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Web Creators Call Internet Outdated
ElvaWSJ writes "Several networking pioneers are dissatisfied with the Internet's underpinnings, and some are offering remedies to ease the strain that bandwidth-hungry services put on technology networks. Along with other projects here in the US and around the world, numerous companies and organizations are looking to rewrite the underpinnings of the internet. This piece looks at new concerns from old hands at networking, with comments from folks like Larry Roberts and Len Bosack. 'Mr. Roberts's concern over the Internet's infrastructure stretches back years. Even while at ARPAnet, he says he was unsure how long the technology could work, especially since the system didn't ensure that information packets would arrive at their destination. His fears crystallized in the late 1990s when he saw companies begin to use the Internet to make phone calls and consumers begin to dabble in online video.'"
Quote: "However, unlike many, Cerf doesn't think the bandwidth issues, frequently stated as a potential stumbling block for video over the web, will be a problem. Cerf thinks that a combination of faster connections, improved network technology and not "streaming" content will alleviate any issues."
Seems like he is not engaged in a (recent) startup.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
to change the internet: Control.
To establish borders and break the very thing that gives the internet so much potential and effect.
A world where no one could blog about monks being killed. A world where people fighting tyranny can't be heard from. and yes, a world where you can't watch porn.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am not familiar with the internal workings of P2P software, but I wouldn't be surprised if most of the algorithms only take into account bandwidth type (modem, DSL, LAN, etc) and which peers are 'super peers' or regular peers. The one piece of information that would be important is network hierarchy, so that you give priority to local peers first. An example order would be: local LAN -> local ISP -> anyone else. The idea is that by optimising for close peers you reduce the amount of traffic going beyond the network. This is also a sort of compromise that could appease certain stingy bandwidth ISPs, since they pay less to the providers they depend on, since the amount of data leaving and entering their network is reduced.
I am not sure how you could work out which peers are considered local. Maybe hop count could do the job, but I don't know how effective that is.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I think that is referring to dark fiber. Throughout the article fiber is referred to as if it's some new revolutionary thing that runs on sun magic and will make molasses pour fast.
I wouldn't worry about not making that connection though, it's almost impossible to even tell what the point of the article actually is. Is it a biography? A review of new tech? A warning of impending danger? Who knows! It's just vague sentences strung together!
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
So light up a couple more fiber strands and upgrade from gig to 10gig equipment. (then from 10gig to 100gig)
But noooo, there's no money for that because the telecomms have spent all their infrastructure money on "QoS" and spying equipment.
Instead of upgrading the capacity they buy hugely powerful equipment to analyse these vast data flows and selectively reduce the quality of service.
The problem with the Internet is the big telecom companies making selfish business decisions instead of the correct technical decisions. (see Bell Canada peering)
I say we buy up the fiber for a new network and run it publicly like the roads.
Customer owned fiber is the way to go.
http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/customer.html
All of the core internet protocols are based on an obsolete assumption of what the core user base is. The internet is no longer composed primarily of trustworthy, technically savvy, geeks and scientists. So, for the past 15 years, we've been layering safety and utility layers on top of this flawed foundation. Look at the evolution of E-mail. E-mails are sent over the same SMTP sessions that used to be driven by manually-entered commands. Add to that some primitive and flawed approaches to protocol standards, and we do have a little bit of a mess. The news to me isn't that the internet is flawed, but that the IT community has managed to scale these foundation technologies into the modern internet age. Yes, it's outdated, but it also still works.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
As far as streaming video goes:
Why not just allocate a piece of the available IP multicast bandwidth in the same way that pieces of the Electromagnetic Spectrum are licensed out. Sure it wouldn't be on demand, but people have been getting by without ondemand television now for 50+ years. Add to this the fact that the ability to have ~1Tb of harddisk is not difficult...and you've got yourself a nice internet connected DVR.
jusathought.
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What the holy crap? How in gods name did this get modded insightfull on Slashdot? What he's done is try to give an idiots guide to QoS (Quality of Service), unfortunately it appears he didn't realise how big the idiots get around here.
QoS is the reason you're able to get megabits of bandwidth. It's the reason VoIP works at all (that's phones over the net). Without QoS filtering those video containing e-mails would use up all the bandwidth you need to watch live videos or have phone conversations. Every ISP on the planet uses it, it's fundamental to their ability to provide a decent experience to you on your megabit line.
So, if your e-mail CONTAINS video, it's treated just like every other e-mail - as non urgent traffic that the ISP can happily throttle back while real time applications like streaming video or audio can get the bandwidth they need. Kind of useful if someone needs to make a 911 call don't you think?
Try engaging the brain before slagging off people that know an awful lot more about this than you do.
Having been around at the beginning, I should comment on this.
There are some fundamental problems with the way the Internet works, but hardware has saved us from having to solve them. The biggest problem is that we still can't deal effectively with congestion in the middle of a pure datagram network. We know what to do out near the edges (look up "fair queuing", which I invented), but in the middle, where there are too many flows and too little transit delay, that doesn't work.
The practical solution to the problem has been cheap long-haul bandwidth in the backbone of the network, with routers to match. Early users of the modern Internet may remember the days when MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST would choke on traffic and the whole backbone would start losing half the packets. That was solved by cheap fibre optic links. Today, we have a network where the "last mile" usually saturates before the backbone does. This is what makes the whole thing work. But we never did get a good technical solution to that problem. We have some good hacks: the congestion window in TCP and "Random Early Drop", which together sort of work. At least where most of the traffic is TCP. We still don't have equally effective ways of throttling UDP traffic.
Roberts is a virtual circuit guy. He founded Telenet, which was a virtual circuit system. (I was recruited by Telenet when they had 13 employees, but turned them down.) Telenet was a flop commercially; it didn't scale up well. Telcos love virtual circuits, because they create connections they can bill. And they keep trying to get virtual circuits into the network. X.25, ISDN, ATM, and PPPoE are virtual circuit systems, and they all came from telcos. Roberts is still pushing variations on his virtual circuit scheme.
There are continuing attempts to get some kind of billable virtual circuit thing into the network, and those attempts consistently come from telcos. There was a scheme tried for using multiple PPPoE connections over ADSL links to provide multiple classes of service, with the good ones being more expensive. That didn't fly. The whole "net neutrality" thing is about this. What telcos really want is to be able to charge based on the "value to the consumer". The wireless phone people do this, and cash in big - SMS messages cost more to send than photos. The wireline telcos see themselves being cut out of the revenue stream as video moves to the Internet. They want to create a place where they can step on the hose and cut off the flow unless you pay them extra.
I wrote the classic RFC on this too many years ago. Read the section "Game Theoretic Aspects of Network Congestion". It's still valid. But, as I said above, we don't have to solve the theoretical problem as long as throwing cheap backbone bandwidth at it works. Cheap backbone bandwidth will continue to be available unless some monopoly situation develops that prevents backbone bandwidth from being provided near cost.