On 21/01/2008, at 7:53 AM, Jeff Johnstone wrote:
All of these discussions ignore the developments taking place in the consumer electronics marketplace. A quick glance at this years consumer electronics show in Vegas shows a HUGE variety of home, mobile and automobile consumer devices using IP services. These devices, AppleTV as an example, will require large bandwidth commitments.
Sure. But it isn't an ISP's job to provide below-cost infrastructure
to subsidize the bandwidth requirements of Sony and Apple.
Pricing should be set without reference to the application developers.
If the application developers end up building applications which are
too expensive to use, then that's their loss. Nobody in the service-
provider industry should be going out of business because they
can't afford the infrastructure needed to give their AppleTV users
20 Gbit/sec ports when Cupertino comes out with HHHHHD Video
in a few years time.
Add this to IP based telephony and you can't just "shut off" a users service after they reach a cap, you would be removing their emergency services access.
Why can't you? We do it all the time. You shape to 64kbps, which is
more than enough bandwidth to run a SIP session with a low-end
CODEC. Phone calls still work, hardly anything else does. (performance
on a Virtual-Access interface with a rate-limit on it is way worse than
performance on a BRI interface without a rate-limit because rate-limits
lead to tail-drops, which spooks TCP very, very badly. So 64kbps is
actually worse than it sounds for TCP applications, but constant bitrate
CODECs deal with it just fine)
Hopefully we won't be seeing "basic" internet services of a couple of gig per month and "channel" offerings of AppleTV, all you can eat as "tier 2 plan", or "other service" as "teir 3 plan".
You guys seem to be behaving as if this stuff hasn't happened before.
No, you won't see "basic" internet on a couple of gig per month. You'll
see "basic" internet on 40 - 60 Gbytes per month, which is more than
most mortals use in any given 30 day period (like, ferchrissakes, who
needs 2 Gbytes per day, day in day out? Grandma certainly doesn't
use that much when she's checking her email...)
Alongside this discussion is AT&T's direction of content censorship and its impact on end users.
No, the two issues are completely orthogonal.
You're supposed to be a network operator, stop thinking like an end
user.
Our help desks are going to take a huge hit in the future as we start trying to troubleshoot issues where the general rule of "I'll pass any packet I get" becomes "I will pass any packet I am payed for and have dissected for content, and after I have determined that the rest of the stream won't push my end user over his network cap this month".
No, metering means the network neutrality debate undergoes gravitational
collapse, and caring about what's inside a packet turns into a total waste
of time.
You don't need to care about whether a packet has been paid for because
you know that every packet has been paid for. That's what metering
delivers.
Why do you think the DPI vendors haven't had much traction outside of
Europe and North America? It isn't because the rest of the world can't
afford them. It's because Europe and North America are where all the
"unlimited" access services are sold, so they're the places where DPI is
actually needed. Would you need to spend millions with Ellacoya or
Sandvine if your customers imposed their own self-created backpressure
against P2P usage?
Again: Some of the significant economies on the Internet have done this
already. The TWC paper isn't trailblazing, and every issue you can think
of to explain why it'll be horrible and won't work has already been demolished
by real-life day-to-day business in other countries. You guys who are
behaving as if the sky will fall are going to have to explain why the Internet
industry hasn't ceased to function in .au and .nz before you get on to
explaining why its collapse would be inevitable in the USA.
- mark
--
Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999
"Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223