So what's the article trying to say? That a toy which inspires a child's interest in science and technology is BAD unless it inspires boys and girls in equal proportions? Get outta here.
Div by zero means my program encountered an error. If it continues anyway, it could corrupt its database or misbehave in other destructive ways. Worse, it could provide the operator with incorrect results leading to real-world destruction.
So yeah, I want divide by zero to throw an exception and I don't wish to ignore the exception.
Your reasoning does not make sense. If each packet benefits each side equally then the benefit from all of the packets is exactly equal. Direction ratios, length of travel and phase of the moon are all irrelevant bits of information that don't apply to the question.
In a functional free market, Time Warner and Comcast would be paying Netflix the same way they pay ABC and CBS. Let's not have any delusions about the current monopoly/duopoly state of affairs being a functional free market.
That sounds so reasonable. Just one problem: those customers you took where you found them paid you to take them where you found them and connect them to the Content networks. Refusing to provide that paid-for service (or throttling it) until the Content networks _also_ pay you is fraudulent double-billing.
Outbound traffic is much cheaper than inbound traffic. You can dump outbound traffic off at the nearest meeting point with its destination network. But you have to carry inbound traffic from wherever the source network gives it to you.
That's a half-truth.
At any connection with the source network, you advertise the destinations you're willing to accept traffic for. Nothing requires you to accept packets for your entire global network at every location where you interconnect; that's something you choose (or choose not) to do.
Sending packets for destinations you did not advertise has long been deemed a violation of any peering agreement, subjecting the transgressor to disconnection.
Likewise, most service providers respect the destination network's advertised priority for each of its destinations. If the "AS path" is "shorter" at the distant connection point, packets are sent to the distant interconnection, not the nearby one. When offered at the same priority from each interconnection point, the packets do of course travel to the nearer one.
The few networks who disregard these advertised priorities and just send to the nearest interconnect tend to suffer from greater malfunction and customer ire.
They might agree to not exchange any money so long as each of them carries about 50% of the packages across the ocean. But if the US post office carries 80% of the packages across the ocean, some money is going to have to change hands to keep it fair.
That's totally disingenuous. The postal systems are sender-pays systems. Of course a portion of that payment must be passed forward to each of the postal systems in the delivery chain.
The Internet is a meet-in-the-middle system in which both sender and receiver pay to reach any of the midpoints where packets are exchanged. Regardless of any ratios, the packets transiting those interconnects have already been paid for in both directions.
If you want to convert to a sender-pays system where everybody gets free gigabit fiber in their homes but Netflix has to pay for access then sure, your example would make sense.
Which AT&T? The rebranded Cingular or the old one that collapsed to nothing allowing Cingular to buy them? Nortel, of course is in bankruptcy. And you wrote the software that managed their money you say? Did it round off the pennies?
Peering is not an uplink at all. It has different characteristics.
Internet Transit service (that uplink) connects you with the rest of the Internet. It's expansive. It connects you to "everything."
Peering connects you with your neighbor and his paying customers. Nothing else, just the folks who have paid your neighbor to connect them with "the Internet."
Are you comprehending the difference? One connects you with everything, even when the ISP has to pay for it. The other connects you only to folks who have already paid the ISP to connect them to you.
"Bandwidth is bandwidth." Sure, if you're ignorant about how networks actually work.
It works fine on non-windows OSes and has no particular speed problems that I've observed.
It is, as you say, complicated and confusing to use. They send a browser certificate you have to use to authenticate which basically nobody else does, and the process for using it is clunky. Then you have to find the sign-this-certificate functionality which while not exactly hard is also not exactly obvious.
Yeah, the idea is idiotic. You blow up the NEO. Wonderful. The million pieces still have the same mass, velocity and therefore kinetic energy heading towards the planet.
You don't blow up threatening space objects. Space is really big. All you do is give the object a little nudge while it's still far enough away. The little nudge is all it takes to miss the planet by a very large margin.
Verizon doesn't have any paid transit at all. They have only peers and customers. They're one of a handful of "transit-free" backbone networks, sometimes mislabelled as "tier 1."
Verizon refused to upgrade the network ports with the peer serving Netflix. They let it congest until Netflix's service stopped working (along with everything else via that peer). They then kindly offered to let Netflix pay for a direct connection.
You don't think that's throttling and paid prioritization?
Right. Regional monopoly/duopoly ISPs have the power to compel double-billing, in which they collect money from two different customers for each packet that transits their network. This "saves" them a considerable amount of money.
Well, that's the big ISP's big lie anyway. In reality "traffic ratios" are an excuse for the "eyeball" networks (those serving consumers) to peer with each other while somehow justifying a refusal to peer with the "content" networks (those providing the movies, web pages and other content consumed).
Many networks do settlement-free peering with each other without any traffic ratios. Indeed, a shocking number of folks find it convenient to peer with google despite the lopsided ratio.
There's a little nuance, but that's basically correct: TWC should have to do this for anyone who asks.
Nuance:
Peer where? TWC gets to pick the location and it isn't fair to require TWC to pay to connect from that location to yours. That's an expense you either pay for or negotiate.
Peer with how much of TWC's network? We're not talking about a single city here, TWC serves many mainland communities and large swaths of Hawaii too. Even if you connect at their favored location, should they be required to shuttle your packets around the globe? Probably not. They can probably establish multiple peering points and decide that unless it benefits them to enlarge it, a connection at that peering point is only good for that portion of their network.
Who pays the setup costs? Core routers are expensive beasts. Some cost half a million dollars or more. Should TWC be compelled to eat the port cost for everybody who wants to peer? Probably not. It's probably appropriate to expect a would-be peer to reimburse TWC for reasonable, direct costs associated with the initial setup of a peering link.
Almost none of the public peering points employ multilateral peering agreements (MPLAs). Instead, you sit on the same ethernet switch that they do but must then negotiate a unilateral peering agreement with each network willing to peer.
A few smaller networks have "open" peering agreements. This means they'll accept an offer to peer with anyone else connected to the switch. Most have closed peering agreements, which means that the peer must meet some arbitrary criteria or they won't talk with you via the peering switch.
There are a few MPLA peering points out there. For example, DR Fortress in Honolulu has a multilateral peering service where all participants agree to trade Hawaii-local traffic with all other participants.
Nonsense. Small networks frequently peer with each other, even as they're locked out of peering in the big boys' club. And for your information, the arbitrary and capricious standards for joining the boys' club IS one of the worst excesses and abuses of the companies that hold hostage the future of our information based economy.
Peering only connects you to the other network's customers, not to the Internet at large.
You'd still have to pay someone to connect you to the other 99% of the Internet.
You'd still have to pay for the network line that connects your house to the location where your ISP does its peering.
Compulsory peering just means that when your ISP's customers have paid for access to "the Internet" and you offer to provide the ISP a direct connection to your part of "the Internet," the ISP has an obligation to service its paid customers in the best way possible: by accepting your offer to directly connect.
And before you ask what's to stop everybody from declaring themselves a peer, think about it for a minute. The ISP's peers can't talk to each other via the ISP. They're not paying customers. Peering requires one of the endpoints in any packet flow to have paid the ISP for access to the Internet.
Instead it is about TW not going out of their way to help speed up a company's traffic by providing peering.
While at the same time going out of their way to speed up any company's traffic who pays them (including offering to speed up this company's for the right fee). Paid prioritization and throttling are two sides of the same coin. Either violates net neutrality.
It's always cheaper for the ISP to send and receive a third party's packets via a network that's paying them than via a network which isn't. Indeed, it has a -negative- cost.
Here's where the line should be drawn: if I'm willing to pay your direct costs for establishing a peering connection to me, that is I bring a line to a location you find convenient, pay reasonable equipment costs and pay for a couple of hours of your engineers' time, and you still say no peering then you've breached network neutrality.
There's a couple nuances to that which I'm skipping for the sake of clarity, but in large there it is.
I stand by my record. Better part of a decade as the technical lead of a regional Internet Service Provider. Frequent participant in the North American Network Operators Group. Participant in the Internet Research Task Force's Routing Research Group.
There are perhaps 100 people in the world who know these issues as well as or better than I do. You are not one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's the article trying to say? That a toy which inspires a child's interest in science and technology is BAD unless it inspires boys and girls in equal proportions? Get outta here.
Div by zero means my program encountered an error. If it continues anyway, it could corrupt its database or misbehave in other destructive ways. Worse, it could provide the operator with incorrect results leading to real-world destruction.
So yeah, I want divide by zero to throw an exception and I don't wish to ignore the exception.
Stephen Cole Kleene and Ken Thompson
https://en.wikipedia.org/?titl...
Your reasoning does not make sense. If each packet benefits each side equally then the benefit from all of the packets is exactly equal. Direction ratios, length of travel and phase of the moon are all irrelevant bits of information that don't apply to the question.
In a functional free market, Time Warner and Comcast would be paying Netflix the same way they pay ABC and CBS. Let's not have any delusions about the current monopoly/duopoly state of affairs being a functional free market.
That sounds so reasonable. Just one problem: those customers you took where you found them paid you to take them where you found them and connect them to the Content networks. Refusing to provide that paid-for service (or throttling it) until the Content networks _also_ pay you is fraudulent double-billing.
Outbound traffic is much cheaper than inbound traffic. You can dump outbound traffic off at the nearest meeting point with its destination network. But you have to carry inbound traffic from wherever the source network gives it to you.
That's a half-truth.
At any connection with the source network, you advertise the destinations you're willing to accept traffic for. Nothing requires you to accept packets for your entire global network at every location where you interconnect; that's something you choose (or choose not) to do.
Sending packets for destinations you did not advertise has long been deemed a violation of any peering agreement, subjecting the transgressor to disconnection.
Likewise, most service providers respect the destination network's advertised priority for each of its destinations. If the "AS path" is "shorter" at the distant connection point, packets are sent to the distant interconnection, not the nearby one. When offered at the same priority from each interconnection point, the packets do of course travel to the nearer one.
The few networks who disregard these advertised priorities and just send to the nearest interconnect tend to suffer from greater malfunction and customer ire.
They might agree to not exchange any money so long as each of them carries about 50% of the packages across the ocean. But if the US post office carries 80% of the packages across the ocean, some money is going to have to change hands to keep it fair.
That's totally disingenuous. The postal systems are sender-pays systems. Of course a portion of that payment must be passed forward to each of the postal systems in the delivery chain.
The Internet is a meet-in-the-middle system in which both sender and receiver pay to reach any of the midpoints where packets are exchanged. Regardless of any ratios, the packets transiting those interconnects have already been paid for in both directions.
If you want to convert to a sender-pays system where everybody gets free gigabit fiber in their homes but Netflix has to pay for access then sure, your example would make sense.
Which AT&T? The rebranded Cingular or the old one that collapsed to nothing allowing Cingular to buy them? Nortel, of course is in bankruptcy. And you wrote the software that managed their money you say? Did it round off the pennies?
Peering is not an uplink at all. It has different characteristics.
Internet Transit service (that uplink) connects you with the rest of the Internet. It's expansive. It connects you to "everything."
Peering connects you with your neighbor and his paying customers. Nothing else, just the folks who have paid your neighbor to connect them with "the Internet."
Are you comprehending the difference? One connects you with everything, even when the ISP has to pay for it. The other connects you only to folks who have already paid the ISP to connect them to you.
"Bandwidth is bandwidth." Sure, if you're ignorant about how networks actually work.
It works fine on non-windows OSes and has no particular speed problems that I've observed.
It is, as you say, complicated and confusing to use. They send a browser certificate you have to use to authenticate which basically nobody else does, and the process for using it is clunky. Then you have to find the sign-this-certificate functionality which while not exactly hard is also not exactly obvious.
That's the spin anyway. Ask any network cut out of the peering process (which is most of them) whether not they "accept" the practice.
Yeah, the idea is idiotic. You blow up the NEO. Wonderful. The million pieces still have the same mass, velocity and therefore kinetic energy heading towards the planet.
You don't blow up threatening space objects. Space is really big. All you do is give the object a little nudge while it's still far enough away. The little nudge is all it takes to miss the planet by a very large margin.
That would be MLPA, not MPLA. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dyslexic.
Verizon doesn't have any paid transit at all. They have only peers and customers. They're one of a handful of "transit-free" backbone networks, sometimes mislabelled as "tier 1."
Verizon refused to upgrade the network ports with the peer serving Netflix. They let it congest until Netflix's service stopped working (along with everything else via that peer). They then kindly offered to let Netflix pay for a direct connection.
You don't think that's throttling and paid prioritization?
Right. Regional monopoly/duopoly ISPs have the power to compel double-billing, in which they collect money from two different customers for each packet that transits their network. This "saves" them a considerable amount of money.
Well, that's the big ISP's big lie anyway. In reality "traffic ratios" are an excuse for the "eyeball" networks (those serving consumers) to peer with each other while somehow justifying a refusal to peer with the "content" networks (those providing the movies, web pages and other content consumed).
Many networks do settlement-free peering with each other without any traffic ratios. Indeed, a shocking number of folks find it convenient to peer with google despite the lopsided ratio.
They offered to peer. TWC refused. Game, set, match.
There's a little nuance, but that's basically correct: TWC should have to do this for anyone who asks.
Nuance:
Peer where? TWC gets to pick the location and it isn't fair to require TWC to pay to connect from that location to yours. That's an expense you either pay for or negotiate.
Peer with how much of TWC's network? We're not talking about a single city here, TWC serves many mainland communities and large swaths of Hawaii too. Even if you connect at their favored location, should they be required to shuttle your packets around the globe? Probably not. They can probably establish multiple peering points and decide that unless it benefits them to enlarge it, a connection at that peering point is only good for that portion of their network.
Who pays the setup costs? Core routers are expensive beasts. Some cost half a million dollars or more. Should TWC be compelled to eat the port cost for everybody who wants to peer? Probably not. It's probably appropriate to expect a would-be peer to reimburse TWC for reasonable, direct costs associated with the initial setup of a peering link.
Almost none of the public peering points employ multilateral peering agreements (MPLAs). Instead, you sit on the same ethernet switch that they do but must then negotiate a unilateral peering agreement with each network willing to peer.
A few smaller networks have "open" peering agreements. This means they'll accept an offer to peer with anyone else connected to the switch. Most have closed peering agreements, which means that the peer must meet some arbitrary criteria or they won't talk with you via the peering switch.
There are a few MPLA peering points out there. For example, DR Fortress in Honolulu has a multilateral peering service where all participants agree to trade Hawaii-local traffic with all other participants.
Wah! I'm an idiot who doesn't understand the difference between Transit (uplink) and peering and can't be bothered to learn.
Nonsense. Small networks frequently peer with each other, even as they're locked out of peering in the big boys' club. And for your information, the arbitrary and capricious standards for joining the boys' club IS one of the worst excesses and abuses of the companies that hold hostage the future of our information based economy.
Peering only connects you to the other network's customers, not to the Internet at large.
You'd still have to pay someone to connect you to the other 99% of the Internet.
You'd still have to pay for the network line that connects your house to the location where your ISP does its peering.
Compulsory peering just means that when your ISP's customers have paid for access to "the Internet" and you offer to provide the ISP a direct connection to your part of "the Internet," the ISP has an obligation to service its paid customers in the best way possible: by accepting your offer to directly connect.
And before you ask what's to stop everybody from declaring themselves a peer, think about it for a minute. The ISP's peers can't talk to each other via the ISP. They're not paying customers. Peering requires one of the endpoints in any packet flow to have paid the ISP for access to the Internet.
Instead it is about TW not going out of their way to help speed up a company's traffic by providing peering.
While at the same time going out of their way to speed up any company's traffic who pays them (including offering to speed up this company's for the right fee). Paid prioritization and throttling are two sides of the same coin. Either violates net neutrality.
It's always cheaper for the ISP to send and receive a third party's packets via a network that's paying them than via a network which isn't. Indeed, it has a -negative- cost.
Here's where the line should be drawn: if I'm willing to pay your direct costs for establishing a peering connection to me, that is I bring a line to a location you find convenient, pay reasonable equipment costs and pay for a couple of hours of your engineers' time, and you still say no peering then you've breached network neutrality.
There's a couple nuances to that which I'm skipping for the sake of clarity, but in large there it is.
I stand by my record. Better part of a decade as the technical lead of a regional Internet Service Provider. Frequent participant in the North American Network Operators Group. Participant in the Internet Research Task Force's Routing Research Group.
There are perhaps 100 people in the world who know these issues as well as or better than I do. You are not one of them.