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 TV

[dsginter]

We can ditch the cableco and finally get ala carte programming.

Re:Google TV

[thebagel]

Wishful thinking, but probably not the case as Verizon also supplies television service. It appears they also have a partnership of some sort with DirecTV.

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.

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:Google TV

[Antidamage]

[Citation for your stupid opinion regarding Akamai being "leaps and bounds" behind needed]

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.

What a question!

[bogaboga]

So why won't Google and Verizon admit what they're up to?

Question is: Do they have to? I doubt they do.

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

[TooMuchToDo]

And putting Google "pods" (i.e. glorified cargo containers) at these sites with limited bandwidth (T1s or microwave backhauls to better connected towers) is going to be useless. You can't cache everyone's Gmail data at each pod (although you could make a fair attempt at doing so, across thousands of cell sites), and you can't cache all of Youtube at each pod. It'd be cheaper to drag fiber to the towers like AT&T is doing.

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.

Verizon's bad psychology

[MikeRT]

Verizon would have been better served all along by approaching this from a positive angle along the lines of "how we can get your content to our users, faster" than "you are screwing us by not paying us." Everyone likes a company that says "what can we do for you" a lot better than one that stamps its feet like a brat.

Really?

[Alcoholic Dali]

Has Cringely ever been right with one of his predictions/theories? I like the guy a lot, and his ideas are always pretty interesting, but somehow I never hear a follow up where someone says "Yep, he was right!"

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

How does Google get the data to its servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that Google isn't "avoiding sending its data over the backbone", but is only doing it once per colocated datacenter instead of many times. Still a big win, but the article is a bit misleading on that score.

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).

Mod Parent Up

[xmas2003]

Odies pretty much nails it ... although one subtle difference is that presumably Akamai and the other CDN providers are available for all to use ... whereas Google's co-located servers may be primarily for its data/apps.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[duffbeer703]

Google is probably looking at partnering much more closely with Verizon than you realize. VZ has thousands of CO facilities all over the country that are essentially empty -- the footprint of equipment needed to provide landline services is shrinking dramatically. Plus the wireless side has the best site placement of any of the carriers, and the backhaul internet connectivity for many of the cell towers runs through these COs.

Throw some Google clusters in these facilities... and you have an ability to deliver extremely fast application access without traversing the internet or having to increase bandwidth to the thousands of wireless sites.

Without "actually" compromising net neutrality

[noidentity]

Google has found a way to get special treatment from Verizon without actually compromising net neutrality

Why does the opening sentence imply that this compromises net neutrality in spirit? It has nothing to do with net neutrality, which is about ARTIFICIALLY restricting speeds based merely on who the data is coming from. In this case, putting your equipment closer to the end-user is less costly, due to physics.

How is this different?

[dachshund]

I'm sorry, but how is this fundamentally different from the sort of tiered service that net-neutrality advocates worry about? Google pays Verizon a substantial sum of money, and in return Google gets preferential access to the network in the form of local datacenters. This gives Google an advantage over competing providers /provided that the bottleneck is in the peering or backbone connections/. Given that Verizon FIOS seems to have substantial excess fiber capacity within its network, that seems like a likely scenario. (Wireless less so.)

There's a finite amount of room at Verizon's data centers, so I imagine they'll be able to charge plenty of money for this, and that smaller providers will be locked out (or will have to pay fractionally, e.g., through an already-colocated service like Akamai). Verizon gets a new profit center and Verizon users pay for it invisibly through advertising and the cost of any services that Google eventually offers for pay. Which is the truly worrisome aspect of net non-neutrality.

Obviously this is only one step on the road to ISP-controlled, for-profit, tiered service. But it's in the same spirit, and it may be that Google has made it clear they're willing to pay for access to those networks.

Re:How is this different?

[DwySteve]

I'm sorry, but how is this fundamentally different from the sort of tiered service that net-neutrality advocates worry about? Google pays Verizon a substantial sum of money, and in return Google gets preferential access to the network in the form of local datacenters.

This is different in that Google actually paid for something physical and not just a 'It'd be a shame if your nice internet caught on fire' protection scheme. What *I* feared about a lack of net neutrality wasn't Google getting faster because they paid, but everyone else getting slower. These large communication companies have a history of trying to sell the same infrastructure as many times as they can. This is different in that new infrastructure was created instead of old infrastructure unfairly and arbitrarily reapportioned.

Re:How is this different?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that the favouring of Google's traffic isn't artificial. In the classical net neutrality scenario, speeding up one company's traffic requires little or no effort on the part of the ISP--the pipes must already exist that can handle such faster traffic, so in reality they're slowing down their competitors by denying access to these pipes. When you colocate a server, though, that actually *does* cost power, physical space, server insurance, et cetera, and the benefits aren't gained by preferential throttling on the part of the ISP. They can't really be held accountable for convenient network topology. It's true this is a little bit of a grey area, but I think my logic is pretty sound.

Re:How is this different?

[dachshund]

The difference is that the favouring of Google's traffic isn't artificial. In the classical net neutrality scenario, speeding up one company's traffic requires little or no effort on the part of the ISP--the pipes must already exist that can handle such faster traffic, so in reality they're slowing down their competitors by denying access to these pipes. When you colocate a server, though, that actually *does* cost power, physical space, server insurance, et cetera, and the benefits aren't gained by preferential throttling on the part of the ISP. They can't really be held accountable for convenient network topology. It's true this is a little bit of a grey area, but I think my logic is pretty sound.

This isn't the classical net (non-)neutrality scenario, it's that scenario's test case. Once the test case is common and accepted throughout the industry, there won't be anything controversial about the artificial version.

Right now you're assuming that Verizon won't "slow down their competitors" by denying them access to their networks. In reality it costs Verizon a lot of money to build Internet connectivity (fiber connections, backbone connectivity, etc.). Verizon now has a choice: they can invest enough money to meet or exceed their customers' demand for this limited resource. Or they can invest less. If they invest less, then they're effectively creating an artificial scarcity, which has exactly the same effect as the classical net-neutrality scenario. Vimeo will stream their videos over the backbone and Google will stream them from the head-end. Google will offer higher quality with better service level, and Vimeo won't.

Then, once all the major players have their co-located their data centers, two different things will happen. First, it will take all of the wind out of the net-neutrality fight, since Google/Microsoft etc. are the major corporate supporters. People will still talk about it, but nobody will be spending money lobbying for it. In this country that means its legislative chances are zero. More to the point, once the major players have their own datacenters, there will be a huge push by smaller companies who /also/ want access to those scarce network resources. In practice that'll either mean buying fractional co-location through a company like Akamai (who then pays Verizon through the nose for the service), or perhaps directly from Verizon.

Of course once you've gotten there, why pay for colocation at all? After all, it's only reasonable that smaller companies should be able to buy the same level of access that Google does, without the "waste" of colocation. In fact, it's necessary for fairness! So Verizon can then move on to the more artificial scenarios in which it prioritizes some traffic into its network, and so on and so forth. In the long run the goal will be prioritization and tiering throughout Verizon's network.

Provided that Verizon ensures that it always has sufficient capacity to meet everyone's needs, this won't result in anyone being slowed down. That is, of course, completely wishful, ridiculous thinking.

You nailed it

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with being anothe akamai. This has everything to do with Google getting more detailed information on exactly who you are. I'm not a Google hater, but when Google and Verizon partner, they will know almost everything that was in your credit report, where you are right now, where you've been walking with your cell phone, which computer at home you're using (assuming you use their router), what you're watching on TV right now, and what type of porn you like on PPV.

Net neutrality remains, but your privacy most certainly does not.

"Air doesn't discriminate"

[Culture20]

And just last night I saw a Verizon commercial that insisted "Air doesn't discriminate, it carries my words, my ideas the same as anyone else's." &$@!ing liars.

Newsflash: This is common practice

[BitZtream]

I'm not sure why this is news, this is and has been common practice for at least the last 15 years that I've been involved with Internet infrastructure and it wasn't really new then either.

Regardless of 'net neutrality' issues, this is just common sense and good network design. If you're going to need a new datacenter putting it as close to the users as possible has always been 'good design' practices. The traffic not only gets to its destination faster, it also unloads links that previously carried the traffic. Its a win for everyone involved.

This is no different than mutual peering agreements or the Akamia and iTunes hosting that pretty much every major ISP does already anyway. I haven't ever downloaded a song from iTunes or an app or movie that didn't come from the TWC datacenter a few miles down the road. Surprising this is the first we've heard of Google doing it actually. Its a safe bet this isn't actually new for them either.

The only downside is that Verizon may not put as much effort into their backbone connections so external sites end up suffering, and thats a problem, but you can only legislate so much, shitty businesses will always figure out a way to rip you off unless they have competition.

Re:Enhanced?

[Bigjeff5]

If google is getting premium internet service because they're paying more money, that's not neutral, period.

How is it not neutral for Google to move their equipment closer to the customer, thereby reducing bandwidth costs? Google isn't paying Verizon a dime to do this, they are simply leveraging their size to reduce their overall bandwidth consumption. This helps Verizon and Google both without restricting any of Google or Verizon's competitors in any way.

Exactly how is this not neutral? It's the very fucking definition of neutral! I know the education system in this country is complete and utter shit, but there really is such a thing as "mutually beneficial". In order for things to be easier on one guy, things do not have to be made harder on someone else. In fact, I'd wager Google will be wanting to set up these pods near all ISPs, and Verizon will welcome any similar setups from any other major source of internet bandwidth. The idea that they wouldn't is simply idiotic (though if that happens, you'll then have a weak but valid point).

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.