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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.
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 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.
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
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.