Sean M. Doran wrote:
Trans-oceanic botlenecks are a real issue, however, and with the current ICM award about to wind down, the question arises about who pays for poor connectivity to where.
Yes, the demand far outstrips the supply of bandwidth, we are having that problem right now. Never mind that the we can afford the > $60,000/month for a measly T1 to the US - we are currently back-ordered as there is not enough available channels across the Pacific.
Assuming that capacity bottlenecks between North America and Asia becomes an operational issue to North American network operators (could be), they would obviously be able to adopt one of three approaches:
There can be two ways of looking at it, from the WWW/content point of view: * "They're unlucky enough to be outside North America, but they want American content anyway. So they have to suffer with poor performance and high prices." * "These folks outside America don't get to appreciate our content. Their numbers are growing. Thus we have to invest in the delivery infrastructure."
-- hide head in sand, hope that other people (namely non-Americans) pick up the cost of the no-longer-subsidized U.S. half-circuits, and continue increasing their own capacity at their own cost.
Our bandwidth here in the Philippines was never subsidized. Still, we have a good growth rate in terms of ISPs, but not so much in users.
-- purchase their own connectivity to exchange points in Europe (such as KTH in Stockholm and LINX in London -- note that each of these two exchange points has a root nameserver in the same facility)
Many Asian countries have yet to build their own IXPs. We have one here, but only 5 providers with IPLs are connected. Our company is working on getting peering agreements with some other local providers since the IXP is fraught by politics :) Assuming that all ISPs here connect at an IX, will a provider buy a pipe from the US to the Philippines to carry their customer's traffic faster? How will that be justified?
-- cut a deal with someone like BT/MCI, UUNET or the like to use their trans-oceanic capacity
The third approach is straightforward -- become a customer of a big global network and trust that customer and other market pressures will keep them expanding globally such that capacity issues don't become overwhelming.
The only global network that has a POP here is CWIX. If you sign up for a CWIX connection from Manila it will not go straight to the US, but pass through HK. This can be seen as a disadvantage, though it is cheaper.
The second approach is straightforward too, and is I imagine what people clamouring for peerings at U.S.-based exhcange points so that they can be Independent Big Networks should begin planning for. That is, if you don't want to become a customer of, say, BT/MCI or UUNET or the like and you don't want to find yourself being able to reach fewer and fewer locations or more and more likely to face settlement charges from those big providers, acquiring independent capacity to remote exchange points is a good idea.
But, the Independent Big Network people will still have to get their own IPLs - which may end up with BT/MCI, Sprint/Global One, or AT&T? What's the difference between becoming an IP customer and just a leased line customer?
Examining this a bit more closely, since undersea capacity is terribly expensive, when there is adequate capacity available to a large aggregate of sites people want to get to, there will be an obvious market for access to that capacity.
You can argue that the undersea capacity pricing model is vastly different (and I don't know its dynamics, either) - and it's like investing in real estate properties. For example, Global One cannot give us a T1 until after our endpoint of the APCN cable is activated.
Finally, there's the third approach. It might be workable, but at some point Europeans and Asians will tire of always increasing the amount of money they put into transoceanic circuits and start becoming either customers of bigger, cheaper providers (or members of consortia or associations which accomplish similar cost-savings)
Several companies, including ourselves, are doing just this.
or start coming to the same understanding: access to trans-oceanic capacity while it continues to be hiddeously expensive should be paid for at both ends, since both sides benefit.
How do we come up with a settlement model? Right now the end-user result is that if the US unlimited dial-up user is accessing a site outside the US, they are actually being subsidized by the guy on the other side of the ocean who has to pay big bucks for her/his data pipe. It depends on who "benefits" more - the guy in the US who is viewing European/Asian content, or the other guy who gets her/his content published, seen and heard?
So, the answer to the question is, yes, you should be concerned about performance issues, and yes, you should be working on a tractable scalable engineering plan for both North American and intercontinental connectivity, and this should take into account other people's real and perceived costs.
And more providers should be hauling in their own high-capacity pipes and putting up their own overseas POPs instead of having the local folks drag their lines to the US, and charge a lot for slow connections. -- miguel a.l. paraz <map@iphil.net> +63-2-893-0850 iphil communications, makati city, philippines <http://www.iphil.net>