I've done real quantitative studies on the topic, and quite frankly you got it wrong. Moore's Law (for CPU power) is far stronger than "Moore's Law for bandwidth". Bandwidth growth has been on the order of 30-40%/year, while CPU power has grown faster than that for at least two decades.
ASN.1 is well known outside of the IETF fundamentalist crowd. With its PER (packed encoding rules), it is very efficient of bandwidth and not all that CPU intensive either. Nor is it difficult, if used correctly (and anything can be tough if used wrong). It's a simple tag-length-value notation which can recurse. The only reason the Internet doesn't use it more is the usual NIH.
You're right. Sprint rolled out a commercial ATM service called ION, really the closest domestic thing to the original "Broadband ISDN" vision, starting a few years ago. It has moved slowly, though, due I think to pricing and last-mile questions. Certainly the switches are there and work, but it has to compete with both IP and traditional phone services.
So ATM can offer the additional services, but do they generate enough real customer demand (vs. hype) to get people to move to ATM? That's still the question. Until Sprint takes the pioneer's arrows in the back, others will move slowly. (AT&T and Worldcom also offer ATM, but didn't have the ambitious applications that ION had.)
That is not an accurate characterization of ATM. From the get-go, it was designed to support different types of QoS, optimized for different families of application. (It took them a while to get any aimed correctly at data, but that's another story.) ATM switches and networks can offer connections from a menu of QoS options, which are indeed reflected in pricing.
Constant Bit Rate (CBR)
Variable Bit Rate - Non-Real-Time (VBR-nRT)
Variable Bit Rate - Real Time (VBR-RT)
Available Bit Rate (ABR)
Unspecified Bit Rate (UBR)
IP per se offers something akin to, albeit slightly more useful tham, UBR.
Don't underrate the phone network. Sure it's not exciting. It just works! It reminds me of Doonebury's prophetic March 25 strip, wherein Sid tells Gary that he has a new, more profitable business model. "Boring stuff people actually need".
The phone business (which I work with) has its own internal excitement, so to speak, but they don't let it degrade basic service. Most of the excitement, alas, involves politics (FCC et al).
You improved on my wording. When I said that they didn't have a good price model, I meant ont that a) they were willing to sell it for, and b) people were willing to pay for it! It's easy to find a, and hard to find b. Wealth flows to those who make the two converge.
Incumbent telephone companies (ILECs), used to monopolies, have no klew about how to price things.
The author seems to buy in to Isenberg's "stupid network" hypothesis, which is a good one for Isenberg's rubber-chicken business but not terribly accurate when taken literally.
The telecom network isn't more "intelligent" than the Internet. The Internet has many times more CPU power than the phone network: A phone switch needs a little CPU time to set up a call, while a router needs a little CPU time for every packet. But Bellcore back in the 1980s coined the term (trademark?) "Intelligent Network" to refer to their architecture for using outboard processors and Signaling System 7 to supplement the feature capabilities of AT&T (now Lucent) and Nortel switches. Isenberg correctly notes that the Internet is different, so he called it the Stupid Network, which is correct as an antonym but not literally accurate.
What the phone network offers (and does amazingly well on) is Quality of Service (QoS), which is a measurable set of performance metrics. The Internet was designed specifically to not use QoS; instead, it shares its resources on an as-available basis with all comers. This is called "best effort" but that's a euphemism for "no particular effort".
Trouble is, people are overloading the Internet with services that really want QoS. Now a decade ago, the telecom industry was foreseeing a way of doing that using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a protocol that offers selectable QoS. But the Internet got commercialized and caught on instead. ATM became relegated to a niche technology (it's most widely used inside ADSL networks) but the global ATM network that had been foreseen never happened.
So now people are looking to the Internet to do all the things that it was designed not to do! I don't mean "not designed to do". MPLS, for instance, is the latest saviour-designee, but it can even be implemented as ATM! (Doesn't have to be, though.) So we're back where we were a decade ago, only we have to wave an "Internet" wand over everything or it won't sell.
The problem with ATM, btw, was that nobody figured out a good price model. QoS costs money to provide. When you provide QoS with an "Internet" label, it will still cost money, and the price problems will still exist.
And the nice thing about the real Internet, the one that carries data, Slashdot, Morpheus, non-real-time file transfer, SMTP mail and lots of other good things, is that its insensitivity to QoS lets it, well, ride on top of whatever's out there. It can be hidden in tunnels, treat censorship as damage and route around it, and survive all sorts of abuse. So I don't think that the "walled garden" folks will be able to kill off our Internet. Hell, if they take their shameless streaming commerce and its fans who think of it as "channels" with them, the rest of us will still get by just fine. Or, more realistically, we'll have more, not less, choice. Because the real Internet won't die.
IPv6 is DOA. And we don't need more IP address space. BUT the telephone number issue is a lot more complex.
IPv6 has been around, more or less, for about a decade. It was SIP and PIP merged; neither Steve nor Paul were terribly good protocol designers, and neither understood addressing. ISO CLNP was a far better protocol; it was almost adopted as the standard under the name TUBA (TCP and UDP with Bigger Addressing). But at the last minute, Vint Cerf (the Chauncey Gardner of the Internet) reneged on a deal with the TUBA advocates and changed his position. Thus we've had no progress for pretty much the entire life of the commercial (post-1993) Internet.
And because IPv6 is such a botch, IPv4 workarounds like NAT will keep it going, and ARIN is sitting on heaps of spare v4 space, like all of the old Class As from 67 to 126! With CIDR, that'll last quite a lot, and indeed Disney does not need a full Class A. But they could use it more than many other Class A occupants!
Telephone numbers are a different story. Every LEC (ILEC, CLEC) needs its own prefix code in every rate center it does business in. There are too many rate centers (in order to keep local calling areas small) and most CLECs don't need as many numbers as they have. But they got full prefix codes because that was the only choice. Now they get 1000 numbers at a time in most areas, or will soon, slowing down area code growth. That, and not PBX extensions or cell phones or even fax servers, is the main waste of phone numbers. And direct-inward-dialing PBX extensions (a feature bundled with Centrex but also used without it) is very beneficial; extension numbers are not a valid substitute.
Still, there will be some need for new phone number space in North America one of these years, not too far out. This has been a recent discussion on comp.dcom.telecom (Telecom Digest) and shouldn't really be a tangent here. But yes, there is some analogy.
Actually, it's worse than that. It used to be Continental Cablevision. They pioneered cable modem service as "Continental Express". Then US West bought them, merged them with some smaller cablecos, and renamed it "MediaOne". Their cable modem service was called "Highway One". Then MediaOne licensed the RoadRunner name from Time Warner (via a joint venture they had, ServiceCo LLC). Then it became AT&T Road Runner, and now it's AT&T @Home. It could become Comcast @Home. But who knows, by then the @Home label could die.
Any one of them delivered/delivers better service than New England Telephone/Bell Titanic/VeriZontal. I realize that in many places, the cable company's job is to make the phone company look good, but here in New England it works the other way. I use AT&T-B's phone service, which is far superior to VeriZontal's.
I have AT&T @Home now, but it was Road Runner until last week. Nothing changed except the name and their home page. This was MediaOne before, not TCI, and MediaOne runs their own cable modem system, tying in to AT&T's national Internet backbone. The mail server's a bit slow and I'm having trouble posting via the news server, but basic connectivity is excellent and reliable. This is near Boston.
The old TCI systems, on the other hand, let @Home do real work for them. From what I hear it hasn't worked out so well. I really think AT&T would like to put @Home out of its misery. They made a mistake going pubilc with it; now they have public minority shareholders they can't screw.
I think Comcast pretty much does their own thing too, albeit with an @Home label. As cablecos go, it's a high-class outfit too, more like MediaOne than TCI. But do note that over half of their current service area was not theirs two years ago -- they did a huge swap with AT&T/TCI as part of the MediaOne deal. (Comcast tried to buy it; AT&T outbid them and owed them a $1B breakup fee, which was paid in the form of cable subscribers. They have been swapping systems to create larger, more contiguous clusters.) So lots of Comcast systems are old TCI systems, which usually means "fix-er-uppers".
The big question for this deal is concentration: AT&T had some legal problems taking over MediaOne, because they ended up owning more than a 30% prorated share of the national CATV market. That law's legality is questionable, but Comcast-AT&TB would be WAY over the mark. And I don't think AT&T has finalized their divestiture of 25% ownership of Time Warner Entertainment.
That isn't funny; it's probably the trick, the key technology! Sometimes called an inverse mux, you take multiple lower-speed channels and combine them.
So they pump copper to its limit, do it over a bunch of pairs in parallel, and get a lot of bandwidth in the aggregate. Big whoop!
There is some effort needed in controlling interference, because most DSL technologies are mutually interfering, and degrade in speed when the subscription rate increases. But it's not going to give you 155 Mbps over a 5-mile loop from the CO to your house. Never will.
Why do you dispute that Williams kept one strand? I've heard that story several times, and at the time I was with a company (and project) that was doing many millions of dollars a year with them (now Worldcom, of course).
Williams probably kept the strand, and did a non-compete agreement too. The day the noncompete expired (well, maybe it was week, you know what I mean), they opened WilCom. Which is now a significant backbone fiber player too, and 10% owned by SBC.
No, I don't know if they could have used the single strand for anything practical. But it was their right-of-way in the first place, so laying new fiber wasn't a big deal.
If Alpha passes to Intel, it is likely to be phased out -- Intel will milk it of its best technology, or at least of the part that they find compatible with their own rigid ideas, and scratch future Alphas. They want the team, but mainly to improve on IA chips.
This is dangerous, for the same reason that other monocultures are dangerous. Plant too much of the same "improved" seed variety and diseases/pests particularly suited to that variety will erupt/spread. Spread one architecture too far and good ideas from others will get lost, and progress will slow down.
Already we've lost lots of good ideas from the early days of computing. Some of the Burroughs CPUs of the 1960s had advanced features that modern CPUs would benefit from. Multics and TENEX/TOPS-20 had features that "modern" OSs, like the many variants on 1969's Unix, lack and could benefit from. The economic benefits of spreading one design (h/w or s/w) across many units usually outweighs the benefits of a better design. At least in the short term, but then we lose the long term benefits.
That's where Alpha got clobbered. DEC had no marketing skill. Alpha was DEC's fourth in-house RISC design (after SAFE, Titan and Omega, and those are only the ones I can remember offhand) and its designers learned a lot from the weaknesses observed in SPARC, MIPS (which DEC used for a while) and other earlier designs. Alpha has unique features. It morphs into a VAX, NT or Unix machine via a code layer that other CPUs don't have; Transmeta is not quite the same idea but at least has some parallels. Its floating point processor still blows the doors off of Intel's or even the superior AMD. It's a clean architecture, unburdened with IA-32's 8080 compatibility (itself a kind of PDP-8 heritage).
But none of that mattered; Alpha never got volume, so it was always a niche machine. VMS still has strong markets (read Terry Shannon's SKC stuff, for instance) and it depends on Alpha, but that's apparently not enough these days to sustain PC-centric Compaq. How sad.
Last week, some doctors reported that the well-known placebo effect doesn't really work. Blank pills don't work better than nothing. Mind over matter and all that doesn't work so well in that medical instance.
But look at the audiophiles. They're doing nutty stuff that can't possibly help the sound, and saying how great it is. The Post article missed the famous scam of a decade or so back, the green magic marker called "CD Stoplight". Rub it on the edge of your CD and it sounds much better, or so claimed the editors of Stereofool. To a high-end fan, "bits is bits" just doesn't work.
Likewise for power conditioning. If the audio gear has good power supplies to begin with, then it shouldn't matter what goes into the AC line. Refrigerator noise? Sure: The compressor not only takes lots of juice when it kicks in, but it shakes the floor (acoustic low-frequency vibration). But a good amplifier power supply should have enough charge in its capacitors to ride it out.
The whole cable biz is also nutty. Yes, inadequate cables will hurt the sound. But good 8-gauge zip wire is probably just as good as $10/foot gold-plated wire. There's precious little skin effect below 20 kHz anyway. As others have noted, this goes triple for digital cables! Bits is bits.
Good speakers, sure. Good amps, sure, though I suspect a $1k VFET amp will sound indistinguishable from a tube amp, or at least have no worse distortion or noise. Ordinary bipolar junction transistor amps are not good, but back in 1960 you could buy a good tube Williamson (that's a type, not a brand) amp for $100 or so that today would set you back a few grand. Why? Because nutty folks think that paying more makes it better.
Good point about compression. Iridium normally assigns 2.4 kbps per call. It compresses voice down that low. No, it doesn't sound great (yes, I've tried it). But given the power budgets of trying to make a battery-powered handheld phone talk to a flying GSM base station a few hundred miles away (low Earth orbit), there's just so much information you can squeeze above the noise.
Even an outdoor antenna doesn't guarantee coverage; Iridium can be shadowed by buildings, thick foliage, etc. It's probably fine from most roofs. It's truly a service for people who are out standing in their field.
You make an excellent point. Always-on is very important, especially given the 30-second-plus connect time of modern modems.
Of course the downside to this is that you're a sitting duck for k1dd13z, but that's what home firewalls are for. I use an SMC Barricade, which can be had nowadays for under $100, and it lets two (or more) computers share the link.
One reason (not the only one!) that DSL is so hard to provide is that it overshoots the mark. It was designed for video on demand, which needed 1.5 Mbps, so it doesn't work on marginal wires (and thus is unavailable to, oh, 50-60% of USA households). A broadband always-on scheme that delivered, say, 256-512 kbps, but was more robust, would be more appropriate for most users. Just not as macho.
And as a cable modem user, I can vouch for how easy they are to get installed and working.
No, a bomb isn't so easy
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Duct Tape
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· Score: 2
To make an atomic weapon, you'd need a higher grade of fissile material. Americium and Thorium won't cut it. You need U-235 or Plutonium. The former is incredibly hard to separate from common Uranium (mostly U-238, which is only barely radioactive) while the latter is only made in reactors, and thus you'd have to buy it from your friendly local Soviet-salvage dealer....
Unlike the Internet, telephone networks are strictly regulated, having been largely developed under government-imposed monopolies. Country codes are assigned by the ITU. Numbering within the United States is supervied (area codes given out) by NeuStar (nanpa.com), under an FCC contract.
It's not a model for the Internet, with its textual names, trademark claims, etc.
ICANN is a recent creation of a dishonest lawyer
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Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 5
ICANN dates back all the way to 1998 or so. Before then, the generally-accepted authority was Jon Postel at IANA. Jon died suddenly. Shortly afterwards, a lawyer with IBM connections named Joe Sims showed up, claiming that Jon had hired him to create a body to oversee Internet names and addresses.
Sims set up ICANN, giving the top job first to newsletter writer Esther Dyson, and appointing the "interim" board. Most of them are still there, "boardsquatters"! ICANN made a deal with Ira Magaziner at the White House, who got DoC to accept them as the new authority.
Thus Joe Sims is the Melvin Dummar of the Internet. (Mel had a forged Howard Hughes will, giving him a share of the late zillionaire's estate. His phoney story made a funny film, "Melvin and Howard".)
Legally, their authority is only what you believe in. Anybody can set up a DNS server and anybody can set their resolver to whatever server they want. ICANN replaced Dyson with MCI Worldcom's Vint Cerf, keeping its UUNET (the largest ISP) on its side. But a grassroots movement can, in theory, give power to an alternative root. New.net is the latest one to have some credibility.
Vint himself, of course, is the Chauncy Gardner of the Internet. (Chauncy was the retarded protagonist of "Being There", whose simpleminded mumblings were confused with brilliance.)
For more info, you all might enjoy http://www.icannwatch.org/
It's amazing that DSL has gotten this far, since it works on so few lines. Indeed it will not work if there's optical fiber anywhere along the path, because DSL is merely a copper pair line driver. It was a clever invention, but the copper was installed for analog telephones, not DSL, so it won't always work.
Now a few years ago, the US telephone industry came up with a new scheme called "Serving Area Concept" (SAC), which would shorten the copper loop to 12,000 feet, using fiber to a neighborhood multiplexor (DLC). SAC sounded great. When ISDN was the best thing going, it could have meant ISDN everywhere, because DLCs do ISDN just fine. (Not that the former-NYNEX parts of VeriZontal ever do that without hard coaxing.) But then DSL came along and best became worst: The DLCs didn't do DSL.
Now there *are* DSLAMs designed to go outdoors, in manholes or huts. These "remote terminals" are temperature-hardened. US West/Qwest has installed a few (their sprawling lines are mostly beyond the 12-18,000 foot limit of ADSL, and largely on DLC). SBC's Project Pronto uses them; trouble is, they're trying to hold up Pronto as a weapon against competition. Put in Pronto and take out competitors (who are using the old copper wires). The FCC said no so they've slowed down Pronto. Also note that *recent* DLCs can be upgraded to do DSL, but many older ones can't.
VeriZontal (well, the BellTitanic side; not so sure about ex-GTE areas) simply does not do remote terminals. So if you're in a DLC-served neighborhood, or more than about 15,000 wire feet from the CO (and the wire can snake every which way...), you're not going to get it. Competitive providers sometimes do apartment buildings (a nice deal is going into Harbor Towers, Boston, for instance) but that requires a large enough complex to merit the considerable cost of getting the T1 or T3 uplinks there.
A few years ago, the Bells said they'd get fiber to the home Real Soon Now. See http://www.newnetworks.com/ for some info about how those promises were broken.
That's what the argument tends to boil down to: If they're allowed to track my every move, then they can personalize the spam they send me on my pocket phone/browser. Please forgive me if I'm not impressed.
McNealy tells me I can be in a distant city and they'll notify me when I'm near a restaurant of a genre I like. So some awful cockroach palace will purchase the spam rights for "Mexican" food and my phone will disturb me to tell me that bad salsa is only two blocks away? Hey Scott, try this for size: If I want to know where Mexican food is, I'll ask! And it might not be where I *am*, it might be where I *am going*. So don't query my GPS.
I find it slightly annoying when spAmazon tells me what I might like, based on whatever book has been purchased on my account for my wife, kids, or as a gift to somebody. Too much personalization is annoying. I'd rather read a magazine; the ads, if I'm interested, are in the same place each time.
That's the trouble with the "m-commerce" crowd. They don't care what people want. They just care that they can. Can spam. Hey, what a good idea. Let's can spam once and for all!
The usual excuse is that IPv6 has fixed-length address fields which are easy to handle, say, as struct's. But who says CLNP can't? While CLNP allows many AFIs, it's quite reasonable for the IETF to standardized on a narrow subset, with defined length.
Little work has been done lately on speeding up CLNP, but I think it should be quite feasible to run it through the fast path.
IPv6 is a failure, and has been for the ten years or so that it's been in the works. Now that Cisco has lost most of its technical talent, it's finally pushing something that should have died years ago.
IPv6 was misbegotten in the first place. There was a working protocol, CLNP, designed for the OSI programme. While OSI had many errors, CLNP, its equivalent of IP, was very good. It had a flexible address field. The first byte was the "authority and format identifier" (AFI), which indicated how to parse the rest. The maximum length was 20 octets but it varied depending on the AFI. Then came the "initial domain identifier" (IDI), which corresponded to network, and the "domain specific part" (DSP), which corresponded to a host on the network (and which could have a subnet-like hierarchy). CLNP was in Cisco, Wellfleet, and other routers over ten years ago! Applied to the Internet, it was called TUBA (TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses).
The IETF almost standardized on TUBA; had they done so, the migration would have been done years ago and we probably wouldn't have had NAT, except maybe for some firewalling. The opposition came about because it was tained by OSI, a religious issue among some immature IETF hotheads. Paul {Francis|Tsuchia} of Bellcore and Steve Deering each wrote their own candidate replacements for IPv4, called PIP and SIP (Paul's and Steve's IP, respectively). Both were undergraduate quality. They merged their efforts (the anti-OSI alliance) into what we now call IPv6. At the last minute, Vint Cerf (the Chauncy Gardner of the Internet) switched his vote from TUBA to IPv6. And real progress in the IP layer basically stopped.
IPv6 doesn't do what it's supposed to. The article at least doesn't claim that its flows are useful for QoS; they're not. The address space is horribly wasteful; because the low-order 64 bits are globally unique (based on MAC), the net result is 64 effective bits, twice. Security is no better than with IPv4. The long addresses result in more header overhead, more bandwidth wasted, and thus either worse performance or more cost. Think of how the bigger headers will work with short-payload streaming payloads!
They should put this turkey out of its misery. There are LOTS of IPv4 addresses in reserve. Properly allocated, 32 bits should last for a decade or more. Of course many Class As were given out wastefully back in the old days, but we really don't need globally unique addresses for every appliance in every house anyway.
It's an old book by an old Reagan hack
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Telecosm
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· Score: 4
I'm surprised that/. is reviewing Telecosm now; it has been out for a few years now. It was written at the leading edge of the dotcom boom, and probably helped fuel some of the irrational exuberance that led to disasters like PSInet stock.
Gilder takes a few facts and selectively uses them to decorate a pre-existing world view. This is about what you'd expect from someone whose own home page is on the web site of a creationist group! He appreciates technology more than science; that's dangerous.
Gilder, you might recall, was the hack behind the "Laffer Curve", which was lame justification for Reagan's nutty tax cuts (what's a few trillion more on the national debt among friends?). As a supply-sider, he is always looking for, well, supply. Fiber optics promise an oversupply of bandwidth. Traditional economics looks at demand too. Gilder assumes that if you build it, they will come, and we'll all be the richer for it. It's, uh, far from proven.
I work with CLECs and have watched DSL since its inception. (I also use a cable modem, which I'm very happy with; since I don't live near the CO, I simply can't get DSL.) While I've seen some real bone-headedness among DSL providers, it's not exactly as if the ILECs (mostly Bells) were playing fair.
The Telecom Act of 1996 set some rules for competitors, but the Act was a typical political compromise; when in doubt, make the wording ambiguous or internally contradictory. Thus the FCC and Courts have been at it ever since, and still are. The actual rules of competition are not clear, and not constant. The Bells' attitude was to honor the unambiguous letter of the law but not one millimeter further, so the competitors have had to struggle to get what seemed obvious.
For instance, they were originally allowed to locate their multiplexing equipment in Bell COs, but the law excluded switching, so some Bells initially wouldn't let in the needed routers. The law didn't say that CLEC employees had to have access to the bathrooms, so some ILECs refused it; likewise, they couldn't use elevators to haul up the racks. These took time to fix. Lots of this kind of nickel-dime chickenkaka took place, and it still does.
The early DSL players (notably Covad) had to buy 100 sq ft collocation cages in each CO, usually over $50k a pop, before starting. Permission to go cageless was required by the FCC only after these "first movers" spent that money. The early DSL players had to lease full loops from the ILECs, typically $12-$20/month apiece, while the ILECs could share ADSL loops with voice. Again, that's changing, but it's too late for most of the early players.
Plus DSL only works on maybe half the loops in the country. So you lose a lot of potential business. And the ILECs go out of their way, unless given regulatory pressure, to do nothing about fixing it.
What also killed the first DSL startups was the race to be everywhere fast. Six DSL providers in one CO guaratee that the business is spread too thin, especially when they all please their VCs by putting in large-scale gear that requires a large market share to break even.
So now, a newcomer entering the DSL business can theoretically avoid the already-fixed roadblocks and get going using cageless collocation, smaller-scale upfront gear, and shared loops. But the capital market has dried up so you can't fund it anyway... and if congresscritter Tauzin (R-BellSouth) gets his way, the CLECs will be mostly shut out anyway.
Opt-out list is used as a mailing list, no?
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Opt-in vs. Opt-out
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· Score: 2
I don't get how opt-out could actually work. If you are actually stupid enough to reply to the "remove me" addresses on spam, your address is upgraded to "verified", and thus gets premium prices from other spammers who buy spam lists. So if you give your address to an "opt-out" list, then an "honest" spammer will try to remove you, but since honest spammers are as rare as six-foot puca rabbits, you won't actually be opted out of any spam.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done real quantitative studies on the topic, and quite frankly you got it wrong. Moore's Law (for CPU power) is far stronger than "Moore's Law for bandwidth". Bandwidth growth has been on the order of 30-40%/year, while CPU power has grown faster than that for at least two decades.
ASN.1 is well known outside of the IETF fundamentalist crowd. With its PER (packed encoding rules), it is very efficient of bandwidth and not all that CPU intensive either. Nor is it difficult, if used correctly (and anything can be tough if used wrong). It's a simple tag-length-value notation which can recurse. The only reason the Internet doesn't use it more is the usual NIH.
You're right. Sprint rolled out a commercial ATM service called ION, really the closest domestic thing to the original "Broadband ISDN" vision, starting a few years ago. It has moved slowly, though, due I think to pricing and last-mile questions. Certainly the switches are there and work, but it has to compete with both IP and traditional phone services.
So ATM can offer the additional services, but do they generate enough real customer demand (vs. hype) to get people to move to ATM? That's still the question. Until Sprint takes the pioneer's arrows in the back, others will move slowly. (AT&T and Worldcom also offer ATM, but didn't have the ambitious applications that ION had.)
That is not an accurate characterization of ATM. From the get-go, it was designed to support different types of QoS, optimized for different families of application. (It took them a while to get any aimed correctly at data, but that's another story.) ATM switches and networks can offer connections from a menu of QoS options, which are indeed reflected in pricing.
Constant Bit Rate (CBR)
Variable Bit Rate - Non-Real-Time (VBR-nRT)
Variable Bit Rate - Real Time (VBR-RT)
Available Bit Rate (ABR)
Unspecified Bit Rate (UBR)
IP per se offers something akin to, albeit slightly more useful tham, UBR.
Don't underrate the phone network. Sure it's not exciting. It just works! It reminds me of Doonebury's prophetic March 25 strip, wherein Sid tells Gary that he has a new, more profitable business model. "Boring stuff people actually need".
The phone business (which I work with) has its own internal excitement, so to speak, but they don't let it degrade basic service. Most of the excitement, alas, involves politics (FCC et al).
You improved on my wording. When I said that they didn't have a good price model, I meant ont that a) they were willing to sell it for, and b) people were willing to pay for it! It's easy to find a, and hard to find b. Wealth flows to those who make the two converge.
Incumbent telephone companies (ILECs), used to monopolies, have no klew about how to price things.
The telecom network isn't more "intelligent" than the Internet. The Internet has many times more CPU power than the phone network: A phone switch needs a little CPU time to set up a call, while a router needs a little CPU time for every packet. But Bellcore back in the 1980s coined the term (trademark?) "Intelligent Network" to refer to their architecture for using outboard processors and Signaling System 7 to supplement the feature capabilities of AT&T (now Lucent) and Nortel switches. Isenberg correctly notes that the Internet is different, so he called it the Stupid Network, which is correct as an antonym but not literally accurate.
What the phone network offers (and does amazingly well on) is Quality of Service (QoS), which is a measurable set of performance metrics. The Internet was designed specifically to not use QoS; instead, it shares its resources on an as-available basis with all comers. This is called "best effort" but that's a euphemism for "no particular effort".
Trouble is, people are overloading the Internet with services that really want QoS. Now a decade ago, the telecom industry was foreseeing a way of doing that using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a protocol that offers selectable QoS. But the Internet got commercialized and caught on instead. ATM became relegated to a niche technology (it's most widely used inside ADSL networks) but the global ATM network that had been foreseen never happened.
So now people are looking to the Internet to do all the things that it was designed not to do! I don't mean "not designed to do". MPLS, for instance, is the latest saviour-designee, but it can even be implemented as ATM! (Doesn't have to be, though.) So we're back where we were a decade ago, only we have to wave an "Internet" wand over everything or it won't sell.
The problem with ATM, btw, was that nobody figured out a good price model. QoS costs money to provide. When you provide QoS with an "Internet" label, it will still cost money, and the price problems will still exist.
And the nice thing about the real Internet, the one that carries data, Slashdot, Morpheus, non-real-time file transfer, SMTP mail and lots of other good things, is that its insensitivity to QoS lets it, well, ride on top of whatever's out there. It can be hidden in tunnels, treat censorship as damage and route around it, and survive all sorts of abuse. So I don't think that the "walled garden" folks will be able to kill off our Internet. Hell, if they take their shameless streaming commerce and its fans who think of it as "channels" with them, the rest of us will still get by just fine. Or, more realistically, we'll have more, not less, choice. Because the real Internet won't die.
IPv6 is DOA. And we don't need more IP address space. BUT the telephone number issue is a lot more complex.
IPv6 has been around, more or less, for about a decade. It was SIP and PIP merged; neither Steve nor Paul were terribly good protocol designers, and neither understood addressing. ISO CLNP was a far better protocol; it was almost adopted as the standard under the name TUBA (TCP and UDP with Bigger Addressing). But at the last minute, Vint Cerf (the Chauncey Gardner of the Internet) reneged on a deal with the TUBA advocates and changed his position. Thus we've had no progress for pretty much the entire life of the commercial (post-1993) Internet.
And because IPv6 is such a botch, IPv4 workarounds like NAT will keep it going, and ARIN is sitting on heaps of spare v4 space, like all of the old Class As from 67 to 126! With CIDR, that'll last quite a lot, and indeed Disney does not need a full Class A. But they could use it more than many other Class A occupants!
Telephone numbers are a different story. Every LEC (ILEC, CLEC) needs its own prefix code in every rate center it does business in. There are too many rate centers (in order to keep local calling areas small) and most CLECs don't need as many numbers as they have. But they got full prefix codes because that was the only choice. Now they get 1000 numbers at a time in most areas, or will soon, slowing down area code growth. That, and not PBX extensions or cell phones or even fax servers, is the main waste of phone numbers. And direct-inward-dialing PBX extensions (a feature bundled with Centrex but also used without it) is very beneficial; extension numbers are not a valid substitute.
Still, there will be some need for new phone number space in North America one of these years, not too far out. This has been a recent discussion on comp.dcom.telecom (Telecom Digest) and shouldn't really be a tangent here. But yes, there is some analogy.
Actually, it's worse than that. It used to be Continental Cablevision. They pioneered cable modem service as "Continental Express". Then US West bought them, merged them with some smaller cablecos, and renamed it "MediaOne". Their cable modem service was called "Highway One". Then MediaOne licensed the RoadRunner name from Time Warner (via a joint venture they had, ServiceCo LLC). Then it became AT&T Road Runner, and now it's AT&T @Home. It could become Comcast @Home. But who knows, by then the @Home label could die.
Any one of them delivered/delivers better service than New England Telephone/Bell Titanic/VeriZontal. I realize that in many places, the cable company's job is to make the phone company look good, but here in New England it works the other way. I use AT&T-B's phone service, which is far superior to VeriZontal's.
I have AT&T @Home now, but it was Road Runner until last week. Nothing changed except the name and their home page. This was MediaOne before, not TCI, and MediaOne runs their own cable modem system, tying in to AT&T's national Internet backbone. The mail server's a bit slow and I'm having trouble posting via the news server, but basic connectivity is excellent and reliable. This is near Boston.
The old TCI systems, on the other hand, let @Home do real work for them. From what I hear it hasn't worked out so well. I really think AT&T would like to put @Home out of its misery. They made a mistake going pubilc with it; now they have public minority shareholders they can't screw.
I think Comcast pretty much does their own thing too, albeit with an @Home label. As cablecos go, it's a high-class outfit too, more like MediaOne than TCI. But do note that over half of their current service area was not theirs two years ago -- they did a huge swap with AT&T/TCI as part of the MediaOne deal. (Comcast tried to buy it; AT&T outbid them and owed them a $1B breakup fee, which was paid in the form of cable subscribers. They have been swapping systems to create larger, more contiguous clusters.) So lots of Comcast systems are old TCI systems, which usually means "fix-er-uppers".
The big question for this deal is concentration: AT&T had some legal problems taking over MediaOne, because they ended up owning more than a 30% prorated share of the national CATV market. That law's legality is questionable, but Comcast-AT&TB would be WAY over the mark. And I don't think AT&T has finalized their divestiture of 25% ownership of Time Warner Entertainment.
That isn't funny; it's probably the trick, the key technology! Sometimes called an inverse mux, you take multiple lower-speed channels and combine them.
So they pump copper to its limit, do it over a bunch of pairs in parallel, and get a lot of bandwidth in the aggregate. Big whoop!
There is some effort needed in controlling interference, because most DSL technologies are mutually interfering, and degrade in speed when the subscription rate increases. But it's not going to give you 155 Mbps over a 5-mile loop from the CO to your house. Never will.
Why do you dispute that Williams kept one strand? I've heard that story several times, and at the time I was with a company (and project) that was doing many millions of dollars a year with them (now Worldcom, of course).
Williams probably kept the strand, and did a non-compete agreement too. The day the noncompete expired (well, maybe it was week, you know what I mean), they opened WilCom. Which is now a significant backbone fiber player too, and 10% owned by SBC.
No, I don't know if they could have used the single strand for anything practical. But it was their right-of-way in the first place, so laying new fiber wasn't a big deal.
If Alpha passes to Intel, it is likely to be phased out -- Intel will milk it of its best technology, or at least of the part that they find compatible with their own rigid ideas, and scratch future Alphas. They want the team, but mainly to improve on IA chips.
This is dangerous, for the same reason that other monocultures are dangerous. Plant too much of the same "improved" seed variety and diseases/pests particularly suited to that variety will erupt/spread. Spread one architecture too far and good ideas from others will get lost, and progress will slow down.
Already we've lost lots of good ideas from the early days of computing. Some of the Burroughs CPUs of the 1960s had advanced features that modern CPUs would benefit from. Multics and TENEX/TOPS-20 had features that "modern" OSs, like the many variants on 1969's Unix, lack and could benefit from. The economic benefits of spreading one design (h/w or s/w) across many units usually outweighs the benefits of a better design. At least in the short term, but then we lose the long term benefits.
That's where Alpha got clobbered. DEC had no marketing skill. Alpha was DEC's fourth in-house RISC design (after SAFE, Titan and Omega, and those are only the ones I can remember offhand) and its designers learned a lot from the weaknesses observed in SPARC, MIPS (which DEC used for a while) and other earlier designs. Alpha has unique features. It morphs into a VAX, NT or Unix machine via a code layer that other CPUs don't have; Transmeta is not quite the same idea but at least has some parallels. Its floating point processor still blows the doors off of Intel's or even the superior AMD. It's a clean architecture, unburdened with IA-32's 8080 compatibility (itself a kind of PDP-8 heritage).
But none of that mattered; Alpha never got volume, so it was always a niche machine. VMS still has strong markets (read Terry Shannon's SKC stuff, for instance) and it depends on Alpha, but that's apparently not enough these days to sustain PC-centric Compaq. How sad.
But look at the audiophiles. They're doing nutty stuff that can't possibly help the sound, and saying how great it is. The Post article missed the famous scam of a decade or so back, the green magic marker called "CD Stoplight". Rub it on the edge of your CD and it sounds much better, or so claimed the editors of Stereofool. To a high-end fan, "bits is bits" just doesn't work.
Likewise for power conditioning. If the audio gear has good power supplies to begin with, then it shouldn't matter what goes into the AC line. Refrigerator noise? Sure: The compressor not only takes lots of juice when it kicks in, but it shakes the floor (acoustic low-frequency vibration). But a good amplifier power supply should have enough charge in its capacitors to ride it out.
The whole cable biz is also nutty. Yes, inadequate cables will hurt the sound. But good 8-gauge zip wire is probably just as good as $10/foot gold-plated wire. There's precious little skin effect below 20 kHz anyway. As others have noted, this goes triple for digital cables! Bits is bits.
Good speakers, sure. Good amps, sure, though I suspect a $1k VFET amp will sound indistinguishable from a tube amp, or at least have no worse distortion or noise. Ordinary bipolar junction transistor amps are not good, but back in 1960 you could buy a good tube Williamson (that's a type, not a brand) amp for $100 or so that today would set you back a few grand. Why? Because nutty folks think that paying more makes it better.
Good point about compression. Iridium normally assigns 2.4 kbps per call. It compresses voice down that low. No, it doesn't sound great (yes, I've tried it). But given the power budgets of trying to make a battery-powered handheld phone talk to a flying GSM base station a few hundred miles away (low Earth orbit), there's just so much information you can squeeze above the noise.
Even an outdoor antenna doesn't guarantee coverage; Iridium can be shadowed by buildings, thick foliage, etc. It's probably fine from most roofs. It's truly a service for people who are out standing in their field.
You make an excellent point. Always-on is very important, especially given the 30-second-plus connect time of modern modems.
Of course the downside to this is that you're a sitting duck for k1dd13z, but that's what home firewalls are for. I use an SMC Barricade, which can be had nowadays for under $100, and it lets two (or more) computers share the link.
One reason (not the only one!) that DSL is so hard to provide is that it overshoots the mark. It was designed for video on demand, which needed 1.5 Mbps, so it doesn't work on marginal wires (and thus is unavailable to, oh, 50-60% of USA households). A broadband always-on scheme that delivered, say, 256-512 kbps, but was more robust, would be more appropriate for most users. Just not as macho.
And as a cable modem user, I can vouch for how easy they are to get installed and working.
To make an atomic weapon, you'd need a higher grade of fissile material. Americium and Thorium won't cut it. You need U-235 or Plutonium. The former is incredibly hard to separate from common Uranium (mostly U-238, which is only barely radioactive) while the latter is only made in reactors, and thus you'd have to buy it from your friendly local Soviet-salvage dealer....
Unlike the Internet, telephone networks are strictly regulated, having been largely developed under government-imposed monopolies. Country codes are assigned by the ITU. Numbering within the United States is supervied (area codes given out) by NeuStar (nanpa.com), under an FCC contract.
It's not a model for the Internet, with its textual names, trademark claims, etc.
ICANN dates back all the way to 1998 or so. Before then, the generally-accepted authority was Jon Postel at IANA. Jon died suddenly. Shortly afterwards, a lawyer with IBM connections named Joe Sims showed up, claiming that Jon had hired him to create a body to oversee Internet names and addresses.
Sims set up ICANN, giving the top job first to newsletter writer Esther Dyson, and appointing the "interim" board. Most of them are still there, "boardsquatters"! ICANN made a deal with Ira Magaziner at the White House, who got DoC to accept them as the new authority.
Thus Joe Sims is the Melvin Dummar of the Internet. (Mel had a forged Howard Hughes will, giving him a share of the late zillionaire's estate. His phoney story made a funny film, "Melvin and Howard".)
Legally, their authority is only what you believe in. Anybody can set up a DNS server and anybody can set their resolver to whatever server they want. ICANN replaced Dyson with MCI Worldcom's Vint Cerf, keeping its UUNET (the largest ISP) on its side. But a grassroots movement can, in theory, give power to an alternative root. New.net is the latest one to have some credibility.
Vint himself, of course, is the Chauncy Gardner of the Internet. (Chauncy was the retarded protagonist of "Being There", whose simpleminded mumblings were confused with brilliance.)
For more info, you all might enjoy http://www.icannwatch.org/
It's amazing that DSL has gotten this far, since it works on so few lines. Indeed it will not work if there's optical fiber anywhere along the path, because DSL is merely a copper pair line driver. It was a clever invention, but the copper was installed for analog telephones, not DSL, so it won't always work.
Now a few years ago, the US telephone industry came up with a new scheme called "Serving Area Concept" (SAC), which would shorten the copper loop to 12,000 feet, using fiber to a neighborhood multiplexor (DLC). SAC sounded great. When ISDN was the best thing going, it could have meant ISDN everywhere, because DLCs do ISDN just fine. (Not that the former-NYNEX parts of VeriZontal ever do that without hard coaxing.) But then DSL came along and best became worst: The DLCs didn't do DSL.
Now there *are* DSLAMs designed to go outdoors, in manholes or huts. These "remote terminals" are temperature-hardened. US West/Qwest has installed a few (their sprawling lines are mostly beyond the 12-18,000 foot limit of ADSL, and largely on DLC). SBC's Project Pronto uses them; trouble is, they're trying to hold up Pronto as a weapon against competition. Put in Pronto and take out competitors (who are using the old copper wires). The FCC said no so they've slowed down Pronto. Also note that *recent* DLCs can be upgraded to do DSL, but many older ones can't.
VeriZontal (well, the BellTitanic side; not so sure about ex-GTE areas) simply does not do remote terminals. So if you're in a DLC-served neighborhood, or more than about 15,000 wire feet from the CO (and the wire can snake every which way...), you're not going to get it. Competitive providers sometimes do apartment buildings (a nice deal is going into Harbor Towers, Boston, for instance) but that requires a large enough complex to merit the considerable cost of getting the T1 or T3 uplinks there.
A few years ago, the Bells said they'd get fiber to the home Real Soon Now. See http://www.newnetworks.com/ for some info about how those promises were broken.
That's what the argument tends to boil down to: If they're allowed to track my every move, then they can personalize the spam they send me on my pocket phone/browser. Please forgive me if I'm not impressed. McNealy tells me I can be in a distant city and they'll notify me when I'm near a restaurant of a genre I like. So some awful cockroach palace will purchase the spam rights for "Mexican" food and my phone will disturb me to tell me that bad salsa is only two blocks away? Hey Scott, try this for size: If I want to know where Mexican food is, I'll ask! And it might not be where I *am*, it might be where I *am going*. So don't query my GPS. I find it slightly annoying when spAmazon tells me what I might like, based on whatever book has been purchased on my account for my wife, kids, or as a gift to somebody. Too much personalization is annoying. I'd rather read a magazine; the ads, if I'm interested, are in the same place each time. That's the trouble with the "m-commerce" crowd. They don't care what people want. They just care that they can. Can spam. Hey, what a good idea. Let's can spam once and for all!
Why do you say IPv6 is faster than CLNP?
The usual excuse is that IPv6 has fixed-length address fields which are easy to handle, say, as struct's. But who says CLNP can't? While CLNP allows many AFIs, it's quite reasonable for the IETF to standardized on a narrow subset, with defined length.
Little work has been done lately on speeding up CLNP, but I think it should be quite feasible to run it through the fast path.
IPv6 is a failure, and has been for the ten years or so that it's been in the works. Now that Cisco has lost most of its technical talent, it's finally pushing something that should have died years ago.
IPv6 was misbegotten in the first place. There was a working protocol, CLNP, designed for the OSI programme. While OSI had many errors, CLNP, its equivalent of IP, was very good. It had a flexible address field. The first byte was the "authority and format identifier" (AFI), which indicated how to parse the rest. The maximum length was 20 octets but it varied depending on the AFI. Then came the "initial domain identifier" (IDI), which corresponded to network, and the "domain specific part" (DSP), which corresponded to a host on the network (and which could have a subnet-like hierarchy). CLNP was in Cisco, Wellfleet, and other routers over ten years ago! Applied to the Internet, it was called TUBA (TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses).
The IETF almost standardized on TUBA; had they done so, the migration would have been done years ago and we probably wouldn't have had NAT, except maybe for some firewalling. The opposition came about because it was tained by OSI, a religious issue among some immature IETF hotheads. Paul {Francis|Tsuchia} of Bellcore and Steve Deering each wrote their own candidate replacements for IPv4, called PIP and SIP (Paul's and Steve's IP, respectively). Both were undergraduate quality. They merged their efforts (the anti-OSI alliance) into what we now call IPv6. At the last minute, Vint Cerf (the Chauncy Gardner of the Internet) switched his vote from TUBA to IPv6. And real progress in the IP layer basically stopped.
IPv6 doesn't do what it's supposed to. The article at least doesn't claim that its flows are useful for QoS; they're not. The address space is horribly wasteful; because the low-order 64 bits are globally unique (based on MAC), the net result is 64 effective bits, twice. Security is no better than with IPv4. The long addresses result in more header overhead, more bandwidth wasted, and thus either worse performance or more cost. Think of how the bigger headers will work with short-payload streaming payloads!
They should put this turkey out of its misery. There are LOTS of IPv4 addresses in reserve. Properly allocated, 32 bits should last for a decade or more. Of course many Class As were given out wastefully back in the old days, but we really don't need globally unique addresses for every appliance in every house anyway.
I'm surprised that /. is reviewing Telecosm now; it has been out for a few years now. It was written at the leading edge of the dotcom boom, and probably helped fuel some of the irrational exuberance that led to disasters like PSInet stock.
Gilder takes a few facts and selectively uses them to decorate a pre-existing world view. This is about what you'd expect from someone whose own home page is on the web site of a creationist group! He appreciates technology more than science; that's dangerous.
Gilder, you might recall, was the hack behind the "Laffer Curve", which was lame justification for Reagan's nutty tax cuts (what's a few trillion more on the national debt among friends?). As a supply-sider, he is always looking for, well, supply. Fiber optics promise an oversupply of bandwidth. Traditional economics looks at demand too. Gilder assumes that if you build it, they will come, and we'll all be the richer for it. It's, uh, far from proven.
The Telecom Act of 1996 set some rules for competitors, but the Act was a typical political compromise; when in doubt, make the wording ambiguous or internally contradictory. Thus the FCC and Courts have been at it ever since, and still are. The actual rules of competition are not clear, and not constant. The Bells' attitude was to honor the unambiguous letter of the law but not one millimeter further, so the competitors have had to struggle to get what seemed obvious.
For instance, they were originally allowed to locate their multiplexing equipment in Bell COs, but the law excluded switching, so some Bells initially wouldn't let in the needed routers. The law didn't say that CLEC employees had to have access to the bathrooms, so some ILECs refused it; likewise, they couldn't use elevators to haul up the racks. These took time to fix. Lots of this kind of nickel-dime chickenkaka took place, and it still does.
The early DSL players (notably Covad) had to buy 100 sq ft collocation cages in each CO, usually over $50k a pop, before starting. Permission to go cageless was required by the FCC only after these "first movers" spent that money. The early DSL players had to lease full loops from the ILECs, typically $12-$20/month apiece, while the ILECs could share ADSL loops with voice. Again, that's changing, but it's too late for most of the early players.
Plus DSL only works on maybe half the loops in the country. So you lose a lot of potential business. And the ILECs go out of their way, unless given regulatory pressure, to do nothing about fixing it.
What also killed the first DSL startups was the race to be everywhere fast. Six DSL providers in one CO guaratee that the business is spread too thin, especially when they all please their VCs by putting in large-scale gear that requires a large market share to break even.
So now, a newcomer entering the DSL business can theoretically avoid the already-fixed roadblocks and get going using cageless collocation, smaller-scale upfront gear, and shared loops. But the capital market has dried up so you can't fund it anyway... and if congresscritter Tauzin (R-BellSouth) gets his way, the CLECs will be mostly shut out anyway.
I don't get how opt-out could actually work. If you are actually stupid enough to reply to the "remove me" addresses on spam, your address is upgraded to "verified", and thus gets premium prices from other spammers who buy spam lists. So if you give your address to an "opt-out" list, then an "honest" spammer will try to remove you, but since honest spammers are as rare as six-foot puca rabbits, you won't actually be opted out of any spam.