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This article briefly hints at the less regulated internet transit industry. I worked for two years at a company that sold competitive intelligence tools to lar
by shimon 18y ago
This article briefly hints at the less regulated internet transit industry. I worked for two years at a company that sold competitive intelligence tools to large ISPs, and what I learned about the global telecom business was pretty eye-opening.
First, internet transit is incredibly competitive. The protocols are designed from the ground up to support changes and redundancy in network routes, so there is not a lot preventing any company from switching ISP service aside from their contracts and the constraints of what wires reach their data center. Because of this competition, prices are always getting lower and vendors are constantly working to reduce costs. Geography is a very significant variable, of course: getting a lot of bandwidth in rural Idaho is going to be much much more expensive than getting it in New York, London, or Seoul because you won't have many options. The most expensive, of course, is in markets that are regulated monopolies; many African countries have absolutely ludicrous bandwidth costs for the same reason they are expensive to fly to.
On the bright side, though, ISPs are constantly working to make the network more efficient. One mechanism for this is peering, where two ISPs agree to exchange traffic that is bound for destinations on each other's network directly, rather than each individually paying their provider to do so. It used to be that only large ISPs would bother to work our peering agreements among each other, but over the past 10 years peer-to-peer traffic has dramatically increased traffic between different ISPs in local and regional markets, so those smaller guys have learned to do peering as well.
What does all this mean? I'm no libertarian, but it's hard not to be awed by the efficiency and power of the unregulated global internet. For whatever reason, tens of thousands of companies are working together around the world in an amazingly cooperative and efficient way, even though many of them are fierce competitors. We could certainly stand some of that in the domestic telephone market, and we'll probably get it eventually, if only because the cost of VOIP transit will probably round to zero within our lifetime.
- lhorn 18y agoYou just saved me 30 minutes of googling for these answers. Thanks a bunch.
- wallflower 18y agoI came across this blog about the Wild West of Internet peering/transit when they had the undersea cable episodes. You might find it interesting. http://www.renesys.com/blog/ http://www.renesys.com/blog/
- shimon 18y agoThat's where I worked. I was never the network geek that most of my coworkers were, but I got to learn a lot. :)
- acgourley 18y agoSo would you mind giving your opinion on Net Neutrality? I've always been a bit torn and I bet you have a good perspective on it.
- shimon 18y agoAs far as I can tell, net neutrality is an interesting mythology that probably is not reducible to specific technical requirements in a long-term-meaningful way. One one hand, there have been good rulings from the FCC, e.g. preventing ISPs from (anticompetitively) slowing down VOIP traffic that isn't handled by their own VOIP service. But on the other hand there are intrinsic physical limitations to the way networks are designed, so it's perfectly reasonable that if you have a Comcast internet connection your VOIP packets will have a faster route to Comcast VOIP servers than to Vonage. There's also a tricky distinction going on here. If you have a Comcast cable line going to your house, your network connection is already non-neutral. That cable carries video signals over IP on a certain share of the wire's bandwidth; this share is always dedicated solely to Comcast IPTV and no matter how many blip.tv videos you have going on your laptop your digital TV will always have the same dedicated bandwidth. Is that unfair? Comcast did a lot of work putting up wires to your house, navigating a bunch of annoying state and/or municipal laws, and investing in a lot of network infrastructure, for which they clearly deserve some reward. Is it OK to dedicate bandwidth on the wire but not over IP? Seems like a distinction that will get meaningless pretty quickly. On the other hand, there are many good reasons to be suspicious of telecom conglomerates, and it might be a reasonable policy position to say that comcast-the-internet-provider and comcast-the-cable-service should be separate companies. All I've heard from the Net Neutrality heroes, though, is vague and inactionable invective. It worries me not because I think it might work, but because it's (1) likely to generate incompetent legislation and (2) crying wolf now when we might well need coherent opposition to specific industry actions or proposed mergers in the future.
- wmf 18y agoAlthough it doesn't affect your argument, I feel compelled to mention that cable TV isn't over IP; it uses MPEG transport stream directly over QAM.