More capacity is ALWAYS needed. When will I be able to watch YouTube clips in HD quality?
Sounds like you need to get yourself a halfway decent QoS box and start throttling traffic on your end. Throttling traffic at the ISP level isn't going to do a damn thing for you.
Better throw in a content cache in there, too (Squid) if you haven't already and force everyone to use it.
First of all I've heard that the Internet is going to collapse about once a year since '97. So I'm not going to believe it until I hear my DSL modem crying in agony.
Second of all, eliminating net neutrality would make the problem worse. Why? Because it would get all these companies using complex routers to figure out how to prioritize all that data. The limitations expressed here are not bandwidth, but rather processing power limitations. It's about routing. Routing packets is a shit load easier when you don't have to dynamically figure out what the hell they are all doing.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Having worked in the ISP market for the past 7 years I have seen the access portion of Internet access go through multiple fazes. From a single T1, to 4T1's, a 10Mbps feed, 100Mbps and now Gigabit and even multiple Gigabit connections to multiple peers.
For a standard ISP it's a given. Your bandwidth needs double, if not triple once every 2 years, 3 if you're lucky. New technologies come up at a regular pace, it's a part of the industry. Whether it's graphical websites, streaming audio, peer to peer networks, or streaming video, new technology creating more demands for bandwidth requires you to upgrade your network access over time.
Having said this, working for a company with over 10,000 highspeed and dialup internet subscribers, I have found some interesting trends. It's not the Youtube's, VoIP, Peer2Peer &etc eating up our resources... It's spyware infected machines, spam attacks and hacked servers that eats up the bandwidth. When I take a look at my network utilization and see a spike I don't say to myself "Oh no! There must be a hot new movie on YouTube that everyone is watching." Far from that! I say to myself "Stink! What spyware program is it this time." or "is my web server under attack again?"
In addition, as access rates increase I've noticed that performance issues is less affected by the speed of the provider network I'm connected to and more by the remote sites access speeds. You'd be surprised by the puny amount of bandwidth the majority of websites on the internet run on. High Bandwidth sites running on fractional T1's, it's just crazy! Entire computer networks run on the cheapest network equipment known to man.
Has anyone taken a good look at the WorldComm's, Level3 and Bell networks of the world? They are already at 10Gbps with MPLS are their core, and multi-gig connections to their customers. The internet backbone looks better than it ever has! There are far more problems with the endpoints of the internet than the backbone, and it's about time that people took more responsibility in making sure that their network elements are properly backed by the appropriate amount of bandwidth and secured from basic security threats than complaining about their backbone providers.
Quandary in the Making
Enable multicast.
That way, all the pr0n and digital radio and multiple broadcast stuff like that won't be choking up the relays with redundant packets. You'll see a 1000% improvement the day they mandate multicast I'll betcha.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If multicast and p2p were used more over simple unicast, then much of the duplicate traffic could be avoided.
If the packets aren't being forged, then it's not difficult to identify them and block them at an upstream router.
As long as the ISP has decent routers and people capable of correctly configuring them.
And that allows one ISP to talk to the other ISP and provide them with a list of addresses and times so that those customers can be notified or other action taken.
Although most users tend to abuse the Internet link somewhat I can not really see what they are moaning about. ...making the big bucks. Ironicly in the deals they have made they have grassed up the same people they used to make them selves popular and get bought up for the big bucks.
You the user pay quite an amount of money for what you should realize is a "peak" rated service. Obviously with contention ratios your real millage varies Tremendously! I think that this is the commercial kick back after the first "free" hit, the technology now has a sufficient take up to be a valid medium such as TV and Radio. The quality of content is consistently been hammered down especially for free services(free in cash or in we take your name and details and spam you for ever type free). We are constantly subjected by SPAM/Directed advertising from our online commerce and from various banner adds etc up down left right of our screens. Youtube got interesting by flaunting the Law (or rather getting others to do it!!), you take the commercial clips off Youtube then it's mostly Drivel produced by wannabe monkeys. The important thing here is that now it's used its notoriety to go commercial and become a delivery mechanism for 3rd party content
Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications...
With a name like that he should be doing porn instead.
The internet is essentially one giant stadium, and computers are the toilets in this stadium. When all the toilets go flush! at the same time, the sewage pipes inside the stadium walls cant handle it, and so they burst.
When you work for a gigantic media company, like I do (Viacom), there's quite frequently work-related reasons to be watching something on YouTube.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I thought we (America) were criss-crossed with tons of fiber from the good old "You mean you can transmit smells through the Internet!?!?" days of the nineties.
Capacity my ass, which by the way holds quite a bit. I've been upgrading all of our home users to at the mininum 4mbit to the max of 10mbit over the last eight months. All of them have run at the speed promised and nobody's bitched. That is the true test of the "whoo, whoa" INTERNET "whoa, whoo"...Employees not bitching. But who knows what happens when a few of them go to South Korea this summer. Damn you South Korea and your Star Trek lightspeed Internet everywhere.
All of those are through their local ISP.
I'm not sure it matters how many people are on a T1 really. You'd think that when people hear that term that there was a halo around it. "Wow, our company has an entire T1!" I can saturate that with ONE download. After you start clogging the pipe with more connections you'll obviously have problems, but 3 severe users can single handily take that up. The only realistic solution I had was to set up a FreeBSD firewall and start segregating traffic. It actually works quite well but I'm already hearing things like "Is there something wrong with the internet? It seems slow?". I think part of the problem is that no one (normal people) really seems to know how much bandwidth a T1 has, 1.5Mb sounds like a lot but that's bits, not bytes, and the fact that many people don't even have a grasp at how big anything on the internet is - 1500k pictures are just numbers to them.
People use their connection in bursts. Right now, I'm sending and receiving a very small amount of data over my IC. In a moment I'll send this post + headers and receive a response. (Then send a few more requests for the banners and receive responses.) Then I'll sit around not sending or receiving much for a while while I read the other posts. Sure, some data will be transmitted in the background as I read, but not nearly 5/6 of a dial-up connection's max. There may be brief times when everyone on a network are all trying to use a sizable portion of the capacity, but that's not going to happen a lot.
It's OK--I read that they are taking the Internet down on April 1st for maintenance to make it run faster.
You seem to be forgetting media streamers, email attachment monsters, p2p clients running in the system tray,and heavy downloaders. Sure, if everyone just surfed slashdot all day things would be fine. They don't.
And if you have ever done enterprise IT, you know that we don't allow media streamers, p2p clients, or heavy downloaders of non-work-related material. Heck, we don't even allow use of Hotmail by most people.
Yes, my name is big brother. And I *am* watching.
For every 1 gig you don't download, I'm going to download 10.
According to this guy, the US consumer has already paid for a lot more bandwith than what we are collectively getting, and the implication is, hold the telcos feet to the fire until they provide it-then maybe we can revisit network neutrality. A contract is a contract, a public commitment should be followed through on.
m
http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.ht
this is clearly a rhetorical question.
anyone who has a brain knows the answer is yes
They're using their grammar skills there.
The argument really depends upon one thing: the passageway between the Internet and the users. Routers are funnels for bandwidth anyway. The lines laid out between the larger routers of the Internet can handle the current trends for years until some huge problem arises. People are complaining about slowing speeds because they don't want to fork over the ca$h to get a better router. If the demand is high enough, maybe the ISPs will lower the prices on faster connections.
-Bob
You want "port prioritized 80 and 110 traffic". Fine. You can pray that a company is going to offer such a service. Good luck, talk to you in 20 years.
What you morons fail to remember is that this goes in cycles. Dialup modems in the mid-90s went through this same cycle. Then we went through it again when DSL was 640K down, 272 up in 1997. And again when cable modems jumped from 1.5 to 3.0 meg.
I have a 2 year old laptop. I don't have any trouble. There are some 3D games that won't run on my laptop, but essentially, anything available on the DS3 at work, or my 6meg cable modem at home runs on my laptop just fine. And it also runs just fine on my iMac.
Pieter might want to go visit a google installation to see what "off the shelf" hardware will get you.
The biggest issue I face is the LAME upload speed on Comcast... and the fact that they STILL won't allow people to hit port 80 at my home. Comcast says it's because of Code Red. That was 6+ years ago. Get a fucking life! I still get hit by Code Red, and it's coming from INSIDE Comcast's firewall. Idiots. Complete fucking idiots. "We're doing it for your safety." Yeah, right. You're doing it because you're too stupid to know how to run a business. I have 6 meg down, 384kilobits up... and I'm LUCKY to get that. Speed tests indicate I get something less than 330kilobits. It's extremely irritating. Too bad AT&T can't get their head out of their ass and offer something better than 1.5meg. I'm 2000 feet from the DSLAM, but the copper is so crappy I can't get anything more than about 2meg for a download, and about 1 meg up. It's pathetic. Phone calls go to deaf ears. I dropped them like a hot potato, and they had the nerve to call me back and ask why I dropped. Poor communication, poor implementation, poor repair and maintenance procedures. I live in a NEW fucking house in a NEW fucking subdivision. There's no reason I shoudl be getting uncorrected errors on a DSL line at 2000 feet. At 2000 feet, I should be able to train up at 15meg on an ADSL2+ line. Too bad they have a 6 or 7 year old antique Alcatel DSLAM. If they'd upgrade and hang doorflyers, the entire neighborhood would DITCH Comcast in a flash.
Comcast's node fails once or twice a day. They have repeaters that blow up once or twice a week. It's pathetic.
If someone came out here and put PON into the neighborhood, they'd make a killing.
Listening to Pieter Poll bellyache about the current state of affairs... makes me think that there's more to the story. They're going to ask for a rate hike so that they can "invest" in the network. Balloney. They're still trying to avoid going bankrupt.
for nearly twenty years the COMO industry has pocketed BILLIONS of dollars in tax giveaways and subsidies while promising to connect us all with OPTICS... they have continued to stretch copper co-ax because it is cheaper and now they expect BILLIONS more in tax breaks and subsidies to fulfill the promises that they have already broken. Asia and Europe are enjoying speed and capacity up to TEN TIMES our CABLE connections for a fraction of what we are now paying for inferior service and nobody will stand up to speak to the problem.
If ISP's are losing all the bandwith they have already then upgrade links, they always can put another fiber links and problem solved. Is sensasionalist to talk about an Internet exceeding the limits because there always have existed a limit and always have been upgraded so What's the big deal?!
ghostbar page.
Stop shivering. Take the plunge. Comcast's business offering is actually pretty good. I've been using it for the past four months, and I have nary a complaint. However, if they need to lay coax to reach you, you're kinda boned -- they do expect you to pay for it, and it can get very expensive. Otherwise, Comcast seems commited to providing high-quality, high-speed asymetric Internet service to business clients. On the residential side, I wouldn't touch them with an 11-foot pole, but it's a whole different world on the business side. It can't hurt to give it a try.
Here Here - the UKs BT back bone is totally setup full of routers that can handle a lot more bandwidth than what is publicly used trust me, i have seen these installed. The problem lies with big Isps such as Tiscali, orange, vodaphone, pipex and simunlar size ISPs that advertise "Unlimited" Broadband - but then regulate UK customers by slapping them with a Fair usage policy they claim on peer two peer policy - (((his fair usage policy automatically identifies the very small number of extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth only during peak hours (6pm to 11pm Monday to Sunday), to protect the service for all our other customers. Outside peak hours, the use of the internet by these heavy users is unaffected.))) Err but i am on Business Board Band and i get a slower Response than an personal account. Ho well another search for a smaller isp will do and I do pay more but I get a much better download rate, thank god I found a small isp. Beware of monopolies in the UK, as "offcom" have a ghost whip which they pretend to use and get pay backs for not taking action. Hoo Ra England!
This whole discussion was happening a lifetime ago.
Everyone who had service with The Phone Company was paying for a dial tone and the ability to place calls on demand. Except even that network was oversubscribed. It was nowhere near the capacity to offer simultaneous dialtone to everyone who was paying for it.
What The Phone Company did that ISPs don't seem to handle as well was accurate demand forecasting and investment to the point that they could handle anything short of a regional disaster or Mother's Day.
Imagine a point-to-point connection where every link in the network connecting them was unsaturated, all the routers had spare CPU capacity, and there was 0% packet loss.
Imagine a world without war.
Imagine more money than you can spend.
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
Nothing to kill or die for
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
Or all that bandwidth so great that "every link in the network [] was unsaturated, all the routers had spare CPU capacity, and there was 0% packet loss"
Trust me:
1) Bandwidth expands to occasionally congest an installed link of any size. (The TCP throttling algorithm actually is written to do precisely that, in order to maximize throughput.)
2) The transport providers aren't going to install, and the ISPs aren't going to buy, enough backbone bandwidth to guarantee zero packet drop to all best-effort traffic, despite total saturation of all edge links to customers. (Their investors won't let them - and if they did they'd still be bankrupted by competitors who didn't, and could thus undersell them.)
3) Even if the backbone links didn't saturate, file transfers over TCP alone will (automatically) ramp up until they saturate edge links, killing the QoS needed for other services on those links unless there is QoS-driven queueing.
But if you'd actually bothered to read my previous post you'd understand that, since I made the points there.
Meanwhile, legacy services include contractual guarantees of QoS levels. In order to live up to those contractual committments while converging that traffic onto a common IP-based backbone the ISP must have similar guarantees that the designated packets will go thorough. To do that he must (first) insure that there is bandwidth to carry them and (second) insure that competing UN-guaranteed packets don't create congestion that bumps them.
He can do the first easily. But the second requires that un-guaranteed packets receive lower service levels than guaranteed packets whenever there are more packets than capacity, period.
Bland assertions that he COULD have installed enough bandwidth that the packets would never be congested won't cut it. The installed bandwidth is what it is, and any momentary burst of traffic that exceeds it can not bump the packets for the guaranteed service or the contract is violated.
So the ISP requires QoS-guaranteed service or he can't converge.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Isn't the state of the art in DDoS to have each zombie make plausible requests at some reasonable rate?
A big botnet (60K zombies) could have each one fire once a minute and request some graphics-heavy 300KB page on your site. 300 KB * 8 bits/byte * 1000 downloads/sec = one OC-48 (as if your server could handle it). Move the graphics, and if the botnet is under realtime control it will start hitting the new location. Remove the graphics, and in some markets your site is out of business.
This article is a lobbying article. And trying to get people into writing letters to their Representatives in Congress. In other words, Slashdot got duped into a political lobbying.
And Net Neutrality should exist. Where there is a problem, there is a solution. Qwest and others just wants to take the easy out instead of solving the network congestion.
Solution: Serve up the data faster to clients can disconnect so others can connect, download, and disconnect. Since servers use T3 or OC lines, it's not the server in question. It is the clients inability to receive the data at faster rates. Imagine if every computer in the world had a OC-48 connection. Verizon has the right idea too. They are connecting Optical Fiber to residential customers and hooking up Gigabit Ethernet in homes. It is a start in resolving the problem.
\
People here seem to think that ISPs are evil for not having trunks that are 1:1 for what they sell. But that's the way it is for most things!
What do you think would happen if everyone in my neighbourhood was to turn on everything electric and max out all of our 100 amp services at once? I'm going to bet that we'd blow a BIG fuse somewhere. Ditto cell phones, water, sewer (maybe), bridges, transit, long distance phone service, etc.
My ISP advertises a 6Mbit line, and I get it most of the time. Do I really expect to be able to download at that rate 24/7 to grab 1.9 terrabytes a month? (Did I blow a decimal place?) Nope.
I would expect the people in charge of water service to get pissed at me if I left all the taps running 24/7 (we're still unmetered for water) -- expect of course, it's quite inconvenient for them to track that sort of abuse.
This is rather humorous coming from QWEST. They can't provide more than a 5Mbit DSL pipe to consumers, and they're complaining about not being able to *keep up*. How is it Verizon can lay FTTH, yet you can't cut it with SLOW DSL qwest? What a joke.
Essentially they're looking for a way to make even MORE money off their crappy service because they f-ed up 7 years ago.
Get into our offices and it is a different story. We have dual t1s coming in and only 60+ employees, but we are constantly saturated. Combine that with the fact that Cisco Pixes have horrible throttling support and you end up with times when I can't even access basic websites very quickly. The issue here is that T1s and DS3s are freakin expensive compared to a simple cable modem. We have been tempted to get Comcast bussines ( which makes me shiver a bit ) because I can get larger down pipes for general internet surfing. We only host a few services such as email here so it isn't like we need megs of up bandwith.
What kind of traffic are you seeing the most? What kind of traffic is high vs low priority?
You might consider going ahead with that Comcast DSL and routing all the low-priority and bandwidth-sucking traffic out that pipe, while leaving the important stuff on the dual-bonded T1.
I could cook something up with an old P3, two $6 NICs, and a CentOS Linux CD using IPTables and NAT, with a few custom rules, YMMV.
I did something similar at a local ISP. Believe it or not, they used SBC DSL for their internal staff, and hosted a few thousand dinky websites on a dual-bonded T1. Websites were all served on the T1, but the internal staff got to everything but their own servers on the DSL line. Worked great.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Although the ..AA and networks have fought to centralise control of media distribution, the solution to the problem of our desire for content and the bandwidth to distribute it in a decentralised model. This is why P2P matters, and why it's regarded as a threat by the true copyright pirates - whose previous business was selling circles, not music or images.
Well, my experience varies. I can d/l from my portage rsync mirror at the U of Wisconsin Madison's Chemistry department at a full 1.2 MB/s yet when I connect to ANYTHING else, I pull maybe 100 KB/s.... the stuff folk bitch about is just the simple fact that you're limited by what the server can cough up that you're connected to. Anytime I need to remind myself of this, I simply pull a file directly off the U of W server and watch it reliably pull the full 1.2 MB/s... even when google and any other site take 10s of sitting there to pull up a home page. Explain that one to me.
My Babylon
Back in the early days of internet dial-up was all they had and T1 seemed like a miracle.
They didn't think about cable modem speed,just assuming T1 is fast.
Tx something is inherently more expensive then any cable account.
In my opinion it is the contrary. There is a lot of unused (potential) bandwidth that is not being used.
Visit http://www.kaizenlog.com
thank you, a very good point!
"So if everybody's watching TV at 8pm, and they're all watching different channels, the telco office needs somewhere between 150 gigabits to 1.5 terabits per second."
That's why people are waiting for the goddamn fiber we have been paying for all these years. It gets pretty sad when government is more efficient than business. Only way people will get fiber in their lifetime is through municipal projects such as UTOPIA. Don't see me complaining about my triple play.
For ISP's, content providers etc Sun's Coolthreads T2000 server with it's 32-core chip, 10GigE, parallel NIC's and low power usage can solve the web/email server issues
We can solve the technology and often have, not the politics or economics.
Nice AC post, but you are wrong in decrying "us" with your factlessness.
First: TCP doesn't start at full window size. Then gains throughput linearly adding one MTU length to the amount of the window size it is willing to risk/fill per ACK. TCP falls back exponentially, that is, every single fault detected cuts the senders willingness to fill the TCP window by half. Maot (all?) TCP implementations actually only ACK every other frame if they don't have any data to send in the other direction. When you factor all this together and add some numbers (which I may get wrong here as I typing without ready reference) it only takes 1 lost outgoing ACK per 2n*log(n) frames where n = window_size/mtu, to limit your downstream speed to an aggregate of 1/2 the channel maximum. So lost upstream packets are quite expensive as a limit.
Next: Everything you said about UDP was immaterial or misleading at best. The reason "streaming" video is usually UDP has to do with the fact that it is generally better to drop frames than delay the program. This is especially true if you are trying to get anywhere near your hardware bandwidth. The ramp-up rate and the exponential fallback mean that you can _only_ loose time to dropouts, but you cannot ever "catch up to 'now'" on a live broadcast because even when you _do_ get the data and you _do_ have the bandwidth to catch up, if you show every frame at the encoded framerate after the pause, it wont ever go "slightly faster than normal" to catch up without the operator doing a seek/fast-forward. So every time you drop frames you permanently lose real wall-clock time. With even minimal frame dropping your schedule would slowly sag back in time. EVEN WITHOUT ALL THAT the streamer/broadcaster doesn't want to have to buffer-for-retransmit N frames for N sessions. It would be very expensive in server hardware alone. So non-UDP is a non-Starter for all streaming media.
Next: I don't know about the 1meg statistic and argument made by the grandparent, but empirical evidence suggests it is invalid. I can demonstrate massive changes in performance for _tiny_ tweaks once I relax throttle beyond the outgoing rate of the modem. (That is, if I throttle to 767kbps I get nearly perfect 8mbps download. Up the throttle to 769kbps and the throughput drops to median 3mbps and so on. I _did_ the experiment.) I have no provenance for that "1 meg" number, nor do I know whether that number is for upstream cache, downstream cache, or both; nor do I know whether that buffer is subject to fragmentation. So I really cannot address this number. Empirical evidence suggests that the practical value of this buffer is apparently minimal.
Next: The cable side of the cable modem is running (essentially) ATM. In particular, this means (1) that the cable side for data flowing from your modem to the carrier is restricted by the rules of pure Time Division Multiplexing and (2) any dropouts in the ATM stream will _not_ be corrected by the cable modem/carrier link, so any misses/drops will have to be resolved at the TCP transport level. Skipping that for a moment, since the cable modem doesn't get any "credit" for unused ATM slots when the modem buffer _didn't_ have data to send. That means that "bursting" from the link to the modem is "bad". Your modem can send 768kbits (if you have the "good package") and your Ethernet link can send 10mbits per second. It isn't that hard for the later to overwhelm the former in a burst because the upstream buffer can be filled 12(?) times faster than it can be emptied in uniformly optimal conditions.
Next: Is it likely that during normal network activity, that a customer would be likely to fulfill the conditions likely to cause fault. In my house it is typical to have at least three computers actively using the network. Before considering the bidirectional UDP of streaming games, we have to consider that each element of a web page is a complete outbound HTTP request (with cookies and all you get a typical upstream size of 2k, and then it can be i
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
i dont see whats the problem here ? let the goddam telcos upgrade the backbone.
there were NO problems when they were reaping phenomenonal profits while overselling their lines ? They saw that there was nothing on the internet to cause a client to use their allotted 1 Mbit bandwidth to the fullest, people used only 10% or so of the bandwidth, so they oversold like hell.
So it is a problem now when they will need to invest some of the easy earned overselling cash back into the backbone eh ?
Nay sire, let them put some of the sweet bucks they made back into the game. MAKE them invest to upgrade the backbone.
Read radical news here
I love it...ROFL.
If there were 10K to 100K different TV channels to watch, that is.
Will occur due to all this IP right garbage. If you fear being sued almost just beacuse you are online, it will become less attractive.
I think we are about to hit the apogee of net useage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why is that sad? Isn't that the way it should be?
... and then they built the supercollider.
My dial-up connection is very consistent. It is a rock steady 28.8 Kbps and does not slow down. Text only web browsing works quite well. FTP downloads/uploads are a consistent 3 KB/s.
I wouldn't even think of looking at youtube.
The internet does not need a "Major Capacity Upgrade" It works just fine at 28.8 Kbps (depending on site design mostly, not available bandwidth). It is a matter of perspective.
Charge people for the amount they download.
Here in the UK "unlimited" connections are very rare - you pay for the speed of your connection, and that comes with a basic usage allowance (2GB for light users, 50GB for heavy ones, for example) and then when you go over that limit you pay for each GB you download (about $2). (Example prices are from Zen ADSL - http://www.zen.co.uk/Broadband/athome.aspx), who I'm not affiliated with, and don't use, but have a good reputation.)
So if you're just surfing the web and checking email you can get a light user account, if you're watching videos/downloading music you get a heavy one, and if you're constantly getting ISOs or torrenting then you pay for the privilege. Nobody subsidises anyone, and people pay a fair price for what they actually use.
Why, exactly, this hasn't caught on in the US is beyond me.
My Journal
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted!
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
You're not "big brother" if you're watching over your own property. The "big brother" problem is when you have an authority which you cannot escape from doing overly intrusive things.
;)
One can always quit a job with your company, for example.
...that sites like that are just a huge waste of resources.
I had thought the bigger problem would be the P2P file sharing (bittorrent, emule,...) which takes much bigger bandwidth then GOOGLE VIDEO nor you-tube.
let's calculate a bit, let's say I've downloaded 1 movie which is dual DVD-r, which is 8.6 GB, if an average movie weighs in you tube 1mb, it means that I will need to watch 8600 movies in you-tube just to take 8.6GB of internet bandwith. so why you think youtube/google vid would be any problem to net's bandwidth?!
So, why not allow common carriers to charge different rates to ladies in a hurry with nice coats on? Or when you make a phone call maybe you should have to explain to the operator how important the call is so they can charge you more if it is urgent.
Sounds like a panacea to me. Ya, right
Have you considered, we already have a lack of "Net Neutrality". It just depends on what you call what. If you are rich enough, you can most likely buy a research position and get access to INTERNET2. How much that costs, dunno. But I'm sure it's available for the right price. You just don't like the current rate structure.
Problem is American Capitalists. They wouldn't use net-coloring (non-neutral) to give better service, they would use it to force more money out of current customers who are using their alloted bandwidth.
The market seemed to shift -- primarily with the advent of electronics and computers. Price to consumer is no longer based on "cost" -- it becomes a function of consumer desire. It becomes about extracting the most money out of a consumer that they are willing to pay. Unfortunately too often, that doesn't translate into better service until the government gets involved -- especially in the form of government spending.
Meanwhile the cable companies get richer and consumers pay more for the same or lesser goods.
Net Neutrality violates the beloved End-to-End Principle just as much as tiering does. Except this time the "smart" centralization put onto the network is the FCC instead of the QoS routers. Now, tiering is bad, but how can so many Slashdotters not remember that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is REALLY REALLY BAD?!!! Telecommunications Decency Act?! HELLO?! Were you even on the Internet in 1993?
As the first post stated, the solution is to eliminate the barrier to entry created by the FCC for the Telcos that prevent open free-entry competition from driving prices for ever greater bandwidth down. Ask yourself why ONLY the Phone Company and the Cable Company are LEGALLY allowed to bring a wire into your home.
See, people complain about UK ISPs, but as the post above shows things are infinitely better than in the US...not WONDERFUL, but still far better than in the US. I'm with TalkTalk, for christ's sake (for the Yanks, TalkTalk introduced a free broadband offer and were completely and totally unable to satisfy demand), and they haven't given me any trouble whatsoever despite all the bad press, and recently just bumped me up to a consistent 6mbps download (even on torrents). It's quite impressive. Compare with some of the American horror stories...
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
With apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer
The outlook wasn't brilliant for the student march that night;
The quads were filled with rent-a-cops and not a picket sign in sight;
With Cooney busted for possestion, and Barrows, the riot laws;
A sickly silence fell upon the supporters of The Cause.
A straggling few got up to go, in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which "springs eternal in the human breast;"
They thought, If only Gay Doc Ruby could be rallying that mob,
We'd put up even money now, with Doc Ruby at the quads.
But Flynn preceded Doc Ruby, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a no-good and the latter was a fake;
Forlorn, that stricken multitude discouraged by the odds,
For there seemed but little chance of Doc Ruby's getting to the quads.
But Flynn let fly a bottle, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despised, set a bomb off in the hall,
And when the dust had lifted and men saw what had occurred,
Jimmy beaned the Dean of Students, while the bombed out library burned.
Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell,
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell,
A Harley roared up from the street, and was tearing up the sod,
And Doc Ruy, Gay Doc Ruby, was advancing through the quads.
There was ease in Doc Ruby's manner as he wheeled into his place;
There was pride in Doc Ruby's bearing and a smile on Doc Ruby's face,
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly gave a nod,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt `twas Gay Doc Ruby at the quads.
Ten thousand eyes were on him as he gunned the throttle loud;
Five thousand tongues applauded as he signaled to the crowd.
And while the nervous officers grabbed the night sticks from their hips,
Defiance gleamed in Doc Ruby's eye, a sneer curled Doc Ruby's lip.
And now a can of tear gas came hurtling through the air,
And Doc Ruby stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there,
Close by the haughty Doc Ruby, the can unheeded sped --
"That ain't my style," said Doc Ruby. "Break it up!" the coppers said.
From the streets, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm waves on a stern and distant shore.
"Kill them; kill the pigs!" shouted someone from the mob;--
And Doc Ruby guns his engine, and wipes-out on the lawn.
With a fist of protest shaking, Doc Ruby's visage shone;
He jumped back on his Harley; he bade the march go on;
The Harley takes off through the quads, 'till it hits a vicious bump;
And Doc Ruby sails through the air, landing smack upon his rump.
"Fascists!" he screeched, "Capitalist, Imperialist, Racist, Sexist pigs!"
"If I must I'll ride a tricycle, but we'll have this march - you dig?"
They saw his face grow stern and cold; they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Gay Doc Ruby wouldn't lose that bike again!
The sneer is gone from Doc Ruby's lip; his teeth are clenched in hate;
He sniffs with cruel derision as he lets go of the brake.
And now he throws it into first, the clutch he now he lets go,
And now the air is shattered as the bike takes off - alone.
Oh! somewhere there's a campus town where they drum and chant all night.
They protest for the rain forest, and demand the wart-hog's rights.
And somewhere bongs are being passed, and somewhere radicals shout;
But there is no joy at Old State U -- Gay Doc Ruby has Wiped Out!
You may find some people watching streaming video or using P2P all day, but at an office, most people don't. They read email with the occasional large attachment. They check the news and weather. They'll look things up online. You seem to be forgetting that at work, some people do work. It's not if every just surfed it would be fine. It's if a non-negligible portion usually surf (or read email or just do nothing over the network) and they do.
I pay 40$ a month for "high speed" internet and my upload to youtube is going at 9kb a second.
'nough said.
~= scwizard =~
That's a free market the American Way, the ISPs are safe from complaining consumers, and no one has to has to worry all day about how much they can max out their torrents without being throttled.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
If I understand both sides of this argument, it would seem that Cisco stock is greatly undervalued.
Those who are streaming large volumes of data should be bandwidth limited in order to keep real time responsiveness snappy for the majority of users doing stuff like checking email, surfing the web etc. QoS is a site-specific technology right? If so, there should be some similar thing that regualates the whole internet. Something that throttles the "unimportant" streams when the internet is becoming saturated. Akin to the government closing off the on/off ramps to the interstate in time of national emergency. If requests for data could be categorized somehow, then maybe some kind of "express lane" prioritization could be had. Surely some mechanisms are already there but they are just not yet evolved, yes?
OK - there may be some need, but abundance in bandwidth will also cause less efficient solutions.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
What I'm curious about is whether bandwidth usage will reach a natural saturation level in the long run. Hypothetically, it makes sense that there is some limit to how much video a person can watch (limited by time), some maximum quality level of audio/video that people will demand (limited by human senses), and some maximum storage that is feasible (limited by cost/power supply). All this ought to put an absolute cap on the total bandwidth use one could expect people to demand. It could be quite a bit greater than where we are now, but it doesn't seem out of the question that we could one day have a more or less perfect network.
Granted that oversubscription of capacity is the best economic model both for ISPs (to maximize the number of customers who can afford to subscribe) and for customers (to minimize their costs), the problem as I see it is one of advertising.
The usual ad states something like "Up to 5Mbps Blazing Speed!".
Instead of stopping there, with smiling faces all around and the low price in a giant font, they ought to be required to show actual average available bandwidth per customer in a 24x7 or 24x30 (hrs x days) graphic. Then potential customers could see what type of "experience" they can actually expect. This of course depends on the customer being knowledgable enough to interpret the graphic, but that could be eased by the fact that simply have the information available would lead to popular journalists "breaking it down" for the average Joe.
I think we should call Al Gore. He could fix this.
I agree with other posters that the problem lies with your setup, not with net neutrality.
IMO, you should route business traffic through the T1s, and, if you so desire, buy a business ADSL/cable modem for everyday surfing.
I'm in Uruguay and we have a 1.5 MB business ADSL for everyday browsing, the e-mail server and website are set up on their dedicated connection, and we don't experience any problem, for 50+ users (who, I suspect, do not need those T1s, and, as you mentioned, should not need megs of bandwidth for normal business surfing!).
Plus we have some monitoring software and policies in place to minimize Youtube and other leisure activities - even then we experience the occasional slowdown (and I have to cut someone off from the net
Maybe you should talk it with your sysadmin...
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I live in a 1 bedroom apartment and have over 10 T1's! (16mbit adsl2 with 2mbit upstream (annex-m))
yes Sir, I find that a rather stinking analogy
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..