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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.
"net Nutrality" does not prevent throttleing ports. It would even allow bandwidth capping from video sites if the policy was #GB/site or something. It does not allow the site to get improved performance by paying money or partnering or being owned by the provider. the only way a site or protocal would get better performance would be by the user paying extra. (a lot like what you describe).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If we need any major internet change, it's nationalizing it. I don't see what's wrong with it right now other than some people crying they will not make enough money (like all companies), people stating that somehow it is making it hard for new companies to be started or people saying that there is a big dark technical problem looming over it waiting to kill us all. None of these are news.
Great Intellect...
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
I don't think most of the ISPs even have common carrier status. The telcos do, when it comes to phone service, but as a data service operator they don't. I believe (and someone who knows more can correct me) that they reason they don't want to be considered common carriers is that they would be subject to additional (read: expensive) regulatory burdens.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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
Every ISP oversubscribes at some point. It's a fact of the business. It's built into the competitive environment, and if you know anything about longhaul capacity and network hardware costs (I'm looking at you, Cisco), you'd know that the cost of moving a megabit of traffic across the country costs *much* more than what it costs for an ISP to deliver a megabit of capacity from its edge routers to your home. They have to play the averages, counting on only having to move a tenth or so of the available sold capacity as actual traffic. As I said above, if you really want a non-oversubscribed link, be prepared to pay $500 and up a month for it. In fact, that's how much Verizon Business, AT&T, and the other "Business Class" providers charge for a T1 circuit, which is 1.5Mbits of non-oversubscribed bandwidth.
Here's a summary of your argument "Networking is hard. We have to lie to sell it to people."
There is an easy way out of this. Stop lying to your customers.
Stop having big, flashing 8 MBPS INTERNET CONNECTION ads with teeny, tiny print on the bottom that says, basically "If you're the only one on, at like 3:05 a.m., if we're not working on something. Oh, and your upload bandwidth is only 384 Kbps."
Don't fucking whine to me how hard it is. You idiots made it hard by LYING YOUR ASSES OFF about what is being sold. You made your bed, lie in it.
[For the record, I'm a telecom engineer for a major equipment manufacturer so I'm intimately familiar with the costs, equipment and issues. I just don't like lying ISPs *cough* Comast *cough*.]
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You're both off by quite a bit. ATT sells T1 for $350 these days. Contractually, you get FULL capacity 24/7.
$350 for a full T? if the CO is across the street and you're buying a 4yr contract then maybe. otherwise i'd be very skeptical...the parent is correct, the average cost is around $500, but can easily be more than that depending on the distance of the local loop...my company for example pays around $600 (for a crappy circuit too but that's for another day...) we're not terribly close to the CO...
Whoops - the link to a QoS/capacity study that I included in my post didn't make it to the Slashdot page. Should have previewed.
There are more.
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make install -not war
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 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.
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