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Web Creators Call Internet Outdated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.'"
They talk about web creators and didn't mention Mr. Manbearpig... I mean, Al Gore!
Can we please go at least a week without hearing about the internets short comings? The internets my only friend and you are all SO mean to it. He/SHE is doing his/HER best!!! Besides, If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The Internet is dead.
Seriously, there really isn't anything that wrong with the Internet. Sure, it may not work perfectly, but how can you ever expect to connect so many diverse systems together in one unregulated mass and have it work perfectly? If you want a better system, go use Internet2 and leave the rest of us alone.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
and consumers begin to dabble in online video...
he was meant to say pRon?
The Web is an application on the internet but it is not the internet. There are many things that use the internet that aren't the web.
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)
From TFA
To tackle the problem, a slew of start-ups are producing gear and software to accelerate Internet traffic or to increase the network's capacity. These include companies run by Messrs. Roberts and Bosack, as well as Riverbed Technology Inc. and Big Band Networks Inc. Other companies, such as BitGravity Inc. and Limelight Networks Inc., are creating "parallel networks" -- essentially scaled-down versions of the Internet -- to escape the glut of traffic on current networks.
Of course, the gentlemen crying wolf are the same people who run companies who can sell you stuff to fix the problem. There's no new problem here. The tubes, according to business people, always seem to be in a sorry state, about ready to crumble the moment the wrong person clicks one more time on that link promising Brittney Spears porn. And yet, I have been able to get my email every morning since 1993 when I got my first email account.
Typical fearmongering article designed to drum up new business. Mod me up, give me my karma now, and move along, nothing to see here.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
It's my understanding that we have thousands of miles of "dark fibre", or unused fibre optic cables running under our grounds. As capacity needs expand, are we looking to use any of this unused resource? Dotcom bubble enterprises paid a lot of money to install it, and then they went bankrupt and the fibre remains unused.
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
The solution according to Roberts:
...
"Last month, his start-up, Anagran Inc., introduced a piece of gear called the flow router that he says can help modernize the Internet. The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission."
No thanks.
The solution according to Bosack:
"Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes."
That would be really nice, how about making use of all the dark fiber first.
All in all, we see the people who were involved in the creation of the Internet now got into the private business and use all possible means of pushing said business forward. It's almost sad they did so good job the first time, that now they have created solutions in search of a problem
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.
So long as you're running packets over copper, or fiber, or radio waves, or any other physical medium, you're going to have the possibility of packet loss. Oops, I unplugged the cable.
I always thought that was the brilliance of IP: once you admit that packets will always be unreliable, you can build a platform on top of that which does what you want. Pretending it can be 100% reliable is a fantasy, and it doesn't help us build better networks.
The web is the same way: no database geek would have ever thought of throwing referential integrity out the window. But Tim realized that there would always be the possibility of not being able to connect, so we have the 404 page, and the web is flourishing.
If Larry has an idea for a way to guarantee packets arrive, that's great, but somehow I doubt it's physically possible. And as long as we don't have it, the best way we know how to build networks is to allow for the possibility of failure, and deal with it.
Even web clients are smart enough to say "Sorry, can't seem to connect to some-server.com right now", but if cable TV goes out all I get is a blank screen. And if my network starts to get flaky, I can pause an online video and come back later when it's fully downloaded; I can't do that on TV. Is online video really that bad? On everything except bandwidth, we're doing pretty darned good, and bandwidth is being solved as we speak.
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.
So the solution is to start having ISPs analyze my network traffic ? How about NO ? No thanks. I'd rather they just implement multicast, and don't use lack of bandwidth as an excuse to start spying on the users. Heck, traffic analysis obviously won't work with encrypted content, so shall we have to choose between privacy and quality of service? I for one do NOT welcome our existing overlords snooping more on what we do, and I would prefer it if they stick to net-neutrality and actually implement protocols like multicast, that have been designed to deal with the bandwidth issues.
Internet is like, so last year. Stone tablet and carrier pigeon are back in style this year. All the Hollywood celebs are doing it. You should too!
The game.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a trebuchet loaded with a metric ton of backup tapes.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I'll let the "average person" part pass (since I just don't know any better), but the megabits in question are at the last mile--there's a bottleneck where all those last mile circuits feed into an uplink that doesn't have nearly as much bandwidth as they do in the aggregate. And that's by design; the whole point of a communications network like the telephone network or a packet-switched network is to make the most of a limited resource by sharing it.
If you want everybody to be able to watch the same exact thing at the exact same time, all the time, you run a wire from a central station to everybody interested (or even easier, you transmit a radio signal). The bandwidth requirement is just whatever your broadcast requires. However, if you want everybody to be able to watch a completely different thing at the same time, all the time, and that thing could be provided by anybody else in the network, then everybody needs to be able to get full bandwidth to any other site all the time. And for that you have to build the equivalent of a wire running from each subscriber to every other one. What's the factorial of 300 million?
The only way to get it to work is to weaken the assumptions; e.g., sometimes you won't be able to watch TV over the internet because too many people are already doing so. Or the number of choices you actually have is small, relative to the number of subscribers (which allows for some tricks to share bandwidth). Or you can't really watch whatever you want whenever you want.
Yes, on a set of on-the-air channels shared with whatever other subscribers may be in the vicinity.
I'm not sure what you mean, but I think it's about 10 years too late to accuse ARPAnet / Internet of poor planning. It already worked. It filled the earth with the first ubiquitous data backbone. I wouldn't be very surprised if it's still called "The Internet" 500 years from now.
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of the internet after all it has been through? It's running out of bandwidth. Packets aren't guaranteed to be delivered. People are using it for fucking video and telephone. Mr. Roberts turned out to be an engineer, and now he's selling flow routers. All you people care about is carving out bandwidth. It's a series of tubes! What you don't realize is that the Internet is just being the Internet and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it. The Internet hasn't updated its hardware in years. It prefixes everything with "www" because all you people care about is WINNING! WINNING! WINNING! LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even loads you bastards! LEAVE THE INTERNET ALONE! Please! Len Bosack talked about adequacy and said if the Internet was adequate it would connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times its capacity. Speaking of adequacy, when is it adequate to publicly bash an international communications network who is going through a hard time?
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!
"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," he says. "I know because I designed it." I thought Al Gore said that he designed that there tarraweb thingy?
Gee, if only we had some method to control the transportation of packets. I envision it starting with something like a handshake between two hosts so each would know that the other was ready. Then you'd want to assign sequence numbers to each packet so the recipient would know if a packet had been dropped. The recipient might have some way to acknowledge each packet, so the sender knows that the recipient received it. And there might even be some way for either endpoint to tell the other that it's finished with the conversation, allowing timely cleanup of network resources.
Nah, I'm dreaming. If such a magic "transport control" protocol were possible, surely the inventors of the Internet would have figured it out by now.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
However, Do worry about the packet loss when that metric ton of tapes land.
Star Pirates
I like to think that I wrote this song (Seven Layer Cake) as a teaching tool...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
I think it is a therapeutical thing.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
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.