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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?"
What a well prepared talk piece. I however take the other approach.
If I'm offered 5Mits/s from my cable provider, that is an obligation for them to fill my order. If they can't fulfill my expectations, then they shouldn't have offered the service to begin with. If telco XYZ is getting bitten for overselling their lines that sure as hell isn't my problem as a consumer. What I do with my 5Mbits/s is my own business. I could use the internet to check my email (10kb), or surf the web a while (2MB), or download a YouTube video (200M?).
Why should my internet operator, the guys protected up the ass by common carrier protections dictate my internet surfing activities?
Bye!
Studies of actual traffic congestion mitigation techniques have consistently demonstrated that increasing capacity is a much cheaper and more reliable remedy than QoS on backbones. With extra benefits in the raw capacity. The "quality traffic to quality networks" would require a whole extra architectural layer to route through several different Internet links on realtime route quality decisions, rather than leverage the full capacity of the Net to route anywhere at any time on local congestion conditions or other overall strategies.
These whines are in fact "special consideration" pressure for the telcos to get "Net Doublecharge". They don't need service tiers, but they can use them to demand distant endpoints pay protection money. If they can get the protection money from the government, their favorite source of subsidy and protection for over a century, they certainly will. Especially if they've already used up the capacity for private accounts (people) to pay them directly, which makes them look less competitive.
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make install -not war
"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.
The solution is to nix net-neutrality legislation and allow the consumer and the producer to come to terms on need versus price.
e nd/endtoend.pdf
You're not by any chance a lobbyist for the non net neut advocates are you? i
Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP) should occur at the end-points of the network.
See "End-to-end arguments in system design" by Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endto
This principle was used by DARPA when it worked on Internet design and it's the reason TCP/IP communications have experienced massive growth.
It's a principle supported by almost everyone except the backbone owners. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him and if you're going to make a profit off them then he wants a cut too (referring to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al who oppose Net Neut).
Compare with mobile carriers who don't follow the principle of network neutraility where you pay more for cell phones that use a zero cost medium (the airways) than you do for the Internet which uses an expensive wired system. And where every service is separately billable. Is that the network of the future you're suggesting is better for us?
I wouldn't be so opposed to your argument if I could be convinced the telcos weren't running a gnarly scheme to make my ISP bill look like my cell phone bill.
The net has been so successful perhaps because it was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists an d engineers in an academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal. You want to give it over to the business folks because you think they can do a better job if they're involved in how the Internet continues to evolve?
Be careful what you wish for. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. But what worries me the most about non net neut is that we're going to be giving companies a large hand in determining, not how the Internet will look in a few years, but ultimately we're going to be giving them a lot of power in influencing how it's developed later on down the road. I say we tread carefully.