The real story here is really simple and it goes back to the first day 2 networks appeared when there used to be only one. You have some companies that have a business model of transporting traffic between 2 providers. That business model isn't going to hold up much longer and you are starting to see the signs of it.
The content providers, let's say VOIPA and HDTVA, buy transit from the transit providers. CableCompanyA and PhoneCompanyA have built their own nationwide networks. Even though they run right next to VOIPA and HDTVA data centers, they are forced to pay this transit provider for this traffic. The more there is, the more they pay.
The content providers see a fee for QOS as them being double charged. The eyeball providers are getting raped by the transit providers also. The transit providers are double dipping and don't have to deal with any of the BS.
The solution is simple. The content providers need to directly connect to the eyeball networks. After a certain traffic level, interconnects should become mandatory.
The content provider loses the cost of transit to the largest eyeball networks, improves the connection to the end user, and has a direct relationship with the person in control of the eyeballs network. The eyeball provider no longer has to pay transit for all of the traffic to this content provider, they have an improved user experience, and they have a working relationship with the content provider.
I know, I know, the concept of everyone getting more for less is hard to fathom. The big transit providers would have to drastically alter their business model, but they would stay in business. There will always be companies, content and eyeball, that don't have a nationwide network or enough traffic to justify the interconnects directly with the other side, and will need to buy some transit.
Ignore all of the rhetoric and understand that this is what it is all about and the picture will become clearer.
This is a death knell for companies that are just software based and don't actually provide the network used by their customers. Unless they have every call route through their servers (every packet), they can't meet CALEA requirements.
Of course, they could just pay the phone and cable companies to do this service for them. Mightily amusing.
I can't believe people are buying in to this garbage.
What we, the infrastructure providers want to be able to do is sell QOS. The product you by mfrom my via cable modem is best effort. period. If you want to use vonage, knock yourself out. if your neighbor uses bittorrent and eats yoru bandwidth, not my problem. I could sell you a qos upgrade for your voip app tat would but your ip trafic above best effort. Of course, Vonage started screaming "OH MY GOD! THEY'LL MAKE MONEY OFF OUR PRODUCT! and has started all of this bull shit about us blocking the internet.
We have the technology to make any traffic better. if you want to pay for it, I'll sell it to you.. and the hell with Vonage crying about it. As i've said a hundred times before.. all they have to do is build their own network and it isn't an issue. Instead, they want to tell me how I should treat their traffic on my network.
So they are doing deep packet inspection at oc48 speeds. 2.4g. Let's see, you can do 1 gig on a Sandvine/Ellacoya/TippingPoint/PCube etc device for under 20k
so 60k for 3 gig. it is the NSA though so they probably paid 3mil.
Absolutely agree.. I can;t imagine they would intentionally do that, tho. I'm not saying they aren't because i don't know, but if they are, they deserve all of the heat they get. On my network i don't do that. i believe in Quantity of service, not QOS, and work to ensure every application that rides mynetwork has appropiate bandwidth. of course, i'm just cool like that;)
Controlling the QOS on your ISP network is a hell of a lot better than What vonage currently offers. No control at all. But thats what happens when you don't own the infrastructure. the infrastructure provider saw a chance to make your service better and make money off of it. And by god, who is Vonage to tell me what i can and what i can't classify packets on my network as?
See, cable companies can't compete with vonage on price. They actually pay for their infrastructure. What they can do is make Vonage better. For a price. And vonage is bitching because.. why? oh yeah.. the cable companies would be making money off of vonages software platform.. ironic isnt it?
- This QOS thing is technically possible from the Shaw end, but the question of performance is a large one
You won't notice an improvement if they have enough bandwidth. However, if your node is filled with bittorrent users, your voip phone would still work where normally it would suffer.
I'm just about ready to start adding Voip and gaming QOS services on my network. Changes nothing if you don't get it. CAN make some services better in the event of congestion if you do.
I dont know about shaw, but the cable co I work for doesn't do that. Everything is best effort unles syou pay more for it. Then it gets a higher QOS flag. I highly doubt Shaw is degrading anything.. they are just making Vonages product better.. for a price.
Vonage doesn't have to pay to send their traffic across the network that shaw built. Since they don't have a network, they have no control over their traffic and it is delivered best effort. The same with the rest of your traffic.
Shaw decided hey, we can make their product better by charging 10 bucks a month and giving it a higher QOS.
Vonage said.. "OH MY GOD!!! SOMEONE ELSE IS MAKING MONEY OFF OF THE PLATFORM WE BUILT! SUE! MAKE LAWS! CRY!!!"
And continue to make money on the infrastructure Shaw made.
Actually, the obvious use for this would be int he modern kitchen where you can pull up the recipe and cooking instructions from a LCD in the wall / countertop / whatever. The HKPC (home kitchen PC)(TM) would communicate with the pots and pans and trigger an alert so you know what pot to use. The LCD mounted on the pot handle would display the name of the ingredient and how much you are supposed to put in it.
The Pot(TM) and The Stove(TM) are in constant communication to control tempatures and times. Since they are in communication with the rest of The Meal(TM) also, they know when to slow it down so that the whole meal finishes at the same time.
I am not sure this setup would have saved me from the day I had to call my mother and ask her how to use the electric can-opener because my wife was not home. It will allow just about anyone to cook more than your standard ramen noodles and ravioli.
It's not impossible. people build networks every day. You say it's impossible. You should probably leave this conversation to people who aren't technically challenged. I know the physical address of every customer connected to my network. Many of them are vonage customers. If I can determine their address in 3 seconds, Vonage should be able to also, right? of course I spend milions each year to build my network. I think i will start offering Vonage to my customers for free. built the network, we'll just borrow their software to make it work. Does that seem fair? it should to you because that's what you are saying. Vonage built the software so they should be able to ride it on anyones network for free.
Why should a network provider get sued for not shouldering the expense of a product they aren't providing? Vonage is a parasitic company. They have no network. They have no facilities of their own to provide these services like E911. They are using other peoples network resources and then blaming them for not having E911 service. They want to provide services that require infrastructure, they should build an infrastructure of their own. End of story.
Just because one vendor can deliver every product, doesn't make them the best at any of the parts. But it was a very good move.
From what I hear, Cisco has agreed to not touch SA for 2 years. Is that correct? Does that mean SA can continue on with their partnerships selling Cisco's competitors products? (C/DWDM transport gear, CMTS's, etc)
I've never known Cisco to be a nice owner. Generally they take the IP and drop the company. I don't see them doing tha to SA but I also don't see them keeping their hands off for 2 years..
Cable companies are already moving to IPTV services along with their data and voice. IP set top boxes already exist. People are doing today what you say will take 10 years.
Oh.. and for the record, your cable plant is almost all fiber. Generally just from your house to the node is coax. But don't tell them FIOS guys that, they act like they just thought up the idea. I always thought cable companies should have advertised that fact.. but oh well.
Close, but no cigar. Juniper actually has the largest share of public backbones. Cisco owns the edge and the IT networks.
Cisco buying SA is a good thing for SA. Their IP platforms have historically not been the most reliable around. Almost anything they have with IP on it is a product they resell for someone else. Cisco can actually give them the IP interface they need. As everyone knows, Video is moving to IP, and currently, noone stands out as the main player for video delivery. Alcatel has a head start, but Cisco could quickly make up that ground. Sounds to me like Cisco can now sell a "headend in a box". Cisco has long held a position in the cable infrastructure with their CMTS. This is not a new area for them.
Actually, if WoW taught us anything, it's the opposite. Everquest was the king of the mmorpg market with 450,000ish subscribers. WoW has 4million+ subscribers with 1 million of them in North America. Even if they took every single subscriber EQ had (which they didn't do), they would have still doubled the 'known' playerbase in N.A. alone. They didn't push anyone aside. Sure, Everquest lost some customers. Every game did. But not enough to make 4million subscribers.
WoW brought a whole new group to MMog's. Blizzard crossed over from the single player to multiplayer arena and brought their fans with them. And damn.. they have a lot of fans.
Except that your small 50,000 person community would have to build the facilities, lay the fiber, hire a noc etc just to run the infrastructure.. and then when it comes time to negotiatie with the broadcasters they get reamed. The largest cost of your bill each month isnt the cost of the infrastructure, it's the content. Companies like comcast / Directv have millions of subscribers and have to fight for the pricing they get, and their only stick is the number of subscribers they have.
There are quite a few cities that run their own cable. Check around and see how they are doing.
Well, if Vonage were to work with the actual infrastructure providers, this could be solved. I could assing voip customers, of any company, an ip out of a specified block that would pass thru filters. Instead, they prefer to just scream they are being blocked and take it to court. Their loss. And not my problem.
Your EMTA (phone/network adapter) should have 2 ip's on it from 2 different subnets. I should be able to filter all of yoru internet traffic without interfering with VOIP at all, except maybe making it better by removing all the spam traffic on the upstream.
Business accounts are and should be treated differently. I know that we dont filter most ports for business accounts..except during an attack etc.
The problem is, we don't have a clueometer to check each individual user. If we did, it would be easy to make 2 different filters. Clued / Unclued.
So, if you pay me for a cable modem, premium service, and the guy next to you on your node is infected and starts spamming/scanning for more machines to infect, filling up the upstream bandwidth, that would be ok with you? Most of my customers feel I am supposed to protect them from that happening.
Well, hello Mr. SPammer. So nice of you to stop by and tell us about your constitutional right to spam.
Forcing your mail to go thru my mailserver when it originates on my network is within my rights as a network operator. Please feel free to sign up with another provider that doesn;t care if you spam. Of course, then you may not be able to send mail to anyone as you will be blacklisted, but at least you'll be free!
But there are better ones. I have just shy of 2 million broadband users on my network. Every day I have many customers who are detected as being infected. Automagically they are placed in a walled garden where the only page they can load tells them what is happening. Basically it tells them that they have been compromised. If we can determine the virus/trojan they are running, we give them a link to a locally stored method of corrrecting the problem. I have never received a complaint about it, but I have received hundreds of calls saying thank you.
I do have to question the FCC's thinking though. Most people who get infected are not of a technical nature. If you disconnect them from the net, they are at a loss of how to fix the issue. Obviously they don't have uptodate protection on their machine. if they go out and buy a brand new copy of whatever virus software, it will need to download the latest definitions, which they can;t do because you shut them off.
It reminds me of the mid 90's where if your ds3 to one of the 6 or so backbones went down they would send you an email to notify you. Or sending them a letter telling them you shut their phone off and telling to call you to get it turned back on.
Vonage uses the TFTP port for the config download. TFTP is commonly a malicious protocol.
From the CERT pages:
TFTP is often used by devices to obtain information at boot-time from servers. For example diskless workstations may use it to retrieve an initial boot image, or routers to fetch their configuration files. The protocol has no authentication and a badly configured server can publish any files to which it has access. There should be no need to use it outside a LAN and even within the LAN it should be used with care.
Don't get pissed at your provider for following CERT recommendations.
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The real story here is really simple and it goes back to the first day 2 networks appeared when there used to be only one. You have some companies that have a business model of transporting traffic between 2 providers. That business model isn't going to hold up much longer and you are starting to see the signs of it.
The content providers, let's say VOIPA and HDTVA, buy transit from the transit providers. CableCompanyA and PhoneCompanyA have built their own nationwide networks. Even though they run right next to VOIPA and HDTVA data centers, they are forced to pay this transit provider for this traffic. The more there is, the more they pay.
The content providers see a fee for QOS as them being double charged. The eyeball providers are getting raped by the transit providers also. The transit providers are double dipping and don't have to deal with any of the BS.
The solution is simple. The content providers need to directly connect to the eyeball networks. After a certain traffic level, interconnects should become mandatory.
The content provider loses the cost of transit to the largest eyeball networks, improves the connection to the end user, and has a direct relationship with the person in control of the eyeballs network. The eyeball provider no longer has to pay transit for all of the traffic to this content provider, they have an improved user experience, and they have a working relationship with the content provider.
I know, I know, the concept of everyone getting more for less is hard to fathom. The big transit providers would have to drastically alter their business model, but they would stay in business. There will always be companies, content and eyeball, that don't have a nationwide network or enough traffic to justify the interconnects directly with the other side, and will need to buy some transit.
Ignore all of the rhetoric and understand that this is what it is all about and the picture will become clearer.
This is a death knell for companies that are just software based and don't actually provide the network used by their customers. Unless they have every call route through their servers (every packet), they can't meet CALEA requirements.
Of course, they could just pay the phone and cable companies to do this service for them. Mightily amusing.
I can't believe people are buying in to this garbage.
What we, the infrastructure providers want to be able to do is sell QOS. The product you by mfrom my via cable modem is best effort. period. If you want to use vonage, knock yourself out. if your neighbor uses bittorrent and eats yoru bandwidth, not my problem. I could sell you a qos upgrade for your voip app tat would but your ip trafic above best effort. Of course, Vonage started screaming "OH MY GOD! THEY'LL MAKE MONEY OFF OUR PRODUCT! and has started all of this bull shit about us blocking the internet.
We have the technology to make any traffic better. if you want to pay for it, I'll sell it to you.. and the hell with Vonage crying about it. As i've said a hundred times before.. all they have to do is build their own network and it isn't an issue. Instead, they want to tell me how I should treat their traffic on my network.
So they are doing deep packet inspection at oc48 speeds. 2.4g.
Let's see, you can do 1 gig on a Sandvine/Ellacoya/TippingPoint/PCube etc device for under 20k
so 60k for 3 gig. it is the NSA though so they probably paid 3mil.
Absolutely agree.. I can;t imagine they would intentionally do that, tho. I'm not saying they aren't because i don't know, but if they are, they deserve all of the heat they get. On my network i don't do that. i believe in Quantity of service, not QOS, and work to ensure every application that rides mynetwork has appropiate bandwidth. of course, i'm just cool like that ;)
Sure do. Telemarketers pay per minute for their calls. You probably pay an all you can eat unlimited plan.
Controlling the QOS on your ISP network is a hell of a lot better than What vonage currently offers. No control at all. But thats what happens when you don't own the infrastructure. the infrastructure provider saw a chance to make your service better and make money off of it. And by god, who is Vonage to tell me what i can and what i can't classify packets on my network as?
See, cable companies can't compete with vonage on price. They actually pay for their infrastructure. What they can do is make Vonage better. For a price. And vonage is bitching because.. why? oh yeah.. the cable companies would be making money off of vonages software platform.. ironic isnt it?
- This QOS thing is technically possible from the Shaw end, but the question of performance is a large one
You won't notice an improvement if they have enough bandwidth. However, if your node is filled with bittorrent users, your voip phone would still work where normally it would suffer.
I'm just about ready to start adding Voip and gaming QOS services on my network. Changes nothing if you don't get it. CAN make some services better in the event of congestion if you do.
I dont know about shaw, but the cable co I work for doesn't do that. Everything is best effort unles syou pay more for it. Then it gets a higher QOS flag. I highly doubt Shaw is degrading anything.. they are just making Vonages product better.. for a price.
here's the real deal.
Vonage doesn't have to pay to send their traffic across the network that shaw built. Since they don't have a network, they have no control over their traffic and it is delivered best effort. The same with the rest of your traffic.
Shaw decided hey, we can make their product better by charging 10 bucks a month and giving it a higher QOS.
Vonage said.. "OH MY GOD!!! SOMEONE ELSE IS MAKING MONEY OFF OF THE PLATFORM WE BUILT! SUE! MAKE LAWS! CRY!!!"
And continue to make money on the infrastructure Shaw made.
Actually, the obvious use for this would be int he modern kitchen where you can pull up the recipe and cooking instructions from a LCD in the wall / countertop / whatever. The HKPC (home kitchen PC)(TM) would communicate with the pots and pans and trigger an alert so you know what pot to use. The LCD mounted on the pot handle would display the name of the ingredient and how much you are supposed to put in it.
The Pot(TM) and The Stove(TM) are in constant communication to control tempatures and times. Since they are in communication with the rest of The Meal(TM) also, they know when to slow it down so that the whole meal finishes at the same time.
I am not sure this setup would have saved me from the day I had to call my mother and ask her how to use the electric can-opener because my wife was not home. It will allow just about anyone to cook more than your standard ramen noodles and ravioli.
It's not impossible. people build networks every day. You say it's impossible. You should probably leave this conversation to people who aren't technically challenged. I know the physical address of every customer connected to my network. Many of them are vonage customers. If I can determine their address in 3 seconds, Vonage should be able to also, right? of course I spend milions each year to build my network. I think i will start offering Vonage to my customers for free. built the network, we'll just borrow their software to make it work. Does that seem fair? it should to you because that's what you are saying. Vonage built the software so they should be able to ride it on anyones network for free.
Why should a network provider get sued for not shouldering the expense of a product they aren't providing? Vonage is a parasitic company. They have no network. They have no facilities of their own to provide these services like E911. They are using other peoples network resources and then blaming them for not having E911 service. They want to provide services that require infrastructure, they should build an infrastructure of their own. End of story.
Just because one vendor can deliver every product, doesn't make them the best at any of the parts. But it was a very good move.
From what I hear, Cisco has agreed to not touch SA for 2 years. Is that correct? Does that mean SA can continue on with their partnerships selling Cisco's competitors products? (C/DWDM transport gear, CMTS's, etc)
I've never known Cisco to be a nice owner. Generally they take the IP and drop the company. I don't see them doing tha to SA but I also don't see them keeping their hands off for 2 years..
Cable companies are already moving to IPTV services along with their data and voice. IP set top boxes already exist. People are doing today what you say will take 10 years.
Oh.. and for the record, your cable plant is almost all fiber. Generally just from your house to the node is coax. But don't tell them FIOS guys that, they act like they just thought up the idea. I always thought cable companies should have advertised that fact.. but oh well.
Close, but no cigar. Juniper actually has the largest share of public backbones. Cisco owns the edge and the IT networks.
Cisco buying SA is a good thing for SA. Their IP platforms have historically not been the most reliable around. Almost anything they have with IP on it is a product they resell for someone else. Cisco can actually give them the IP interface they need. As everyone knows, Video is moving to IP, and currently, noone stands out as the main player for video delivery. Alcatel has a head start, but Cisco could quickly make up that ground. Sounds to me like Cisco can now sell a "headend in a box". Cisco has long held a position in the cable infrastructure with their CMTS. This is not a new area for them.
Actually, if WoW taught us anything, it's the opposite. Everquest was the king of the mmorpg market with 450,000ish subscribers. WoW has 4million+ subscribers with 1 million of them in North America. Even if they took every single subscriber EQ had (which they didn't do), they would have still doubled the 'known' playerbase in N.A. alone. They didn't push anyone aside. Sure, Everquest lost some customers. Every game did. But not enough to make 4million subscribers.
WoW brought a whole new group to MMog's. Blizzard crossed over from the single player to multiplayer arena and brought their fans with them. And damn.. they have a lot of fans.
Except that your small 50,000 person community would have to build the facilities, lay the fiber, hire a noc etc just to run the infrastructure.. and then when it comes time to negotiatie with the broadcasters they get reamed. The largest cost of your bill each month isnt the cost of the infrastructure, it's the content. Companies like comcast / Directv have millions of subscribers and have to fight for the pricing they get, and their only stick is the number of subscribers they have.
There are quite a few cities that run their own cable. Check around and see how they are doing.
Well, if Vonage were to work with the actual infrastructure providers, this could be solved. I could assing voip customers, of any company, an ip out of a specified block that would pass thru filters. Instead, they prefer to just scream they are being blocked and take it to court. Their loss. And not my problem.
2 things.
= 12629485 [Slashdot] my company already uses this solution.
As I posted previously http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=150605&cid
Your EMTA (phone/network adapter) should have 2 ip's on it from 2 different subnets. I should be able to filter all of yoru internet traffic without interfering with VOIP at all, except maybe making it better by removing all the spam traffic on the upstream.
Business accounts are and should be treated differently. I know that we dont filter most ports for business accounts..except during an attack etc.
The problem is, we don't have a clueometer to check each individual user. If we did, it would be easy to make 2 different filters. Clued / Unclued.
So, if you pay me for a cable modem, premium service, and the guy next to you on your node is infected and starts spamming/scanning for more machines to infect, filling up the upstream bandwidth, that would be ok with you? Most of my customers feel I am supposed to protect them from that happening.
We offer data and voip over the same circuit. I can disconnect yor internet without touching your Voip line.
If your ISP is using an Emta with only 1 ip address on it, you should be looking for a new ISP anyway.
Well, hello Mr. SPammer. So nice of you to stop by and tell us about your constitutional right to spam.
Forcing your mail to go thru my mailserver when it originates on my network is within my rights as a network operator. Please feel free to sign up with another provider that doesn;t care if you spam. Of course, then you may not be able to send mail to anyone as you will be blacklisted, but at least you'll be free!
But there are better ones. I have just shy of 2 million broadband users on my network. Every day I have many customers who are detected as being infected. Automagically they are placed in a walled garden where the only page they can load tells them what is happening. Basically it tells them that they have been compromised. If we can determine the virus/trojan they are running, we give them a link to a locally stored method of corrrecting the problem. I have never received a complaint about it, but I have received hundreds of calls saying thank you.
I do have to question the FCC's thinking though. Most people who get infected are not of a technical nature. If you disconnect them from the net, they are at a loss of how to fix the issue. Obviously they don't have uptodate protection on their machine. if they go out and buy a brand new copy of whatever virus software, it will need to download the latest definitions, which they can;t do because you shut them off.
It reminds me of the mid 90's where if your ds3 to one of the 6 or so backbones went down they would send you an email to notify you. Or sending them a letter telling them you shut their phone off and telling to call you to get it turned back on.
Your provider speaks the truth..
Vonage uses the TFTP port for the config download. TFTP is commonly a malicious protocol.
From the CERT pages:
TFTP is often used by devices to obtain information at boot-time from servers. For example diskless workstations may use it to retrieve an initial boot image, or routers to fetch their configuration files. The protocol has no authentication and a badly configured server can publish any files to which it has access. There should be no need to use it outside a LAN and even within the LAN it should be used with care.
Don't get pissed at your provider for following CERT recommendations.