On Mar 12, 6:56 pm, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Study: Net neutrality law would spur infrastructure improvements
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | One of the main arguments opponents of network neutrality make is
> | that laws requiring ISPs to treat all traffic equally would
> | discourage infrastructure investment on the part of those who own
> | the pipes. A new study conducted by researchers at the University
> | of Florida undercuts those claims.
Keep in mind that it was net neutrality which greated the demand for
high speed bandwidth in the first place. If the telephone companies
had had their way, we would still be trying to squeeze 28,000 bits/
second out of a dial-up modem, or even more likely, would still be
trying to squeeze 1200 baud out of an accoustical coupler.
The divestature of AT&T resulted in diversification of technology.
There was the transition from analog 24 pair cables to copper cables
that could carry 1.4 megabits/second over each pair, to Fiber that
could carry as much as 5 gigabits/second. Video phones had first been
suggested as a possibility back in the 1950s, and AT&T even had
technology to do the Analog-to-digital and digital to analog
conversion of video signals, along with various forms of compression
even as early as 1980. The problem was that Cable and Telephone used
different bandwidths and different circuitry. Today, digital cable is
not substantially different from that 20 year old technology - first
suggested as a possibility by Brian Kernigan and Dennis Ritchie.
The irony is that carriers, both cable and network/telephony have
provided grades of service. When a business wants to do video
conferencing in real-time, they pay a much higher price, or a premium
tarriff for the faster bandwidth required to get smooth video. Cable
companies are the same way. The broadcasters who want smooth signals
containing music and action movies delivered smoothly, the cable
companies deliver - for a price.
Flat rate IP service has always been available, but there are also
different tiers of service, including commitment rates, quality rates,
and availability rates, as well as other options such as fixed IP
addresses. It's entirely possible to purchase the same cable, with
the same wires, for as little as $29/month and as much as $299/month,
depending on the quality of service you want. Most carriers even
offer higher tiers of service, for those who want to host an entire
subnet or run a hosting service.
One of the big fights over IPv6 has been the desire of end users and
customers at the termination end wanting to have control over their
own subnets, with the ability to route and/or tunnel to the correct
server. The carriers, on the other hand, want to have control over
every IP address and charge for each independently. Furthermore they
want to have the ability to partition the IPv6 subnets by geography,
meaning more wasted IP addresses, but the ability to charge by
distance as well as quality of service.
One of the biggest problems lately, is these new services that allow
you to watch your own TV - over the internet. The problem is that
this is personal use of about 4 megabits/second, to carry what amounts
to redundant content.
As both a cable subscriber and a frequent traveller, I can understand
the frustration of spending $99/month for cable, including premium
channels like Cinemax and Showtime, then spending 20 days/month at a
hotel where there is only one channel of HBO (if that).
What would be nice is if I could take the access card out of my cable
box, put it in my wallet, and when I get to my hotel, put it in their
cable box, and get the access ot the service for which I'm paying
triple digit service fees.
Instead, the media industry wants us to pay premium rates for home
service we can't use, which includes the same 8 movies on 8 different
channels staggered by a few hours, even though we have VCRs or TiVo or
DVRs.
Then they want us to pay $4.95 per movie for "pay per view" to get a
movie on demand. Then they want us to pay $4.95 per movie for
"download on demand" movies.
> | Researchers at the school used game theory to come up with an
> | analytical model for a world without net neutrality. The study
> | argued that the killing net neutrality would result in fewer
> | infrastructure investments and service upgrades rather than
> | more.
The counter to this is competition. If cable and DSL have to compete
with MIMO and 802.11n relay centers to the backbones, or 10 mb/s
cellular, the nature of competition is that all carriers will try to
compete for various stages of the bandwidth.
By 2001, one of the factors that caused the "Internet Bubble" to
burst, was that the carriers had built up too much excess bandwidth.
They could sell it to each other, but the unused bandwidth just became
an expense (which caused some confusion for Worldcom who was treating
bandwidth like commodities futures).
Many businesses now use gigabit WAN connections. Some of the media
companies now use terrabit networks, often needing high speed switches
into huge "trunks" of distribution.
The problem is that a popular video can actually flood the internet.
When Bill Gates video testimony was put on the web, streaming video
systems were pumping huge volumes out, because the video was cached,
but the network routers and switches were struggling to keep up with
the bandwidth.
The price of network traffic has gone from 40 cents/megabyte to 4
cents per gigabyte. The "flat rate" service has created the demand
for these services, but the "premium rate" service has financed it's
development and expansion.
> | Even worse, ISPs that require content providers to pay
> | for preferential access on their networks run the risk of losing
> | customers whose favorite sites aren't on the preferred list.
Keep in mind that this is not a block-out. It's only a traffic
shaper. Traffic shapers and priority routing have been available on
CISCO routers since the early 1990s. In the early days, this was
needed so that FTP traffic didn't make telnet users have to wait 10
seconds for an FTP packet to complete before the echo came back.
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070311-study-net-neutrality-la...http://tinyurl.com/36ej68
>
> This parallels Free software in the sense that limitation and lockin give the
> vendor no incentive to improve.
This is based on a very "binary" point of view. It's based on the
monopoly mind-set. The problem is that the only monopoly in the
entire internet, is the Microsoft desktop. From the first switch out
of your house, to the final destination, and back, every switch
competes for routing priority. The main difference is that the PPV
video coming into your cable box has a higher priority than your web-
cam chat with grandpa. The reality is that you probably won't notice,
because your web-cam only uses about 256 kbits/second, even at 30
frames/second, and a 200 millisecond delay merely means a slight
"jump" or "jitter" in the bandwidth.
> Just look at the sorry state of Internet
> Explorer 6, which turned the Web experience into a nightmare while offering
> no further development for 5+ years.
Yes, and because Microsoft dropped the ball, competition generatod
Opera, Mozilla, FireFox, Galeon, and Konqueror. And the popularity of
Firefoox led to adoption of OpenOffice, which has increased the
popularity of Linux and Unix (OS/X) on the desktop.
Microsoft still maintains an illegal monopoly on the OEM channel,
demanding exclusionary contracts which are in direct violation of the
Clayton act, but at this point, due to the available of low-cost high
speed internet access, including WiFi at Starbucks, Panera, and IHOP,
CableModems, and DSL, it's as easy to download quality applications
for Linux (including Linux itself) as it is to install it from a CD-
ROM or DVD. I downloaded a SuSE Linux DVD ISO image starting just
before I went to bed. By the morning, I had the image, and burned the
DVD in about 15 minutes. 10 minutes later, I was rebooting my PC on
that same DVD, and installing SUSE Linux on my Z61p.
I still have the OEM license to XP, and I still have the ability to
install XP as a secondary VMWare client, but I don't have to limit
myself to Windows alone.
> This should be demand-driven, not capacity-driven, where capacity is
> artificially limited, with imposed barriers.
The irony is that nobody noticed the limits before, but they have
existed even since the early 1990s. The problem is very similar to
what happened with Napster. Someone looking to make a quick buck
selling a service which didn't seem so bad when it was only a few
hundred users, has expanded that service to 10 million users, who are
calling their ISPs and complaining because their streaming video to
their work computer isn't as smooth as they want it to be.
They are upset because their $29/month service isn't getting the same
priority as the corporate video conference being provided to a
customer who pays $20,000/month for 5 gb/sec connections to 20
locations. The low cost service promises a minimum commitment rate,
but does not assure smooth delivery of that rate. The low cost
service has a maximum rate, but that maximum rate of say, 4 megabits/
second, might be 1/10th the minimum commitment rate. If there is as
Starbucks down the road, and one of their customers, who is paying $10/
hour, decides to download a DVD, his traffic takes priority over
yours, simply because the Starbucks has a connection that might have
50 people connected to the WiFi hub at $10/hour per person.
If you want the faster performance for an hour or two, go to
starbucks.
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