Neutral Net Needs Twice the Bandwidth of Tiered

berberine writes with a link to Ars Technica, straight to an article discussing the differences between a net neutral internet and one that supports tiers of content. As you might imagine, our neutral internet is far more bandwidth-intensive; AT&T estimates it might require as much as twice the bandwidth of a tiered internet. From the article: "Corporate sponsorship of research doesn't automatically invalidate that research; what's needed is a close look at the actual results to determine if they were done correctly. According to David Isenberg, a long-time industry insider and proponent of 'dumb' (neutral) networks, the research itself is fine. In his view, it's simply obvious that a dumb network will require more peak capacity than a managed one. But extending that banal observation to make the claim that running a managed network is cheaper is, to Isenberg, not at all intuitive. For one thing, doubling the peak volume of a network does not mean spending twice as much money as it cost to build the original network."

Comments

And

[Umbral Blot]

And sometimes it is worth pursuing an outcome that is not maximally effecient for other reasons, a fact that people seem to overlook sometimes. So what if the internet is half as fast as it could be; that is an acceptable trade-off for a free and open internet.

Re:And

[Saint Fnordius]

To put it differently, unmanaged traffic where the drivers get to decide which road they use themselves is less efficient than a traffic net where a central authority dictates to you which highway you're allowed to take. Of course an unmanaged net needs more throughput capacity overall, but in exchange the traffic doesn't require micromanaging. Part of why highways and trucks beat out rail service is because of that flexibility, of not being at the mercy of the switching stations and schedules.

Or consider an irrigation network with multiple sources and multiple outlets. You could either build all the pipes so that any of them could deliver maximum capacity, or have workers actively controlling the valves to distribute the water across the entire net so that one side doesn't overload. The latter solution doesn't require as robust a pipe, but requires a more complex valve system and somebody controlling it.

Re: Re:And

[rnturn]

The point of the Internet is to have a network where anything is possible.

Heh, heh. I can remember when the phone companies wouldn't allow modems because (it seemed to those of us who used them, anyway) it allowed you to do things that the phone company hadn't thought of. "Sending bits across voice lines? NO! You'll have an expensive leased line installed if you want to do that. And you'll lease equipment from us, too. Or we'll cut off your service!"

Tier it off and you'll make it about as useful as the television networks.

You've hit the nail on the head. That's the model the phone companies are trying to emulate. It explains their ridiculous subscriber plans that include "Content by whoever".

I'm not at all surprised at the difficulty that the phone companies are having with the Internet. They had to be dragged -- kicking and screaming -- into accepting packet switched networks in the first place. My guess is that an entire generation of managers (or two) at these companies need to retire before we'll see anything like a basic understanding of the Internet in these companies' actions.

Re:And

[jack455]

Good post, except the implication you make here: "So what if the internet is half as fast as it could be; that is an acceptable trade-off for a free and open internet."
I even agree with the sentiment, but the study incorrectly implied or stated that doubling the peak capacity would double the costs. Even if that were true, not doubling the peak capacity would _not_ halve the "speed" of the internet. For what it's worth here's a selected quote from Ars quoting Isenberg, commenting on the study.

...
doubling the peak volume of a network does not mean spending twice as much money as it cost to build the original network. "The failure of the authors to extend the conclusions from capacity to raw costs of capacity is deliberately misleading," Isenberg says, "especially when the researchers invoked 'economic viability' and 'cost of capacity' in their introduction to the work." ...
According to Isenberg, the cheapest and best alternative is simply to build out dumb capacity: to "overprovision" by as much as 100 percent.

Re:And

[datapharmer]

That's a horrible analogy - It just doesn't hold up. The trains are actually far more efficient than highways as a system, but since the U.S. spends more on cleaning roadkill of the highways than total funding for Amtrak they don't have enough staff or working trains so things get off schedule which causes the entire system to break. Just because the U.S. can't manage a switched system doesn't mean it is bad... try telling someone in France that the highway is faster and more efficient than the train!

Unmanaged networks are inefficient and pointless. There is no damage in routing things to avoid network congestion, but tiered networks are bad too. A tiered network is like a toll road that has restricted carpool type lanes, but the number of passengers doesn't matter - how much you pay in tolls does.

Re:And

[the eric conspiracy]

Some bits are more important. A UDP packet that is part of a RTP session when dropped may result in an unacceptable quality 911 phone call. A TCP packet part of a HTTP session will just get resent.

Re:And

[Phisbut]

I just don't buy it. A neutral internet would transfer just as many bits as a prioritized one.

What I don't get is, from what I understand, a tiered internet is only screwing America. AT&T can charge all they want for the last mile, but with more and more of the Internet being installed elsewhere (and I bet more will come if it gets tiered in America), and more and more users not in America, Europeans, Asians and Australians will get excellent connections to servers in Europe, Asia and Australia, while Americans will have a crappy connection to just about anywhere (although one could argue that's already the case).

Pass all the laws you want in America, you'll soon have to accept that the Internet is no longer a US-only network.

P.S. What sucks though is that Canada will probably get sucked into whatever crapiness the US gets

Re:And

[doom]

Now look at population density in North America...pockets of high density, not coincidentally these are the places where mass public transit is the best in NA. But for the most part, NA is not very dense population wise. It is simply prohibitively expensive to implement mass public transit as it has been in parts of europe and india.

Not saying it's impossible, just saying that it really is NOT Just That Easy.

And what I think you're missing is that the low-density areas have essentially been created by the US government prioritizing highway funding. Suburbia only seems to make sense if you hide a lot of the costs that make it possible. If you stop hiding the costs, suburbia will at the very least stop sprawling quite as fast as it is.

Show me the bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

But we're already paying eight times the cost of neutral net bandwidth, so in what way is this study relevant to the consumer?

Re:Show me the bandwidth

[enrevanche]

It is relevant in that this study can be used by the congressman that have been paid for by AT&T to oppose net neutrality.

It is relevant because it will allow AT&T to make a system for which they can charge vastly more than they do now.

It is relevant because it will allow AT&T to reduce your choice more and more over time and to take bigger and bigger pieces of the internet pie.

It is relevant because it will allow AT&T to force more and more companies to deal directly with them for connectivity if their customers want any access to the AT&Ts customers (or shall we call them victims.)

Wait a second...

[vigmeister]

When I am looking at leasing an internet connection at home, I equate bandwidth with speed and this is a reasonably rational assumption (today).

Analyzing the situation and pluggin in numbers,
Assume that the bandwidth available is fixed. What they're essentially saying is that either all of us can get 50BjBps (Bajillion Bps) regardless of the importance of our packets, or using a pareto distribution, 20% of us will get 80BjBps and 80% will get 20BjBps effectively?

I know these are rough numbers, But damn if I know which one I'd prefer... I think at the end of the day, a clearly defined set of standards for prioritization needs to first be developed by an independent body (ICANN/ISO/IEEE?). Once that is done, we can debate net neutrality. Right now, none of us actually know what is going to be prioritized. If streaming video for doctors performing live surgery is prioritized, I'm OK with that. If companies can buy priority for commercial, then I am kind of opposed to it unless I am guaranteed that these priority purchases will subsidize my connection.

Maybe they can have two levels of internet access: Neutral internet access (~$50 p.m) and Tiered access (~$10 p.m). Then let these levels fight it out. Of course, the implementation is unclear to me as I am not network engineer. To think about it, isn't this tiered in itself?

Cheers!

The new way to spin "net neutrality is bad"

[grev]

Majority of people don't know what net neutrality is, they don't care, and they never will. Now, whenever the issue is brought up in the mainstream news or whatever, big business can talk about how it's half as efficient, in addition to being communist and un-American. I can only imagine how this will turn out.

Net Neutrality

[Tuoqui]

Is not about a dumb internet. It is about an internet that does not discriminate based on entry or exit points and/or the protocol being used except where such discrimination will benefit the overall network performance.

Net Neutrality Positive
VOIP Packets receiving priority (because lag and bandwidth throttling reduce performance of VOIP technologies)
Prioritizing Gaming traffic of popular/well used games (IE. MMOs, FPS over internet, etc...)

Net Neutrality Negative
Throttling Bandwidth on P2P applications (This is the big concern on most ISPs, they admittedly do suck up a lot of bandwidth)
Extorting Money from websites who have not paid large sums of money for faster service (YouTube-wannabes)
Delaying or Denying packets coming from X-Network (because they didn't pay extortion money)

Ways to fix things... Run more Fiber. It should not be as hard as it was before since many of the tunnels and such have been made already.

Re:Net Neutrality

[TubeSteak]

Ways to fix things... Run more Fiber. It should not be as hard as it was before since many of the tunnels and such have been made already. That is not the answer.
There is already plenty of fiber is lying around.

The real issue is hardware to light up the fiber and then to switch the packets.
That is where the ISPs are trying to cheap out.

This looks like double-speak to me

[Fross]

couldn't this be re-interpreted as saying that if they were to run a tiered network, they would have no problem throttling its bandwidth to 50%, in order to ensure the content *they* prioritise gets through unhindered?

In other words...

[Em Ellel]

Allowing traffic through requires more bandwidth than blocking traffic.

Whomever got paid to "research" this - I admire your ability to get paid for stating the obvious.

-Em

Re:In other words...

[bhmit1]

Allowing traffic through requires more bandwidth than blocking traffic.

More importantly, they basically said that when they are allowed to have a tiered internet, they intend on blocking half of the traffic. If you're a generator of traffic to an isp, and you're not paying the tariff/extortion, guess what half you're in?

Re:Stop the presses!

[dw]

>They mean to say that a network with arbitrary caps and rate limiting consumes less bandwidth than an unrestricted one? Say it ain't so!

To look at it another way. A provider desiring to guarantee QOS... latency, jitter and minimum bandwidth for services such as VoIP, without having the benifit of having control over that bandwidth, would need to have a lot more bandwidth to meet those expectations.

This is just restating the idea that QOS enforcement becomes irrelevant with enough bandwidth.

What Happened to All the Overcapacity?

[rbegga]

To the Bandwidth Providers:

We keep hearing these arguments from the Telco's and Cable COs about how much more difficult it will be to build and maintain an open Internet because of the bandwidth requirements that imposes. Enlighten us as to why this is now a problem considering the major Telecom bust that occurred a few years back was due to the overcapacity you had built into your networks? Google is going around buying up dark fiber from you guys while you're complaining about lack of infrastructure? Nonsense. I don't believe you guys can't figure out a model to make this work for you and us without getting the government involved.

Duh

[the eric conspiracy]

It should be obvious that if you don't prioritize traffic based on QoS requirements that you will need more bandwidth. This has been a basic given for many years now. The question is what will it cost to prioritize the traffic to meet a given QoS level vs. just adding bandwidth.

There are a lot lot of people who think the various prioritization schemes that have been proposed just won't work because they are not scalable - while a fast dumb core is.

To me the problem with prioritization is that it is just harder to implement, and once it is in place it makes management harder. Also it tends to place limits as to what you can do on the IP network. Fast-dumb doesn't have these problems.

Ripoff Talk

[Doc Ruby]

What this research really proves is that a neutral network needs only double the bandwidth to replace a tiered one . Doubling the bandwidth is a lot cheaper, faster rollout, and more manageable than a tiered network. And it's more scalable than a complex tiered network. Plus, it has twice the bandwidth. And it doesn't have the flexibility and openness of a neutral network.

These Net Doublecharge crooks will say anything to get their extortion money. I expect they will, because they don't care about us, just their money and political power. But why does Slashdot have to publish it? Slashdot, a big website, is a target for Net Doublecharge, which will blackmail Slashdot's servers to carry its traffic to nerd consumers.

Let's not only pay them to give us the Internet that we built for them with our taxes and scientists, and created demand for with our content and services, and also peddle their lies that are stealing the whole thing from us.

Re:government regulation vs free market

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that ISP's are generally government created semi-monopolies Uh, no, the problem is that you basically can't create a small-scale version of AT&T or whoever and grow it over time into something that can compete with them. There's no "local market" for the internet, there's nobody that will choose an internet that only talks to a 10-mile radius no matter how cheap it is. Unless you can connect to the rest of the internet on a level, neutral playing field there is no way for you to compete. You can't go to the bank and say 'hey give me this 100 billion dollar loan so I can set up a national infrastructure and start a price war with the comm monopolies' and expect them to ever lend you the money. Anytime you as a middle class person have no prayer of ever setting up a competing company and, over time, displacing a company there needs to be regulation. Fundamentally, net neutrality means that any ISP can compete with any other ISP at any scale. You can start an ISP for your block if you want and think you can provide a better service than somebody else.

Re:So, basically....

[DragonWriter]

With all the patching Automatic Update does, I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't all over a neutral net. They may have to pay a fortune to ISPs.

They can afford to pay a fortune to ISPs, especially if it means competitors (like every Linux distro that is gratis as well as libre) that can't instantly suffers a major disadvantage in pushing updates.

It isn't.

[jd]

The study is flawed from a number of perspectives. First, as you mention, the current costs to consumers vastly exceed the costs to provide this mythical doubling in bandwidth. Secondly, network neutrality (to me) means that everyone gets the same experience and access as everyone else. This means that if you implement user-neutral traffic management (packet dropping schemes to minimize retransmits, throttling streams at congested points, fair service to ensure no connection is stagnant, smarter routing algorithms that avoid segments that are basically dead in the water) and user-neutral methods of improving data distribution (web caches, multicasting, SRM) then you gain virtually all of the benefits AT&T claim for their non-neutral system - and more besides - without harming a single user.

The above remedies would give all of the smoothing at peak times on heavily loaded routers, but in a manner that is entirely equitable and - get this - doesn't actually reduce the service provided to anyone. The peaks that kill the backbones are not particularly long-lived and contain a vast number of unnecessary retransmits, inflating the traffic levels. Schemes already exist that can potentially halve the retransmits and diffuse the load over just enough time that it can be handled. Other schemes already exist that can eliminate unnecessary repeat transmissions from source, massively reducing the load on the most burdened segments.

None of these require that any user be given priority or special privileges. None of these require that neutrality be compromised. Yet none of these require that either services or end-users experience any detectable delays (at worst) - and most of the time, both services and end-users will experience a much faster, smoother Internet.

Of course, you'll never get AT&T to admit that the reason they can't do any better is that they're not only greedy but also technologically incompetent. Nonetheless, that is the reality of the situation. It is also something missing from said "study".

An amazingly small multiplier!

[Tired and Emotional]

Twice the bandwidth is an amazingly small multiplier. Its the sort of growth factor that one can reasonably imagine being accomodated with improvements in technology and build-out over a short period. So one has to ask what was the motivation for coming up with that number.

Seems to me what they are thinking is that all the managed stuff will fit within existing capacity and then the unmanaged stuff requires new capacity. Or, to put it another way, all the available capacity needs to be managed.

So the real statement here is "we need to close down the internet as it exists today so we can repurpose the network in order to generate greater revenues".

Not to mention

[hey!]

It's actually a rather boneheaded comparison.

It's like saying a tractor-trailer requires an engine with 20x the torque of a family sedan. Well, yeah, because they do different things.

A net neutral network provides a level playing field on which content providers can enter without barriers and compete against anybody.

A non-neutral net does not provide the ability of content vendors to enter the market on an equal basis without setting up a special deal with a network bandwidth provider. In practice, this means content is bundled with service, and that the network providers provide a poor selection of content.

If you want to see what a non-neutral net looks like, look know further than cell phone companies, who have all lame proprietary multimedia and information services. You'd have to be a fatuous rich person to spend good money to watch Verizon videos on your phone (apologies in advance to any fatuous rich /. readers). The main thing these offerings do is make it much more confusing to compare prices between competing wireless vendors. How much does that cost the market every year? We'll never know.

And to top it off, what is the most exciting new phone product in years? The iPhone. A device whose multimedia features (iPod, YouTube access) are not tied to the bandwidth provider.

So, yeah, I'll take the tractor trailer if I'm moving 50,000 pounds of bananas to market. I'll take the neutral net if I want to have a vibrant content market.