Dirk Harms-Merbitz <dirk@power.net> wrote:
The big problem is the current incentive to cripple network connections.
The incentive to reduce quality down to the minimal level accepted by the target customer base is the prominent feature of any market.
Why should it cost more to connect at 100MB/sec vs. 56KB/sec? If the same amount of packets are transfered? Why should I pay more beyond the one-time cost of buying interface electronics?
Because there is a real cost for long-haul packet transport. Why people pay higher rent for houses than for studio apartments? "Connection costs" is rent on transmission facilities, plus overhead (upkeep of the property, insurance, administration, etc).
Many real-time problems with packet switching (out of order arrival of packets, need to re-order packets) essentially go away when speed increases, i.e. things move out of perceptible ranges into in-perceptible time variations.
That does not parse. Internet as is does not reorder packets. Increasing speed does not change anything in this respect. It only shrinks time scale. And, i never suspected that reordering is a problem in real-time world. 0.5 sec variance (a lot!) with 1.5Mbps MPEG-2 video stream (better-than cable TV quality) requires stunning 100 kilobytes worth of buffers. The only reason reordering is a problem is because TCP has no reasonable selective ACKs (the existing SACK options are close to useless), so kludges like VJ's fast retransmit are necessary on high delay-bandwidth networks.
Settlement based on whoever takes more traffic would be nice.
Would you please describe any useful mechanism of traffic-based inter-backbone settelemts?
It gives a very direct incentive to build better networks.
Nah. It is like saying that "usage-based" pricing at McDonalds gives a very direct incentive to sell something better resembling food.
Lets say MAE's and NAP's are run in a cost-recovery mode and my only monthly cost as a network is the cost of my circuits, i.e. having a connection to the MAE/NAP.
They do it now.
As soon as my network takes more traffic than my circuit costs I'm making money.
I assume "my network takes more traffic" means "there are more packets (bytes, etc) going into my network", right? So, you want to charge others for your customers browsing their customer's servers?
Money that can be used directly to build a better network which will take even more traffic, i.e. generate more money. In a sense, this would provide best case capitalism with routers deciding from whom to buy.
I love it. Do you really think you discovered a fount of money? Any settlement game is zero-sum by definition. When ISP A pays ISP B some sum, A has less resources to invest into infrastructure. On average, customers do not win.
All energy would go into building better networks... neither advertising, nor salespeople are necessary in this scenario!
Ah, i'd like to live in that world of yours. --vadim
On Sun, 26 Jan 1997, Vadim Antonov wrote: <this was later but might be more interesting>
Would you please describe any useful mechanism of traffic-based inter-backbone settelemts?
Each packet either 1. terminates in my network 2. transits my network 3. originates from my network Lets assume that I announce a price that I will charge other networks for transitting packets through my network. Note, that I couldn't care less about the speed at which they connect to my network. Computers (third party?) on the edges of my network count the number of packets that transit my network over a certain time period. Periodically I issue invoices. Of course, other networks do the same. End users (including co-located computers) simply appear as connected networks that don't provide any transit, hence they pay for their connection.
Why should it cost more to connect at 100MB/sec vs. 56KB/sec? If the same amount of packets are transfered? Why should I pay more beyond the one-time cost of buying interface electronics?
Because there is a real cost for long-haul packet transport.
Remember that I said "if the same amount of packets are transfered". The speed of my connection does not necessarily affect the number of packets that I'm transmitting.
"Connection costs" is rent on transmission facilities, plus overhead (upkeep of the property, insurance, administration, etc).
No. That's "transmission cost", not "connection cost". The cost of me connecting to your network (not counting setup and so on) is the sum of the interface electronics on both ends and whatever link we need inbetween. Off on a tangent... creating bandwidth is somewhat like making computer chips. Making the first production Pentium (or whatever) processor costs billions. The second is a few cents. Here, laying the cable is expensive. Once it is in the ground, the cost for transporting another packet is almost zero. An interesting question is what do to with potential bandwidth/cpu cycles/free ram, i.e. what are the costs of not using available capacity? One answer is that the cost is zero until your competitor starts being more efficient then you are. See Soviet UNION vs USA. Back to networks... it would be logical to assume that whenever people deploy fiber they drop as much as they can afford at that moment. If that's true then there must be enourmous amounts of unlit fiber. What's the total capacity going accross the atlantic or pacific? How much of it is being used? I'd bet that there are many terabits of fiber that are not in use. Yes, of course, the closer you get to what's technologically feasable, (the closer you move to the border to the future) the more expensive things become. I guess that's the main argument used to defend higher costs for faster connections. But we don't even need to go to that edge. Building gigabit, if not terrabit routers is amazingly simple and can be done with off the shelf technology. Hey, a few Linux boxes interconnected with a few 100MB/sec ethernet switches in the right fashion would allow the creation of a super NAP that should outperform gigaswitches easily. Summary: I would not be surprised if the packet carrying capacity of the Internet could be increased by two or three orders of magnitude with surprisingly little investments. The real challenge is how to get people to do that.
All energy would go into building better networks... neither advertising, nor salespeople are necessary in this scenario!
Ah, i'd like to live in that world of yours.
Hehe... you can, think about it. Dirk
--vadim
I love it. Do you really think you discovered a fount of money? Any settlement game is zero-sum by definition. When ISP A pays ISP B some sum, A has less resources to invest into infrastructure. On average, customers do not win.
Whilst the rest of your message makes perfect sense, I don't think this does. Settlment peering can easilly be +ve sum for A&B. For instance ISP C could lose out. Very few economic transactions are zero sum (except perhaps under perfect competition). Consider the limiting case where A sells B transit. Hopefully this is not zero sum or we should be looking for other jobs... Alex Bligh Xara Networks
participants (3)
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Alex.Bligh -
Dirk Harms-Merbitz -
Vadim Antonov