What Are Google and Verizon Up To?

pickens writes "Robert X. Cringley has an op-ed in the NY Times in which he contends that Google has found a way to get special treatment from Verizon without actually compromising net neutrality, by beginning to co-locate some of their portable data centers with Verizon network hubs. 'With servers so close to users, Google could not only send its data faster but also avoid sending it over the Internet backbone that connects service providers and for which they all pay,' writes Cringley. 'This would save space for other traffic — and money for both Verizon and Google, as their backbone bills decline (wishful thinking, but theoretically possible). Net neutrality would be not only intact, but enhanced.' So why won't Google and Verizon admit what they're up to? 'If my guess is right, then I would think they're silent because it's a secret. They'd rather their competitors not know until a few hundred shipping containers are in place — and suddenly YouTube looks more like HBO.'"

Comments

Google presentation on their data centers

[mbone]

None of this would surprise me. Akamai has been placing gear in ISP's premises (for free!) for over a decade now.

Here is a 2.4 Mbyte pdf on Google's approach to data centers, and a video tour.

Re:Google TV

[odies]

Well, I don't really understand what is so interesting about this. Akamai and other CDN providers have been doing this for 15+ years already. It's nothing new.

i don't think so

[StripedCow]

The largest bottleneck is from Verizon to the customer. This means that putting google's servers at Verizon will not increase speed so much. It may reduce latency a little, but that is not so important.

Without affecting net-neutrality, Google could easily put bigger cables towards Verizon centers and accomplish exactly the same thing, namely, not so much.

Re:i don't think so

[butlerm]

This means that putting google's servers at Verizon will not increase speed so much. It may reduce latency a little, but that is not so important.

Low latency is under-appreciated. Due to the way Internet congestion control and other connection establishment algorithms work, latency makes a big difference in how fast a connection starts up and how fast it recovers from any packet loss. Many web pages cause a half dozen connections to different sites to be established, and they don't all run in parallel, notably not the one that establishes the connection in the first place. DNS lookups and HTTPS make this all worse, as well, because both require additional network round trips.

I have a 7 mbps connection now with ~100 ms typical latency to most sites in the United States. If I had a choice between twice the bandwidth with the same latency or half the latency with the same bandwidth, I would choose the latter in a heartbeat. It would make a much more perceptible difference. ISPs just need to learn how to market the increased real world speed that comes with lower latency.

So?

[nweaver]

This is the entire Akamai business model: It saves money for BOTH google AND Verizon, and improves latency for Google.

And unless the user is actually transferring data at full line rate (saturating buffers), does not penalize anyone else. (During full rate transfers, TCP dynamics cause short RTT flows to be favored).

Re:Google TV

[AnEducatedNegro]

Yes. In fact, if you watched the worldcup on ESPN online you were watching the stream coming from a local server hosted by your ISP.

Although, to be pedantic, not all CDNs host in every ISP's datacenter... only the really rich ones do. Everyone else just uses anycast to reduce latency. A good write up about anycast is here

Re:Really?

[AHuxley]

He did talk about his work over the years eg
"As longtime readers know, the routine here is that I first review my predictions from a year ago and either revel in my brilliance (good luck, actually) or admit my failure (all failures are real, nothing is simulated and no special or computer effects are used)."
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080104_003787.html

This is routine

[Simetrical]

With servers so close to users, Google could not only send its data faster but also avoid sending it over the Internet backbone that connects service providers and for which they all pay

Does anyone seriously believe Google is sending data to Verizon over the backbones? There's a little thing called peering. ISPs go over their traffic records, find the data centers they're paying the backbones the most to ship traffic to, and run direct lines instead when that would save them money in the long term. IIRC, even Wikipedia only pays for about half of its bandwidth – the rest is peering. Google must use orders of magnitude more bandwidth, so I can't believe it's paying for practically any of it. It wouldn't be worth it for any significant ISP not to peer with Google.