Re: Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?
Comparative to Milwaukee, I'd be guessing delivering high performance internet and making enough money to fund expansion and eat is harder at a non US ISP. It's harder, but there's nothing wrong with it. It compels you to get inventive.
The costs to provide DSL up here in Milwaukee are kind of insane,
Insanity is a relative term :-) Try to deliver Internet outside of the US in countries that share western culture and you'll start to understand why caps are seen as an excusable form of treatment for the insanity.
Okay, so, let's pretend that today I'm sitting in Sweden. Go. Extremely high speed connectivity, uncapped, well in excess of what is delivered in most parts of the US. I was just informed that Road Runner upgraded locally from 5 to 7Mbps a month ago, and has a premium 15Mbps offering now, but there are folks with 100Mbps over there. So, your point is, what, that it's easier to deliver Internet outside of the US in countries that share western culture? That could be true, we're tied up by some large communications companies who don't want carrier- neutral networks to the residence. If we just want to start making up claims that fit the observed facts, I would say that the amount that a user can download from the Internet in countries that share western culture tends to decrease with distance from Sweden, though not linearly. AU gets placed on the far end of that. :-) (That's both a joke AND roughly true!)
Clearly they're not something we'd prefer, but they are useful to manage demand in the context of high costs with customers who benchmark against global consumer pricing (or those who think that the Internet is a homogeneous thing)
...Hmm, that's a good idea, perhaps you should do that (get out of the US) before you start saying what we're doing is "wrong with your business" or "insane" or perhaps unreasonable.
And I agree with Mark Newton's sentiments. It's completely delusional of you to insist that the rest of the world follow the same definition of "reasonable". We're not the same. Which is good in some respects as it does create some diversity. And I'm quite pleased about that :-)
Well, since I didn't insist that you follow any definition of "reasonable", and in fact I started out by saying : Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their : broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but : in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's : continuing evolution. it would seem clear that I'm not particularly interested in your local economics, no matter how sucky you've allowed them to be, but was more interested in talking about the problem in general. I *am* interested in the impact that it has on the evolution of the Internet. That you're so pleased to be "diverse" in a way that makes it more difficult for your users to join the modern era and use modern apps is sufficient to make me wonder. There's certainly some "delusional" going on there. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Sun, Oct 07, 2007 at 10:33:19AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
Well, since I didn't insist that you follow any definition of "reasonable", and in fact I started out by saying
: Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their : broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but : in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's : continuing evolution.
With respect, Joe, you also said this: # Of course, that's obvious. The point here is that if your business is so # fragile that you can only deliver each broadband customer a dialup modem's # worth of bandwidth, something's wrong with your business. Now, I don't know what you think you've trying to achieve by throwing around doubts and aspersions about other peoples' business viability without the faintest idea about the constraints said businesses are working under, but whatever it is I doubt you're achieving it :-) Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry? Be warned that the industry is already full of sharks who don't know what they're talking about, and if what you suggest happens to match the business model deployed by one of those guys who has subsequently gone broke, I reserve the right to point and laugh derisively. Yours, - mark -- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote:
Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry?
I would fix the problem, ie get more competition into these two areas where the prices are obvisouly way higher than in most parts of the civilised world, much higher than is motivated by the placement there in the middle of an ocean. Perhaps it's hard to get the transoceanic cost down to european levels, but a 25 time difference, that's just too much. And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote:
Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry?
I would fix the problem, ie get more competition into these two areas where the prices are obvisouly way higher than in most parts of the civilised world, much higher than is motivated by the placement there in the middle of an ocean.
Perhaps it's hard to get the transoceanic cost down to european levels, but a 25 time difference, that's just too much.
That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is "address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are." Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before.
And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference.
The fundamental difference is that it's owned by a monopoly. Here in the US, we wrestled with Mark's problems around a decade ago, when transit was about that expensive, and copper cost big bucks. There was a lot of fear and paranoia about selling DSL lines for a fraction of what the cost of the circuit if provided with committed bandwidth would cost. The whole Info Superhighway thing was supposed to result in a national infrastructure that provided residential users with 45Mbps to-the-home capabilities on a carrier-neutral network built by the telcos. These promises by the telcos were carefully and incrementally revoked, while the incentives we provided to the telcos remained. As a result, we're now in a situation where the serious players are really the ILEC and the cable companies, and they've shut out the CLEC's from any reasonable path forward. Despite this, wholesale prices did continue to drop. Somehow, amazingly, the ILEC found it possible to provide DSL at extremely competitive prices. Annoyingly, a bit lower than "wholesale" costs... $14.99/mo for 768K DSL, $19.99/mo for 1.5M, etc. They're currently feeling the heat from Road Runner, whose prices tend towards being a bit more expensive, but speeds tend towards better too. :-) Anyways, as displeased as I may be with the state of affairs here in the US, it is worth noting that the speeds continue to improve, and projects such as U-verse and FIOS are promising to deliver higher bandwidth to the user, and maintain pressure on the cable companies for them to do better as well. US providers do not seem to be doing significant amounts of DPI or other policy to manage bandwidth consumption. That doesn't mean that there's no overcommit crisis, but right now, limits on upload speeds appear to combine with a lack of killer centralized content distribution apps and as a result, the situation is stable. My interest in this mainly relates to how these things will impact the Internet in the future, and I see some possible problems developing. I do believe that video-over-IP is a coming thing, and I see a very scary (for network operators) scenario of needing to sustain much greater levels of traffic, as podcast-like video delivery is something that would be a major impact. Right now, both the ILEC and the cable company appear to be betting that they'll continue to drive the content viewing of their customers through broadcast, and certainly that's the most efficient model we've found, but it only works for "popular" stuff. That still leaves a wildly large void for a new service model. The question of whether or not such a thing can actually be sustained by the Internet is fascinating, and whether or not it'll crush current network designs. With respect to the AU thing, it would be interesting to know whether or not the quotas in AU have acted to limit the popularity of services such as YouTube (my guess would be an emphatic yes), as I see YouTube as being a precursor to video things-to-come. Looking at whether or not AU has stifled new uses for the Internet, or has otherwise impacted the way users use the Internet, could be interesting and potentially valuable information to futurists and even other operators. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Mon, Oct 08, 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
With respect to the AU thing, it would be interesting to know whether or not the quotas in AU have acted to limit the popularity of services such as YouTube (my guess would be an emphatic yes), as I see YouTube as being a precursor to video things-to-come. Looking at whether or not AU has stifled new uses for the Internet, or has otherwise impacted the way users use the Internet, could be interesting and potentially valuable information to futurists and even other operators.
.. or try to attract those sorts of content delivery networks into Australia to serve said content locally and bypass the whole US transit issue. Of course, the Australian market is so god damned small compared to the American one, let alone trying to get content providers over to the West Coast when there's two million people here, and 15+ million over east. Some ISPs played around with Youtube caching. I won't name names, but there were more than two of them. Its whats inspiring me to start getting some numbers on bandwidth saved. What they found is that caching Youtube under test conditions gave -immediate- traffic savings, but it skewed the TX/RX ratios. Their inbound dropped but their outbound stayed the same, so their links were "just as utilised." They then judged it not to be worth it at this time. Of course, I'd say "can't you invent something to put in place of your now lower RX utilisation?" but I'm just an Arts student, what do I know about content? :) Adrian (Why don't I move overseas again?)
At 09:50 AM 10/8/2007, Joe Greco wrote:
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Mark Newton wrote:
Thought experiment: With $250 per megabit per month transit and $30 - $50 per month tail costs, what would _you_ do to create the perfect internet industry?
I would fix the problem, ie get more competition into these two areas where the prices are obvisouly way higher than in most parts of the civilised world, much higher than is motivated by the placement there in the middle of an ocean.
Perhaps it's hard to get the transoceanic cost down to european levels, but a 25 time difference, that's just too much.
That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is "address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are." Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before.
"Address those problems" sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as "move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^&* expensive place." Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me.
And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference.
The fundamental difference is that it's owned by a monopoly.
Bingo. So, how do you propose an ISP in Australia fix the political structure, and do it in a timescale that fits your expectations?
Here in the US, we wrestled with Mark's problems around a decade ago, when transit was about that expensive, and copper cost big bucks. There was a lot of fear and paranoia about selling DSL lines for a fraction of what the cost of the circuit if provided with committed bandwidth would cost.
The whole Info Superhighway thing was supposed to result in a national infrastructure that provided residential users with 45Mbps to-the-home capabilities on a carrier-neutral network built by the telcos. These promises by the telcos were carefully and incrementally revoked, while the incentives we provided to the telcos remained. As a result, we're now in a situation where the serious players are really the ILEC and the cable companies, and they've shut out the CLEC's from any reasonable path forward.
Despite this, wholesale prices did continue to drop. Somehow, amazingly, the ILEC found it possible to provide DSL at extremely competitive prices. Annoyingly, a bit lower than "wholesale" costs... $14.99/mo for 768K DSL, $19.99/mo for 1.5M, etc. They're currently feeling the heat from Road Runner, whose prices tend towards being a bit more expensive, but speeds tend towards better too. :-)
I should note that this applies only where the ILEC (or cable company, for that matter) has bothered to deploy service. Unlike telephone service, there has been no "universal service" approach. There are large areas without service other than dialup. Verizon, it's particularly sad, charges $19.95/month for dialup that'll also tie up a POTS line, where it'll offer the lowest DSL speeds at $14.95. And Verizon "cherry picks" the places where it offers DSL (and moreso for FiOS) so the affluent towns get high speed service, while the rural and poorer places only have available dialup (and that dialup is more expensive). I would be curious if any of the places in the world with higher-cost high-speed service also have any sort of requirement of coverage?
Anyways, as displeased as I may be with the state of affairs here in the US, it is worth noting that the speeds continue to improve, and projects such as U-verse and FIOS are promising to deliver higher bandwidth to the user, and maintain pressure on the cable companies for them to do better as well.
Of course this only applies if you live in an inner city or wealthy suburb.
US providers do not seem to be doing significant amounts of DPI or other policy to manage bandwidth consumption. That doesn't mean that there's no overcommit crisis, but right now, limits on upload speeds appear to combine with a lack of killer centralized content distribution apps and as a result, the situation is stable.
My interest in this mainly relates to how these things will impact the Internet in the future, and I see some possible problems developing.
Do you believe there is any reason for the "Internet of the Future" to be everywhere? You're concerned about video over IP delivery and other advanced applications, but do you expect to make a video call to your cousin who owns a farm outside of town? This question is largely ignored in discussions about cranking the 'net to ever faster speeds, at least in the US. I'd be interested to know how it's addressed elsewhere in the world.
I do believe that video-over-IP is a coming thing, and I see a very scary (for network operators) scenario of needing to sustain much greater levels of traffic, as podcast-like video delivery is something that would be a major impact. Right now, both the ILEC and the cable company appear to be betting that they'll continue to drive the content viewing of their customers through broadcast, and certainly that's the most efficient model we've found, but it only works for "popular" stuff. That still leaves a wildly large void for a new service model. The question of whether or not such a thing can actually be sustained by the Internet is fascinating, and whether or not it'll crush current network designs.
With respect to the AU thing, it would be interesting to know whether or not the quotas in AU have acted to limit the popularity of services such as YouTube (my guess would be an emphatic yes), as I see YouTube as being a precursor to video things-to-come. Looking at whether or not AU has stifled new uses for the Internet, or has otherwise impacted the way users use the Internet, could be interesting and potentially valuable information to futurists and even other operators.
... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
From: "Daniel Senie" <dts@senie.com>
Verizon, it's particularly sad, charges $19.95/month for dialup that'll also tie up a POTS line, where it'll offer the lowest DSL speeds at $14.95. And Verizon "cherry picks" the places where it offers DSL (and moreso for FiOS) so the affluent towns get high speed service, while the rural and poorer places only have available dialup (and that dialup is more expensive).
In my experience, the support cost of DSL is significantly cheaper than dial-up in terms of helpdesk calls. DSL/Cable/FiOS is typically a plug and play, where as dialup can be quite a bit more troublesome, involving more tech time in the long run.
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Andy Johnson wrote:
In my experience, the support cost of DSL is significantly cheaper than dial-up in terms of helpdesk calls. DSL/Cable/FiOS is typically a plug and play, where as dialup can be quite a bit more troublesome, involving more tech time in the long run.
I occasionally see providers offering pay-per-incident tech support, particularly for their lower-priced service offerings, as a way to offset the higher support costs as a percentage of overall revenue from those users. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is out there. jms
That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is "address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are." Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before.
"Address those problems" sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as "move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^&* expensive place." Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me.
It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side.
And about the local tail, that's also 5-10 times higher than normal in the western world, I don't see that being motivated by some fundamental difference.
The fundamental difference is that it's owned by a monopoly.
Bingo. So, how do you propose an ISP in Australia fix the political structure, and do it in a timescale that fits your expectations?
I have no expectations for them, and therefore there's no required timescale. However, apparently I am not the only one to recognize that a problem exists. Upon a minor amount of further research into the issue, it appears that Pipe Networks, VSNL, etc., are working on a new cable, a project referred to as "Project Runway", to connect Australia to Guam at multiterabit speeds - so it may soon come to pass that the current off-continent duopoly for bandwidth may need to adjust somewhat. That could represent one significant problem - solved in a year or two. The local political problem - well, I have to note that "political" != "technical", and politics can be affected, whereas technical problems tend to organize them into problems that can be solved, and problems that cannot.
Despite this, wholesale prices did continue to drop. Somehow, amazingly, the ILEC found it possible to provide DSL at extremely competitive prices. Annoyingly, a bit lower than "wholesale" costs... $14.99/mo for 768K DSL, $19.99/mo for 1.5M, etc. They're currently feeling the heat from Road Runner, whose prices tend towards being a bit more expensive, but speeds tend towards better too. :-)
I should note that this applies only where the ILEC (or cable company, for that matter) has bothered to deploy service. Unlike telephone service, there has been no "universal service" approach. There are large areas without service other than dialup.
Large geographic areas, yes. This isn't good. Our regulation of the telecoms has sadly been extremely permissive when it comes to giving up on the points that were originally part of the plan for broadband in America.
Verizon, it's particularly sad, charges $19.95/month for dialup that'll also tie up a POTS line, where it'll offer the lowest DSL speeds at $14.95. And Verizon "cherry picks" the places where it offers DSL (and moreso for FiOS) so the affluent towns get high speed service, while the rural and poorer places only have available dialup (and that dialup is more expensive).
I would be curious if any of the places in the world with higher-cost high-speed service also have any sort of requirement of coverage?
Interesting question.
Anyways, as displeased as I may be with the state of affairs here in the US, it is worth noting that the speeds continue to improve, and projects such as U-verse and FIOS are promising to deliver higher bandwidth to the user, and maintain pressure on the cable companies for them to do better as well.
Of course this only applies if you live in an inner city or wealthy suburb.
Oddly, it's reported that the cable company, which has very high penetration rates, has boosted RR speeds throughout the service area, and the speeds being offered exceed U-verse speeds, AFAICT. I would actually view this as a challenge for the ILEC, though I fundamentally dislike the duopoly aspects. I would much prefer to see a carrier neutral last mile network here, and I've yet to see a compelling argument that it wouldn't work if it was given a chance, which is probably why the telcos have lobbied so incredibly hard against actually doing it.
US providers do not seem to be doing significant amounts of DPI or other policy to manage bandwidth consumption. That doesn't mean that there's no overcommit crisis, but right now, limits on upload speeds appear to combine with a lack of killer centralized content distribution apps and as a result, the situation is stable.
My interest in this mainly relates to how these things will impact the Internet in the future, and I see some possible problems developing.
Do you believe there is any reason for the "Internet of the Future" to be everywhere?
Above Vint Cerf's "IP Everywhere"? :-)
You're concerned about video over IP delivery and other advanced applications, but do you expect to make a video call to your cousin who owns a farm outside of town? This question is largely ignored in discussions about cranking the 'net to ever faster speeds, at least in the US. I'd be interested to know how it's addressed elsewhere in the world.
I'd like to see it addressed. I'd like to see widespread Internet availability. At this point, it's possible to make a video call to your cousin who owns a farm outside of town, but doing so probably requires you to be signed up for satellite based broadband, or long distance wireless. Both services exist, and people do use them. I know one guy in rural Illinois who maintains a radio tower so he can get wifi access from the nearest highspeed Internet source (~miles). He plays multiplayer shoot'ems on the Internet, not the sort of thing you'd do over dialup, and he's good enough that his ping times aren't a noticeable handicap. I'd note that that was even several years ago. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
$quoted_author = "Joe Greco" ;
That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is "address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are." Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before.
"Address those problems" sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as "move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^&* expensive place." Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me.
It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side.
it's arrogant to use throwaway lines like "address those problems" when the reality is a complex political and corporate stoush over a former government entity with a monopoly on the local loop. AU should be at a stage where the next generation network (FTTx, for some values of x hopefully approaching H) will be built by a new, neutral entity owned by a consortium of telcos/ISPs with wholesale charges set on a cost recovery basis. if either political party realises how important this is for AUs future and stares down telstra in their game of ACCC chicken, that may even become a reality. cheers marty -- You get 10 points for difficulty, but for execution you get minus three. "Holding On" - Lazy Susan
$quoted_author = "Joe Greco" ;
That's approximately correct. The true answer to the thought experiment is "address those problems, don't continue to blindly pay those costs and complain about how unique your problems are." Because the problems are neither unique nor new - merely ingrained. People have solved them before.
"Address those problems" sounds quite a bit like an old Sam Kinnison routine, paraphrased as "move to where the broadband is! You live in a %*^&* expensive place." Sorry, but your statement comes across as arrogant, at least to me.
It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side.
it's arrogant to use throwaway lines like "address those problems" when the reality is a complex political and corporate stoush over a former government entity with a monopoly on the local loop.
AU should be at a stage where the next generation network (FTTx, for some values of x hopefully approaching H) will be built by a new, neutral entity owned by a consortium of telcos/ISPs with wholesale charges set on a cost recovery basis. if either political party realises how important this is for AUs future and stares down telstra in their game of ACCC chicken, that may even become a reality.
So, in other words, it is arrogant for me to not have a detailed game plan to deal with another continent's networking political problems, and instead to summarize it as "address those problems." Okay, then. Well, I certainly apologize. My assumption was that the membership of this mailing list was: 1) Not stupid, 2) Actually fairly experienced in these sorts of issues, meaning that they are capable of filling in the large blanks themselves, and 3) Probably not interested in a detailed game plan for something outside of the North American continent anyways, given the "NA" in NANOG. Certainly the general plan you suggest sounds like a good one. We kind of screwed that up here in the US. Despite having screwed it up, we've still got cheap broadband. I'd actually like to see something very much more like what you suggest for AU here in the US. But there was more than one problem listed. The other major factor seems to be transit bandwidth. I believe I already mentioned that there are others who are actually working to "address those problems," so I am guessing that my terse suggestion was actually spot on. Otherwise they wouldn't be working on a new fiber from Australia to Guam. The only thing that seems to be particularly new or unique about this situation is that it was a momentary flash here in the US, when broadband was first deployed, and providers were terrified of high volume users. That passed fairly rapidly, and we're now on "unlimited" plans. I would, however, caution the folks in AU to carefully examine the path that things took here in the US - and avoid the mistakes. We started out with a plan to have a next generation neutral network, and it looks like it would have kept the US in the lead of the Internet revolution. The first mistake, in my opinion, was not creating a truly neutral entity to do that network, and instead allowing Ma Bell to create it for us. But it's late and I'm guessing most of the interested folks here have already got a good idea of how it all went wrong. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side.
There's a big difference between fixing brokenness and demanding that somebody else do something that might make sense in your situation but not in theirs. People in different places deal with different economic factors, whether in terms of telecommunications, or the movement of goods, or labor. In the US, we automate a lot of household tasks (dish washing, clothes washing, etc.) because the machines to do those tasks are cheap, and peoples' time is expensive. Many people have cars, because they can afford them, but hiring a chauffeur would be extremely extravagant. In some other parts of the world, importing machines to wash dishes or wash clothing would be considered extremely expensive. Anybody who could afford such things would instead spend $10 per month on a servant who would do what those machines do, and clean the house and cook meals. Cars, made with expensive foreign materials by expensive foreign labor, would mostly be unaffordable, but anybody who could afford one would also spend the extra $10 per month on somebody to drive it for them. The same goes for telecommunications connectivity. In the US, we've been conditioned over the last ten years to think of long haul telecom capacity between major cities as a seemingly infinite resource with a price approaching zero, so expending extra effort to limit its use wouldn't make much sense. In parts of the world where the same long distance capacity that we take for granted sells for $5,000 per megabit per second per month, and where $5,000 represents 10 or 20 years of income for the average person, people look at it differently. So, what drives the telecom cost differences? Distance and difficulty of terrain are certainly partial answers, as are economies of scale. But, if we look at what happened in the US, the story is a bit different. In the late 1990s, we had a telecom construction boom. Demand for capacity was surging and lots of investors wanted to invest in new capacity. There was a set of cities that were seen both as where the money was, and where a network had to be to be a peer of all the other networks. Once somebody was laying a little bit of fiber, it didn't cost much more to lay a lot of it, so lots of companies ended up burying lots more fiber than they had a use for between the same set of points. Doing that was really expensive, and the construction had to be paid for up front before the fiber could be used. Presumably, the investors assumed that once the fiber was in, it would sell for what fiber was selling for before the construction boom, and they'd all make their money back. Unfortunately if you're an investor, but fortunately if you're an American consumer, the market didn't work that way. It became a competitive market with high capital costs, a near infinite supply of the product, and lots of competition. The fiber companies couldn't price their services to recover their construction costs, because if they had charged more than any of their competitors they wouldn't have made a cent. Instead, they priced their services to be cheaper than the competition, trying to salvage whatever money they could. The competitors responded by pricing things even cheaper, trying to make sales of their own, and the cycle repeated itself again and again as the price of capacity along those routes fell towards zero. Eventually, the construction debt went away in bankruptcy, the fiber got bought up cheaply by companies that hadn't lost everything in building it, and what it had cost to build ceased to be relevant at all. In other words, capacity in the US is cheap because a bunch of investors screwed up. That's nothing new; it's how the American railroads got built in the mid to late 1800s, and it's how the original American phone networks got built in the early 1900s. Investors will presumably keep making similar mistakes, and society will be better off because of it. But counting on them to make the same mistake while investing in the same thing within the same decade may be pushing it. Unfortunately for consumers, and fortunately for investors, this pattern didn't repeat itself everywhere. Those who built fiber on paths that were not seen as where the money was ended up with monopolies. They can charge far more than their construction costs, as long as they can find customers willing to pay. They're vulnerable, of course, to somebody else coming along and building a parallel cable that forces their prices towards zero, but such a cable would force its own price towards zero as well, and generally wouldn't be a good investment. Second cables do occasionally get built, but often their either on sufficiently different paths that they still provide a monopoly on connectivity to somewhere, or they're built by somebody who needs the capacity themselves. If you're an ISP in an area served by an expensive long haul capacity monopoly rather than a cheap competitive free for all, the economic decisions you're likely to make are quite different than the decisions made in major American cities. If you can always go get more cheap capacity, encouraging your customers to use a lot of it and thereby become dependent on it may be a wise move, or at least may not hurt you much. It's probably cheaper than keeping track of who's using what and having to deal with variable bills. But if the capacity you buy is expensive, you probably don't want your customers using a lot of it unless they're willing to pay you at least what you're paying for it. Charging per bit, or imposing bandwidth caps, is a way to align your customers' economic interests with your own, and to encourage them to behave in the way that you want them to. I should also note that those advocating "carrier neutral" fiber to the home probably won't get high speeds at low prices, as long as that "carrier neutral" fiber is a monopoly. Even regulated monopolies are generally allowed to charge enough to make back their construction costs, and if the ISPs are paying for the fiber monthly rather than up front, that's going to put a pretty firm floor on what ISPs can charge. What would theoretically push consumer prices down would be to have several competing companies build fiber to the same set of homes, that they or their post-bankruptcy successors would continue to control. We've sort of got that in much of the US, with the DSL/cable duopolies, and speeds do seem to be creeping up slowly, although not nearly as much as in some other parts of the world. The question, of course, is how to convince investors to go for such a thing. -Steve
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
It's arrogant to fix brokenness? Because I'm certainly there. In my experience, if you don't bother to address problems, they're very likely to remain, especially when money is involved on the opposite side.
There's a big difference between fixing brokenness and demanding that somebody else do something that might make sense in your situation but not in theirs.
Well, then, when someone actually demands that, then why don't you have that little chat with them. Otherwise, you might want to recognize that someone actually /asked/ me what I would do - and I answered. For you (or anyone else) to turn that on its ear and make it out like I was demanding that somebody else do something is, at best, poor form. [lots of boring and obvious US Internet boom/bust history snipped]
In other words, capacity in the US is cheap because a bunch of investors screwed up. That's nothing new; it's how the American railroads got built in the mid to late 1800s, and it's how the original American phone networks got built in the early 1900s. Investors will presumably keep making similar mistakes, and society will be better off because of it. But counting on them to make the same mistake while investing in the same thing within the same decade may be pushing it.
So there's nowhere else in the world that there's cheap capacity? There are other areas of the world that are served by the Internet, and it seems unlikely to me that cheap bandwidth in every single area is due to the competition/bankruptcy cycle. Actually, the thing that tends to be /most/ special about a location such as Australia is that running the capacity out there is a lot different than running fiber along tracks in the US. The race into financial ruin caused by competitiveness among carriers was not a certainty, but the excessive levels of excess capacity from numerous providers probably forced it to become one, as smaller fish fought for a slice of the pie. The lack of large amounts of excess capacity on competing carriers clearly keeps the AU costs high, possibly (probably) artificially so. Therefore, I'm not sure I would accept this argument about why US capacity is cheap as being a complete answer, though in the context of talking about why AU is expensive, it's certainly clear that the lack of competition to AU is a major factor.
If you're an ISP in an area served by an expensive long haul capacity monopoly rather than a cheap competitive free for all, the economic decisions you're likely to make are quite different than the decisions made in major American cities. If you can always go get more cheap capacity, encouraging your customers to use a lot of it and thereby become dependent on it may be a wise move, or at least may not hurt you much.
I'm not actually certain under what circumstances *encouraging* your customers to use a lot of bandwidth is a wise move, since there are still issues with overcommit in virtually every ISP network.
It's probably cheaper than keeping track of who's using what and having to deal with variable bills. But if the capacity you buy is expensive, you probably don't want your customers using a lot of it unless they're willing to pay you at least what you're paying for it. Charging per bit, or imposing bandwidth caps, is a way to align your customers' economic interests with your own, and to encourage them to behave in the way that you want them to.
Well, my initial message included this: : Continued reliance on broadband users using tiny percentages of their : broadband connection certainly makes the ISP business model easier, but : in the long term, isn't going to work out well for the Internet's : continuing evolution. So, now you've actually stumbled into a vague understanding of what I was initially getting at. Good. :-) I am seeing a continued growth of bandwidth-intensive services, including new, sophisticated, data-driven technologies. I am concerned about the impact that forcing customers "to behave in the way that you want them to" has on the development of new technologies. Let's get into that, just a little bit. One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices. Ten years ago, your average PC connected to the Internet, and users might actually have downloaded the occasional software update manually. Today, it is fairly common to configure PC's to download updates - not only for Windows, but for virus scanners, Web browsers, e-mail clients, etc., all automatically. To fail to arrange this is actually risking viral infection. Download-and-run software is getting more common. Microsoft distributed Vista betas as DVD ISO's. These things are not getting smaller. Ten years ago, portable GPS-based navigation systems weren't really popular. Five years ago, we had CD- or DVD-based systems as fairly readily available options. Today, we have a huge variety of devices. All of these devices suffer from problems where data is out of date; the latest devices that store their database on non-RO medium, however, can be periodically updated. I fully expect that we'll be seeing more frequent updates, along with more specific regional information downloads about construction and temporary obstructions, which will only drive that process to be more frequent. Ten years ago, 35MM cameras were king. Today, digital multimegapixel cameras are king. Users are finding that they can easily upgrade that 128MB SD card that cost them an arm and a leg a few years ago to a nice new 2GB SD card that costs twenty bucks (maybe with a coupon). They like to e-mail around their pictures - and their MPEG video-movies. Now, I want to make a point here - I do not consider ANY of these to be the sort of "new killer app" that I'm talking about, yet within each of these classes of device, we're seeing the potential develop for the need for some more bandwidth to do things that your AVERAGE END USER is going to want to be able to do. The continued growth of technology is a key. Look at the state of the art. I can get a 4GB storage module the size of my pinky fingernail (MicroSD). That wasn't the case ten years ago. While some - or even a lot - of that data is being originated from non-Internet sources, such as digital cameras, PDA's, cell phones, etc., it seems obvious that some percentage of the storage device capacity being sold is going to result in additional Internet bandwidth used, and that this is going to scale upwards along with the increasing capacity/decreasing price of storage. So even if there isn't a next killer app, there's likely to be continued growth and demand for Internet bandwidth for current apps.
I should also note that those advocating "carrier neutral" fiber to the home probably won't get high speeds at low prices, as long as that "carrier neutral" fiber is a monopoly. Even regulated monopolies are generally allowed to charge enough to make back their construction costs, and if the ISPs are paying for the fiber monthly rather than up front, that's going to put a pretty firm floor on what ISPs can charge. What would theoretically push consumer prices down would be to have several competing companies build fiber to the same set of homes, that they or their post-bankruptcy successors would continue to control. We've sort of got that in much of the US, with the DSL/cable duopolies, and speeds do seem to be creeping up slowly, although not nearly as much as in some other parts of the world. The question, of course, is how to convince investors to go for such a thing.
Obviously (and, yes, I pointed this out /much/ earlier in this discussion) this is a serious problem. We currently have a system here in the US that was distorted by the incumbent telcos and cablecos. To understand how to convince the investors to go for such a thing, you can look at the sorts of incentives included in the Info Superhighway proposals. We offered great incentives for them to build this - and even granted most of them. However, we lost out because there was a lot of clever lobbying, and we didn't actually end up requiring them to hold up their end of the bargain. The short form is that they took the incentives and ran; some people have valued those incentives as being as much as $200 billion. I'm not making that up. http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm This is somewhat slanted, but there's a lot of truth in it. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices.
The one thing that scares me the most is that I have discovered people around me that use their bittorrent clients with rss feeds from bittorrent sites to download "everything" (basically, or at least a category) and then just delete what they don't want. Because they're paying for flat rate there is little incentive in trying to save on bandwidth. If this spreads, be afraid, be very afraid. I can't think of anything more bandwidth intensive than video, no software updates downloads in the world can compete with people automatically downloading DVDRs or xvids of tv shows and movies, and then throwing it away because they were too lazy to set up proper filtering in the first place. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Oct 10, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices.
The one thing that scares me the most is that I have discovered people around me that use their bittorrent clients with rss feeds from bittorrent sites to download "everything" (basically, or at least a category) and then just delete what they don't want. Because they're paying for flat rate there is little incentive in trying to save on bandwidth.
If this spreads, be afraid, be very afraid. I can't think of anything more bandwidth intensive than video, no software updates downloads in the world can compete with people automatically downloading DVDRs or xvids of tv shows and movies, and then throwing it away because they were too lazy to set up proper filtering in the first place.
Many people leave the TV on all the time, at least while they are home. On the Internet broadcasting side, we (AmericaFree.TV) have some viewers that do the same - one has racked up a cumulative 109 _days_ of viewing so far this year. (109 days in 280 days duration works out to 9.3 hours per day.) I am sure that other video providers can provide similar reports. So, I don't think that things are that different here in the new regime. Regards Marshall
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Oct 10, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Joe Greco wrote:
One of the biggest challenges for the Internet has got to be the steadily increasing storage market, combined with the continued development of small, portable processors for every application, meaning that there's been an explosion of computing devices.
The one thing that scares me the most is that I have discovered people around me that use their bittorrent clients with rss feeds from bittorrent sites to download "everything" (basically, or at least a category) and then just delete what they don't want. Because they're paying for flat rate there is little incentive in trying to save on bandwidth.
If this spreads, be afraid, be very afraid. I can't think of anything more bandwidth intensive than video, no software updates downloads in the world can compete with people automatically downloading DVDRs or xvids of tv shows and movies, and then throwing it away because they were too lazy to set up proper filtering in the first place.
Many people leave the TV on all the time, at least while they are home.
On the Internet broadcasting side, we (AmericaFree.TV) have some viewers that do the same - one has racked up a cumulative 109 _days_ of viewing so far this year. (109 days in 280 days duration works out to 9.3 hours per day.) I am sure that other video providers can provide similar reports. So, I don't think that things are that different here in the new regime.
That's scary enough. However, consider something like TiVo. Our dual- tuner DirecTiVo spends a fair amount of its time recording. Now, first, some explanation. We're not a huge TV household. The DirecTiVo is a first generation, ~30 hour unit. It's set up to record about 50 different things on season pass, many of which are not currently available. It's also got an extensive number of thumbs rated (and therefore often automatically recorded as a suggestion) items. I'm guessing that a minimum of 90% of what is recorded is either deleted or rolls off the end without being watched, yet there are various shows (possibly just one) on the unit from last year yet. All things considered, this harms no one and nothing, since the TiVo is not using any measurable resource to do the recordings that would not otherwise have been used. A DVR on a traditional cable network is non-problematic, as is a DVR on any of the "next gen" broadcast/multicast style networks that could be deployed as a drop-in replacement for legacy cable. More interesting are some of the new cable "video on demand" services, which could create a fair amount of challenge for cable service providers. However, even there, the challenge is limited to the service provider's network, and it is unlikely that the load created cannot be addressed. Multiple customer DVR's requesting content for speculative download purposes (i.e. for TiVo-style "favorites" support) could be broadcast or multicast the material at a predetermined time, essentially minimizing the load caused by speculative downloading. True in-real-time VOD would be limited to users actually in front of the glass. All of this, however, represents content within the cable provider's network. From the "TiVo user" perspective above, even if a vast majority of the content is being discarded, it shouldn't really be a major problem. Now, for something (seemingly) completely different. Thirty years ago, TV was dominated by the big broadcast networks. Shows were expensive to produce, equipment was expensive, and the networks tried to aim at large interest groups. Shows such as "Star Trek" had a lot of difficulty succeeding, for many reasons, but thrived in syndication. With the advent of cable networks, we saw the launch of channels such as "SciFi", which was originally pegged as a place where "Star Treks" and other sci-fi movies would find a second life. However, if you look at what has /actually/ happened, many networks have actually started originating their own high-quality, much more narrowly targetted shows. We've seen "Battlestar Galactica" and "Flash Gordon" appear on SciFi, for example. Part of this is that it is less difficult and complex to produce shows, with the advances in technology that we've seen. I picked SciFi mainly because there's a lot of bleedover from legacy broadcast TV to provide some compare/contrast - but more general examples, such as HBO produced shows, exist as well. A big question, then, is will we continue to see this sort of effect? Can we expect TV to continue to evolve towards more highly targetted segments? I believe that the answer is "yes," and along with that may come a move towards a certain amount of more amateur content. Something more like "video podcasting" than short YouTube videos. And it'll get better (or worse, depending on POV) as time goes on. Technology improves. Today's cell phones, for example, can take short movies. The sheer amount of video data that could/can be/is published out on the Internet is staggering, but it's currently somewhat hard to find and to get onto a TiVo automatically. I guess I'm not betting on that situation lasting forever. At some point, this *is* going to be a problem for network operators. It should be obvious that this could be network meltdown. Solving these problems is an interesting problem. Trying to get people to "save on bandwidth" is going to be difficult in an environment where equipment is just "doing its thing" and users don't really have that much of a grasp on how much bandwidth they use anyways. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
Many people leave the TV on all the time, at least while they are home.
On the Internet broadcasting side, we (AmericaFree.TV) have some viewers that do the same - one has racked up a cumulative 109 _days_ of viewing so far this year. (109 days in 280 days duration works out to 9.3 hours per day.) I am sure that other video providers can provide similar reports. So, I don't think that things are that different here in the new regime.
If it's multicast TV I don't see the problem, it doesn't increase your backbone traffic linearly with the number of people doing it. But this is of course a problem in a VOD environment, but on the other hand, people are probably less likely to just leave it on if it's actually programming they can have when they want. You don't need a TiVo when you have network based service that does the TiVo functionality for you. Personally, I'd rather pay per hour I'm watching VOD, than paying nothing for channels filled with commercials where I have no control over when and what I could watch. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
If it's multicast TV I don't see the problem, it doesn't increase your backbone traffic linearly with the number of people doing it.
However if you have UK-style ADSL ppp backhaul then multicast doesn't help. Tony. -- f.a.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ IRISH SEA: SOUTHERLY, BACKING NORTHEASTERLY FOR A TIME, 3 OR 4. SLIGHT OR MODERATE. SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD, OCCASIONALLY POOR.
On 10/12/07, Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at> wrote:
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
If it's multicast TV I don't see the problem, it doesn't increase your backbone traffic linearly with the number of people doing it.
However if you have UK-style ADSL ppp backhaul then multicast doesn't help.
Tony.
Not to drag this too far off topic, but have serious studies been done looking at moving switching fabric closer to the DSLAMs (versus doing everything PPPoE)? I know this sort of goes opposite of how ILECs are setup to dish out DSL, but as more traffic is being pushed user to user, it may make economic/technical sense. -brandon
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Brandon Galbraith wrote:
Not to drag this too far off topic, but have serious studies been done looking at moving switching fabric closer to the DSLAMs (versus doing everything PPPoE)? I know this sort of goes opposite of how ILECs are setup to dish out DSL, but as more traffic is being pushed user to user, it may make economic/technical sense.
I know some som non-ILECs that do DSL bitstream via L3/MPLS IPVPN and IP DSLAMs, which then if they implement multicast in their VPN would be able to provide a service that could support multicast TV. For me any tunnel based bitstream doesn't scale for the future and in competetive markets it's already been going away (mostly because ISPs buying the bitstream service can't compete anyway). -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
participants (12)
-
Adrian Chadd -
Andy Johnson -
Brandon Galbraith -
Daniel Senie -
Joe Greco -
Justin M. Streiner -
Mark Newton -
Marshall Eubanks -
Martin Barry -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Steve Gibbard -
Tony Finch