No Neuts in CA

This is heartwarming and inspirational: Television viewers will ultimately wind up with one-stop shopping for video, phone and Internet services, under legislation approved by the state Senate that would open the video-services market to telephone companies. No matter what happens with Stevens and Barton this year, those of is in California are cool. I heard … Continue reading “No Neuts in CA”

This is heartwarming and inspirational:

Television viewers will ultimately wind up with one-stop shopping for video, phone and Internet services, under legislation approved by the state Senate that would open the video-services market to telephone companies.

No matter what happens with Stevens and Barton this year, those of is in California are cool.

I heard a debate of this bill on the radio with my old nemesis Lenny Goldberg arguing against it, pretty pathetically in fact. Lenny was reduced to arguing that cell phones aren’t real phones and similar rot. The man is shameless, but hardworking. No matter what your cause, he’ll shill for you: public employee unions, higher taxes, alimony, child support extraction, re-regulation of utilities, whatever, he’s there as long as you can pay the freight.

Free Software Communists

I used to spend a lot of time in the Indian state of Kerala, so this article in Salon by Andrew Leonard caught my eye: Richard Stallman must be sleeping well this week. Eight years ago, I accompanied the free software pioneer on a visit to the Bill Gates-funded computer science building on the Stanford … Continue reading “Free Software Communists”

I used to spend a lot of time in the Indian state of Kerala, so this article in Salon by Andrew Leonard caught my eye:

Richard Stallman must be sleeping well this week. Eight years ago, I accompanied the free software pioneer on a visit to the Bill Gates-funded computer science building on the Stanford campus. To get in we had to pass through an entrance that sported the Microsoft founder’s name engraved on high. Stallman gave Bill the finger, and then tried to convince some passersby that they should likewise flip Bill off. They looked at him like he was crazy.

Crazy like a fox. This week, the New York Times reported that the Communist state government of Kerala, India, “is campaigning to eliminate Microsoft from use in public institutions.” The government wants state-funded entities, such as public schools, to switch to free software, such as Linux-based operating systems. And guess what? Richard Stallman was very much involved.

Stallman has been pushing free software in India for years. In 2001 he chose Kerala as the headquarters for the Indian affiliate of the Free Software Foundation, the nonprofit he founded to promote software that users can freely copy and modify. Not long after the socialist Left Democratic Front won control of Kerala’s state assembly in May 2006, he was back, lobbying the government with his trademark indefatigability. A few weeks ago, the government banned Coca-Cola and Pepsi, on the grounds that an environmental watchdog had found high levels of pesticides in the products. Now it’s tackling Microsoft.
Continue reading “Free Software Communists”

Gigabit networking for the consumer

Here it comes, a broadband technology that can move bits at a gigabit per second. And it’s all done without any wires: On a bus fitted out specially for the occasion in Jeju this week, Samsung demonstrated a new version of 4G technology transferring data at speeds of 100Mbit/s. The bus was moving at 60kmph … Continue reading “Gigabit networking for the consumer”

Here it comes, a broadband technology that can move bits at a gigabit per second. And it’s all done without any wires:

On a bus fitted out specially for the occasion in Jeju this week, Samsung demonstrated a new version of 4G technology transferring data at speeds of 100Mbit/s.

The bus was moving at 60kmph – which you rarely see in real life – but it was proof enough, the Korean giant boasted, as the demonstration included handover between cells. 1Gbit/s is 50 times faster than the current Mobile WiMAX specification, 802.16e. At walking pace, the demonstration moved bits at 1GB/s.

What was that about a cable/telco duopoly? Sorry, but technology marches on and today’s reality is tomorrow’s history.

How commmon is International blockage?

Technological Musings says: British Telecom makes sure that no other VoIP service can work on their network by blocking commonly used ports. Is this true? I know that Korea Telecom does this, but I’d never heard this before. The blog contains a number of errors, such as this one: “There are a lot of ISPs … Continue reading “How commmon is International blockage?”

Technological Musings says:

British Telecom makes sure that no other VoIP service can work on their network by blocking commonly used ports.

Is this true? I know that Korea Telecom does this, but I’d never heard this before. The blog contains a number of errors, such as this one: “There are a lot of ISPs in the US, who make sure that Vonage doesnt work on their network,” so I don’t want to take this unsourced claim at face value.

Speaking of Cults…

The reaction of the Apple faithful to the disclosure of a security hole in the design of Apple OSX was amazing. A couple of guys figured out that you could trick OSX into executing some foreign code with root privilege by sending a malformed packet to a third-party wireless LAN card. The guys – David … Continue reading “Speaking of Cults…”

The reaction of the Apple faithful to the disclosure of a security hole in the design of Apple OSX was amazing. A couple of guys figured out that you could trick OSX into executing some foreign code with root privilege by sending a malformed packet to a third-party wireless LAN card. The guys – David Maynor and Johnny Ellch – have been viciously attacked by the Kool-Aid drinking Apple faithful:

I was absolutely shocked when I ran across these stories on Digg. I had personally video interviewed Maynor and his partner Jon “Johnny Cache” Ellch and these two gentlemen were very honest and straightforward. But as soon as I read the stories, the stench began to rise. Maynor and SecureWorks had been telling the truth the entire time and they had falsified nothing. The only falsification going on was the stories themselves! Not only did Dalrymple and Chartier and others like them not follow the most basic of journalism principles to at least check with the source, they apparently didn’t even bother looking at the original video of David Manor released by SecureWorks.

The Faithful claim Maynor and Ellch alleged something they didn’t allege, and are therefore out to get Apple.

The saga continues on George Ou’s ZDNet blog today. It seems to me that the flaw the dudes found depends on bad behavior from both the driver and the OS, and if it exists on one vendor’s product, it certainly can exist on others as well. So Apple and its faithful should simply fix the problem and stop smearing people.

Is that too much to ask?

Welcome to the neutral net

We pointed out the other day that net neutrality fiends want public ownership of the Internet access network. Here’s a report from Broadband News on what that looks like: Culver City, California was the first Los Angeles municipality to offer the public a free all-access Wi-Fi network. They’re also the first to ban all porn … Continue reading “Welcome to the neutral net”

We pointed out the other day that net neutrality fiends want public ownership of the Internet access network. Here’s a report from Broadband News on what that looks like:

Culver City, California was the first Los Angeles municipality to offer the public a free all-access Wi-Fi network. They’re also the first to ban all porn and p2p from that network, according to an announcement made yesterday. The city says they’ve added Audible Magic’s CopySense Network Appliance to filter illegal and “problematic content” from their network.

Be careful what you ask for, kids, you just might get it.

H/T Techdirt.

Wikiality of Net Neutrality

The current Wikipedia entry for Net Neutrality has a pretty good intro, but you never know how long these things will last: Columbia University law professor Tim Wu popularized the phrase network neutrality as a term designating a network that does not favor one application (for example the World Wide Web) over another (such as … Continue reading “Wikiality of Net Neutrality”

The current Wikipedia entry for Net Neutrality has a pretty good intro, but you never know how long these things will last:

Columbia University law professor Tim Wu popularized the phrase network neutrality as a term designating a network that does not favor one application (for example the World Wide Web) over another (such as online gaming or Voice over IP).[1] Wu claims that the Internet is not neutral “as among all applications” as it favors file transfer over real-time communication.

The concept of network neutrality has since taken the form of various regulations proposed to govern Internet communications, including commercial interconnection agreements between Internet Service Providers (ISPs), carriers, on-line service providers, and broadband users, usually on the basis of principles of public service obligations associated with special access to public rights of way. In this sense, network neutrality means a state in which Internet providers provide interconnection services on a uniform basis, or “without discrimination”, although there is considerable disagreement about how this principle applies to applications with different needs.

Network neutrality is sometimes used as a technical term, although it has no history in the design documents (RFCs) describing the Internet protocols. In this usage, it is claimed to represent a property of protocol layering in which higher-layer protocols may not communicate service requirements to lower-layer protocols, a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of protocol engineering. (In conventional network engineering practice, each protocol in a layered system exposes Service Access Points to higher layers that can be used to request a level of service appropriate to the needs of higher-layer protocols.

Network neutrality also designates a contemporary controversy local to the United States regarding the role that government should take relative to Internet access providers providing multiple levels of service for different fees. This controversy, which emerged following regulatory developments in the United States, is extremely complex, as it mixes technical, economic, ideological and legal arguments. In essence, network neutrality regulations proposed by Senators Snowe and Dorgan and Representative Markey bar ISPs from offering Quality of Service enhancements for a fee.

This framing is showing up in some of the recent essays on the subject, such as this one from Tech News and this one by Susan Davis for Hosting News.

High-traffic articles in Wikipedia tend to degrade over time and require reformulation as entropy increases.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. A Google sympathizer going by the name “Wolfkeeper” tried to erase the summary and replace it with a pithy personal opinion. See the history page.

How much bandwidth is enough?

Reader Dave Johnson argues that QoS isn’t necessary on big packet networks because the carrier can simply provision the network adequately to carry all possible traffic at once: If an ISP has ample internal and outgoing bandwidth, as in more than enough to provide for the sum total of their customers allocations, then where does … Continue reading “How much bandwidth is enough?”

Reader Dave Johnson argues that QoS isn’t necessary on big packet networks because the carrier can simply provision the network adequately to carry all possible traffic at once:

If an ISP has ample internal and outgoing bandwidth, as in more than enough to provide for the sum total of their customers allocations, then where does that leave the latency issue? The only way packets are delayed or refused is because there is not enough capacity on the destination wire. If there is enough capacity then *where* is the problem? Customers are by definition limited in the amount of data (under any protocol) that they can send, so all quantities are known.

As idiotic as this sounds, it’s a common Urban Myth, originally expressed in the works of David Isenberg, if not elsewhere. Bandwidth is free, you see, so just hook me up and don’t worry about it.

OK, let’s play along. How much bandwidth does an ISP have to have on its internal network to allow all of its customers to use all the bandwidth in their hookups all the time? Verizon’s FIOS customers have 100 megabit/sec connections, and there are 375,000 of them. So all Verizon needs for “ample” bandwidth inside its own network is a 37.5 terabit/sec (terabit being a million million) switch, and a similar sized connection to the public Internet.

Of course, that kind of bandwidth doesn’t exist.

Will it in the future? Maybe, but by then instead of worrying about 375,000 customers on the Verizon network, we’ll be worrying about 200 million Americans with 100 megabit/sec each. That adds up to 20,000 terabits/sec. I don’t see any switches capable of handing that load on the horizon, of course. This is a ridiculous exercise, and I only do it because the argument from hyper-regulation side is so lame.

Now lets assume that ISPs can cap bandwidth for each user to some level of transport per day, week, or month. Does that alter the arithmetic above? Actually, no, because you still have to design for peak load. If everybody wants to download American Idol at the same time, you need to accommodate that, so that’s where we are.

The fastest datalinks we have today are 40 gigabits/sec. So let’s take a bunch of them and bond them together to get a 20,000 terabit/sec pipe. We only need 500,000 of them. Supposing we can build a switch that handles 20 such pipes (not really practical today, because of limitations on bus speeds, but let’s be generous) you need 25,000 of them. But now how do we interconnect these switches to each other? Well, we just need to interconnect them to each other in a big mesh, but we’re playing with probabilities again, betting that no combination of users will over-use the path between one switch and anohter. So we’ll have to add another level of switches to enable each end-user to reach each end-user through any intermediate switch, and there will be a lot of these. Somebody has to pay for all these switches, because even if they were cheap (and they aren’t), they’re not free.

This is why QoS is needed: “more bandwidth” only works up to the economic and physical constraints on bandwidth, both of which are real.

So here’s the lab problem in summary: the fastest pipes we have are 40 gigabits/second. How many of them, and in what topology, do you need in order for 100 million users to transmit 100 megabits/second of traffic with no delay?

Carriers Seek IP QOS Peers

Ha ha hee hee ho ho, here we go on our way to a better Internet: Peering isn’t just for VOIP anymore. Carriers are beginning to form peering arrangements by which they mutually honor each other’s QOS requirements at the transport layer. (See VOIP Cuts Out Middlemen.) That’s one of the findings of a new … Continue reading “Carriers Seek IP QOS Peers”

Ha ha hee hee ho ho, here we go on our way to a better Internet:

Peering isn’t just for VOIP anymore.

Carriers are beginning to form peering arrangements by which they mutually honor each other’s QOS requirements at the transport layer. (See VOIP Cuts Out Middlemen.)

That’s one of the findings of a new Heavy Reading report titled “VOIP Peering & the Future of Telecom Network Interconnection.”

“They need to go beyond VOIP peering to support their customers, principally their enterprise customers,” says John Longo, the Heavy Reading analyst who wrote the report. “They want to provide voice services as well as their own advanced applications end-to-end for their customers.”

See, it wasn’t so hard after all.

H/T Matt Sherman.

The Rise of the Self-Contradictory Network

Re-reading my Berkman Center slanderer David Isenberg’s seminal paper The Rise of the Stupid Network, I was struck by the contradictory nature of the two paragraphs at the heart of the polemic. First, he says his “Stupid Network” is aware of the types of messages presented to it, and handles each with appropriate service: [In] … Continue reading “The Rise of the Self-Contradictory Network”

Re-reading my Berkman Center slanderer David Isenberg’s seminal paper The Rise of the Stupid Network, I was struck by the contradictory nature of the two paragraphs at the heart of the polemic.

First, he says his “Stupid Network” is aware of the types of messages presented to it, and handles each with appropriate service:

[In] the Stupid Network, because the data is the boss, it can tell the network, in real time, what kind of service it needs. And the Stupid Network would have a small repertoire of idiot-savant behaviors to treat different data types appropriately. If the data identified itself as financial data, the Stupid Network would deliver it accurately, no matter how many milliseconds of delay the error checking would take. If the data were two-way voice or video, the Stupid Network would provide low delay, even at the price of an occasional flipped bit. If the data were entertainment audio or video, the Stupid Network would provide wider bandwidth, but would not necessarily give low delay or absolute accuracy. And if there were a need for unique transmission characteristics, the data would tell the Stupid Network in more detail how to treat it, and the Stupid Network would do what it was told.

Yet this is the very behavior that Net Neutrality laws would ban carriers from embedding in their fee agreements, and moreover it contradicts the very next paragraph:

You would not have to ask your Stupid Network provider for any special network modifications – its only function would be to, “Deliver the Bits, Stupid.”

Network neutrality advocates say true neutrality is simply delivering the bits, first-come, first-served. But delivering the bits in ways that are sensitive to application needs is blasphemy, monopolistic, price-gouging and extortion. See Susan Crawford for an example of the “bits is bits” point of view:

There are lots of people out there saying “we need to treat all VoIP alike, all video alike, and all blogs alike.” For them, that’s network neutrality. That’s not what I hope we’ll end up meaning by net neutrality. That would require a heavy-handed regulator enforcing a provider’s determination of what packets are “like” other packets. I am not in favor of that approach. I have a different vision. I hope, someday, we’ll treat broadband access like the utility it is. That would mean separating transport from other activities, and separating access from backbone and backhaul transport. That doesn’t require a great deal of discretion to repose in any particular actor.

Yesterday’s debate at PDF seemed to be focused on the fuzzier definition of network neutrality (“treat all VoIP alike”). That definition plays directly into the arguments of the telcos. It would give the FCC an enormous amount of discretion and power.

(UPDATE) In a subsequent re-write of this article, Isenberg came over to the Crawford side and abandoned the special treatment idea:

Intelligent Network advocates point out that networks need to treat different data types differently. Right now, they’re absolutely correct. There is a network for telephony, another network for TV, and proprietary leased-line networks for financial transactions – and none of these are ideal for public Internet traffic. You need to have low delay for voice telephony, the ability to handle megabit data streams with ease for TV, and low error rates and strong security for financial transactions.

Quality of Service (QOS) is an intermediate step in the journey from separate networks to a single, simple Stupid Network…

But suppose technology improves so much that the worst QOS is perfectly fine for all kinds of traffic, without a repertoire of different data handling techniques. Suppose, for example, that everyday normal latency becomes low enough to support voice telephony, while at the same time allowing enough capacity for video, plus data integrity strong enough for financial transactions. This would be a true Stupid Network – one treatment for all kinds of traffic.

Why should anybody build a network to transport raw bits without packet inspection? None that Isenberg can see:

One thing about the Stupid Network is clear – the physical elements that comprise the network would be neither expensive nor scarce. There would be little profit margin in shipping dumb bits. There would be lots of high value Business Ideas supported by the Stupid Network, above and beyond transport.

As I read that, he’s justifying the Telco program to pay for the network by selling services. That’s a “high value Business Idea” instead of a low-profit transport business.

And indeed, Isenberg has come to recognize that nobody will build a high-speed, stupid network simply to carry bits, as there would be no money in it:

The best network is the hardest one to make money running.

So this realization ultimately leads to the real end-goal of network neutrality: broadband Internet access networks should not be built by private companies, they should be built by government and maintained as public utilities. The goal of network neutrality legislation, then, should be to discourage private investment in broadband networks, the quicker to energize local governments to jump into the networking business.

The end of Evslin’s talk was all about doing that in Santa Barbara, CA, where Doc Searls is on the case.