13 ms·

Ha-rumph. Allow me to call them out on their "three points": 1. The networks are running at capacity. Well, maybe they are, I don't have inside information as

by skolor 17y ago

Ha-rumph. Allow me to call them out on their "three points": 1. The networks are running at capacity. Well, maybe they are, I don't have inside information as to the big ISP's networks. What I do know, however, is that other countries have networks with 5x the bandwidth that the fastest internet connections available here have.While it may be prohibitively expensive to roll that out all across the country, there is no real reason not to have it available in major cities, except to create an artificial scarcity of bandwidth. In addition to that, traffic shaping doesn't help the problem, it makes it worse. There are two ways an end user sees the speed of their connection: latency and throughput. Traffic shaping works by lowering the throughput of bandwidth-intensive applications, so that there is more bandwidth left over for the rest of the users. However, if all of the bandwidth intensive applications are being shaping, and slowed down, then the overall throughput the user sees will decline sharply. In addition, latency, or the overhead time it takes for any request to be processed goes up when traffic is being shaped, making it take longer for individual pages to load too, and make the service seem slower in a non-quantifiable way. 2. We can't enforce it. This is simply not true. Its relatively simple to check to see if your traffic is being shaped and/or impeded, and several applications have been released to do so. Sure, it would be difficult for the government to do so, but if the average user can quickly and easily check, that is not nearly the problem the article makes it out to be. 3. Ok, you have a point there. Having regulations does add bureaucracy into the situation, which is rarely a beneficial thing. Now the FCC is proposing taking a free market that works Except that it doesn't work. The ISPs are already threatening to close down their networks, and make things much more closed off. We already regularly have ISP peering problems, there is little to stop them from just cutting off portions of the internet at their whim. Blind faith in "Free Market" is not infallible, it requires the public to be well educated, both in how the service/product works, and in the alternatives to it. At this point, neither of those are true. Your average user understands how an ISP works to about the point of: "It gets me my Youtube and MySpace". On top of that, there largely aren't alternatives. Want high speed? You have one, maybe two options, depending on where you are. Live out in the country, and you're lucky to have one.Sure, you could have some kind of satellite setup, but that is slow and expensive, and generally harder to set up/keep maintained. I am generally against government regulations, but with something like the internet, I think Net Neutrality is a necessary thing, and that the government needs to step in and make sure ISPs don't start abusing their networks.

tc 17y ago
Since I'm in this industry, I'd like to point out that bandwidth is not artificially scarce. It is just scarce, necessarily limited by the capital available to buy equipment and lease facilities, fiber, and copper. Before talking about the artificial scarcity of bandwidth, I'd encourage you to check the prices on some Cisco or Juniper gear. No one buys this stuff to intentionally underutilized its capacity. And correspondingly, no one avoids buying this gear to create scarcity; they avoid buying it because it is expensive. Carriers are bound by the same forces as other businesses. People buy expensive equipment if and only if they expect to see a return on their investment.
- skolor 17y ago
  I am fairly aware what network infrastructure costs. I am also very aware that in several other countries it is not only profitable, but profitable enough that there are several companies doing it. There are only two reasons I can see for not having the kind of high speed connections some many other places in the world enjoy, is either: A) the backbone of the network is overloaded, and that is what needs upgrading most, or B) they don't want to upgrade one part of the network and leaving the non-urban areas with only lower speed connections. Without any kind of inside knowledge, I would guess it is a mixture of the two. In any case: I pay roughly the same as I could get several times the bandwidth in other countries. If it is economically feasible there, there really is no reason why it wouldn't be feasible here. You may not be able to see network-wide improvements due to a slow infrastructure, but with sites like Google and Amazon putting up edge servers in most large cities, and the use of P2P technology, the gains would still be significant. Hell, if the major ISPs really wanted to make an impact as far as bandwidth was concerned, they would embrace P2P far more. A network-aware P2P network helps solve much of the problem of a slow backbone connection, as long as there is a fast local (metro-area) connection. Of course, I can't see the companies going for that, for the same reason they dislike Net Neutrality: it forces them to give up control.
  - tc 17y ago
    "Without any kind of inside knowledge, I would guess" I don't want to be overly-harsh to you in particular, but I think this is the key to so much of the useless posturing and speculating on this issue. It may in fact be similar to the familiar refrain that people become more tolerant of homosexuals when they realize that one of their friends, family members, or business partners is gay. It's easy to stigmatize and demonize internet carriers if you don't know anyone who runs a business in that field. To your points though. Most carrier backbones are not regularly overloaded. The bottleneck is at the network edge. And it isn't that carriers don't want to build. Everyone I know in this industry loves expanding their network and increasing capacity. But at the end of the day, you have to make a return on investment or your go out of business. Building out the network edge is terribly expensive. You have to buy and place a lot of expensive equipment in a lot of different places. You have to lay or lease lots of fiber or copper, or you have to build towers (and lay fiber to backhaul). Amazingly, there are lots of carriers that do this. You wouldn't even recognize most of the names. Speaking as someone who came to telecom from a software background, I think there is a tendency for software people to want to idealize telecom into an ethereal mass-less abstraction, like software. If you look at it that way, any limitation is artificial -- the man is holding you down for his own pleasure. But the business isn't anything like that. Think Fedex rather than Google, and you'd be on the right path. As for Europe, Asia, etc., keep in mind that those networks were far more heavily subsidized than our own. You may think that's a good thing, but remember that this removed resources from other human endeavors. Not everyone on Earth rates decreasing his or her CounterStrike latency as the highest priority in life.

by skolor 17y ago

tc 17y ago

Since I'm in this industry, I'd like to point out that bandwidth is not artificially scarce. It is just scarce, necessarily limited by the capital available to buy equipment and lease facilities, fiber, and copper. Before talking about the artificial scarcity of bandwidth, I'd encourage you to check the prices on some Cisco or Juniper gear. No one buys this stuff to intentionally underutilized its capacity. And correspondingly, no one avoids buying this gear to create scarcity; they avoid buying it because it is expensive. Carriers are bound by the same forces as other businesses. People buy expensive equipment if and only if they expect to see a return on their investment.

skolor 17y ago
I am fairly aware what network infrastructure costs. I am also very aware that in several other countries it is not only profitable, but profitable enough that there are several companies doing it. There are only two reasons I can see for not having the kind of high speed connections some many other places in the world enjoy, is either: A) the backbone of the network is overloaded, and that is what needs upgrading most, or B) they don't want to upgrade one part of the network and leaving the non-urban areas with only lower speed connections. Without any kind of inside knowledge, I would guess it is a mixture of the two. In any case: I pay roughly the same as I could get several times the bandwidth in other countries. If it is economically feasible there, there really is no reason why it wouldn't be feasible here. You may not be able to see network-wide improvements due to a slow infrastructure, but with sites like Google and Amazon putting up edge servers in most large cities, and the use of P2P technology, the gains would still be significant. Hell, if the major ISPs really wanted to make an impact as far as bandwidth was concerned, they would embrace P2P far more. A network-aware P2P network helps solve much of the problem of a slow backbone connection, as long as there is a fast local (metro-area) connection. Of course, I can't see the companies going for that, for the same reason they dislike Net Neutrality: it forces them to give up control.
- tc 17y ago
  "Without any kind of inside knowledge, I would guess" I don't want to be overly-harsh to you in particular, but I think this is the key to so much of the useless posturing and speculating on this issue. It may in fact be similar to the familiar refrain that people become more tolerant of homosexuals when they realize that one of their friends, family members, or business partners is gay. It's easy to stigmatize and demonize internet carriers if you don't know anyone who runs a business in that field. To your points though. Most carrier backbones are not regularly overloaded. The bottleneck is at the network edge. And it isn't that carriers don't want to build. Everyone I know in this industry loves expanding their network and increasing capacity. But at the end of the day, you have to make a return on investment or your go out of business. Building out the network edge is terribly expensive. You have to buy and place a lot of expensive equipment in a lot of different places. You have to lay or lease lots of fiber or copper, or you have to build towers (and lay fiber to backhaul). Amazingly, there are lots of carriers that do this. You wouldn't even recognize most of the names. Speaking as someone who came to telecom from a software background, I think there is a tendency for software people to want to idealize telecom into an ethereal mass-less abstraction, like software. If you look at it that way, any limitation is artificial -- the man is holding you down for his own pleasure. But the business isn't anything like that. Think Fedex rather than Google, and you'd be on the right path. As for Europe, Asia, etc., keep in mind that those networks were far more heavily subsidized than our own. You may think that's a good thing, but remember that this removed resources from other human endeavors. Not everyone on Earth rates decreasing his or her CounterStrike latency as the highest priority in life.