Category: Networks

Cade Metz reminds us that Google is the most virtuous collection of people on Earth in this love-letter in The Register

“This side of the argument said: We were pretty well known on the internet. We were pretty popular. We had some funds available. We could essentially buy prioritization that would ensure we would be the search engine used by everybody. We would come out fine – a non-neutral world would be a good world for us.”

But then that Google idealism kicked in.

Continue reading “Sweetness and Light”

Here are my opening remarks from Media Access Project’s Innovation ’08 in Santa Clara this morning. A DVD will be available shortly. This was a lively discussion, with Google and Vuze on the case.

The remarks are cross-posted to CircleID and were Slash-dotted. One Slashdot reader said: Thank you, I finally read a post from someone who gets it. I didn’t think that would ever happen. That’s not a bad response.

Good morning and welcome. My name is Richard Bennett and I’m a network engineer. I’ve built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed’s on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing.

I’m opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we’re going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain.
Continue reading “Introductory Remarks, Innovation ’08”

Why Tiered Broadband is a Wonderful Thing and ASIVS – Blog Maverick

There is a new and exciting development. Its called an Application Specific Integrated Video Service (ASIVS) . What is an ASIVS ? Its a computer dedicated specifically to downloading and playing both standard definition and high definition video. You connect it to a network that is dedicated to delivering GIGABITS PER SECOND of high quality video with ZERO buffering. Its amazing, it always works and connects right to your standard def or High Definition TV, easily. Most of the systems I have seen have a pretty good programming guide and scheduling system and they will let you download AS MUCH VIDEO AS YOU WANT, limited only by the size of its hard drive!!

If you haven’t heard of the ASIVS, its because most people call it a DVR.

If downloading TV shows is so important to you, add a DVR to your cable or satellite service for 5 bucks a month and download all you want. If you want to watch those shows on your laptop, connect the composite video out in your DVR to the composite in on your laptop. Same with movies.

Read the whole thing, it’s a classic.

Technorati Tags: net+neutrality

Here’s an update on the MAP/AT&T tech policy event next week:

Where: de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053

When: Thursday, June 12

10:15 AM Panel 1: What Does Net Neutrality Mean Now?
Comcast’s interruption of P2P transmissions has generated debate about the need and wisdom of deploying advanced net management technologies. Can and will the private sector address this problem without government mandates? Historically, the debate about Net Neutrality has focused on who can access information distribution channels, and under what circumstances. Comcast’s recent interruption brings up new questions, explored here by some of the leading experts in the field.

Panelists:
George Ou, Technology for Mortals
Richard Bennett, Network Architect, Broadband Politics
Ronald B. Yokubaitis, Chairman and CEO, Data Foundry
Richard Whitt, Senior Policy Counsel, Google
Jay Monahan, General Counsel, Vuze, Inc.
Parul Desai (Moderator)

They had me down as “Musician” which is pretty funny for anyone who ever heard me sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Another panel will discuss the 700 MHz auction after lunch:

12:30 PM Panel 2: Spectrum Policy After the 700 MHz Auction
The FCC’s recently concluded 700 MHz auction has been praised, criticized, and puzzled over. Auction veterans will discuss what happened, why it happened, and what will happen next.

Panelists:
Coleman Bazelon, Principal, The Brattle Group
Gregory Rose, Economist, Gregory Rose & Associates
Carolyn Brandon, CTIA
Marc Berejka, Senior Director of Public Policy, Microsoft Corporation
Joanne Hovis, President, Columbia Telecommunications Corp.
Harold Feld (Moderator)

UPDATE: the Times BITS Blog has totally re-written its story, removing most of the incendiary language, so this post is now officially academic. A similar piece in The Register has also been re-written. It would be a lot easier for everyone if our blogger/journalists would get things right the first time, but better late than not even.

Comcast’s “protocol agnostic” network management system has been generally praised by all parties in the network neutrality debate as a sane and sensible approach to congestion management. As the system enters trials today in two locations, the praise has been tempered by some irrational criticism. Saul Hansell, a New York Times blogger, sees the new system as something quite nefarious, a “blacklist:”

It will test new devices that will keep track of Comcast users and assemble a blacklist of heavy users. Those on the blacklist will find that all of their online activities may slow down at peak times: from downloading movies to checking e-mail.

This account is extremely bizarre, but not unprecedented. Saul Hansell, meet your progenitor.

Come on down to Innovation ’08 at eBay’s place in San Jose for this outstanding panel on June 12th:

What Does Net Neutrality Mean Now?

Comcast’s interruption of P2P transmissions has generated debate about the need and wisdom of deploying advanced net management technologies. Can and will the private sector address this problem without government mandates? Historically, the debate about Net Neutrality has focused on who can access information distribution channels, and under what circumstances. Comcast’s recent interruption brings up new questions, explored here by some of the leading experts in the field.

Also on my panel are George Ou and Ronald B. Yokubaitis, CEO of Data Foundry. The ever-shifting sands of public policy will be prominently on display.

I finally got a result from the Glasnost server after several unsuccessful attempts, but it’s unfortunately not correct:

Is BitTorrent traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were
interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets.
It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.

The BitTorrent download worked.
Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads.
In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 2079 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved
maximal 2147 Kbps. You can find details here.

Is BitTorrent traffic on a non-standard BitTorrent port (4711) throttled?

2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were
interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets.
It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.

The BitTorrent download worked.
Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads.
In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 2135 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved
maximal 2126 Kbps. You can find details here.

Immediately before and after this test I seeded a Torrent successfully, at a rate in the range of 30-40 K Bytes/sec. So I know seeding is possible on my connection, but Glasnost claims it isn’t. This is not a cool tool.

Still no answers to my questions, despite a promise to have some by Friday.

Here’s an example of the kind of blatant falsehoods that Free Press and their ilk have been circulating about Internet regulation, from the Future of Music Coalition Blog:

Recently, Comcast blocked access to the legal, licensed audiovisual delivery service called Vuze — which competes with the company’s own AV offerings — simply because Vuze utilizes peer-to-peer technology to distribute its licensed content.

Excuse me, but no such thing happened. Vuze works fine on the Comcast network and always has. Vuze petitioned the FCC for a rule that would define network management in some specific terms, and did not themselves allege any blocking.

Continue reading “Future of Music Coalition Strays into Fantasyland”

See George Ou for some more clarification on the ridiculous interpretations of the Glasnost data:

The whole Comcast issue is being kicked around in the press in recent days because the Max Planck Institute released a study showing the rates of TCP resets happening throughout the world. But this whole issue is being mischaracterized as the “blocking” of BitTorrent and it’s being portrayed as a free speech issue when it is nothing of a sort.

I still haven’t got answers to my questions to the Glasnost people. I suspect they’re embarrassed to have published such a poor analysis.

Here is my list of questions that haven’t been answered (the first three have been answered):

4. Your findings are wildly different from those publicized by Vuze, Inc., on the extent of TCP RSTs on various ISPs. Vuze, which uses a different survey methodology, found them across a much larger swath. How do you explain the discrepancy in RST detection, and whose methodology is more exhaustive?

5. Your survey method relies on a self-selected pool of participants. What steps did you make to seek testers by means of advertising your intent to conduct a study?

6. Your study appears to measure TCP RSTs and not congestion or throughput. Why the omission of any attempt to characterize load?

7. Given that the target of ISP traffic shaping is unattended and dedicated P2P seeders, are you justified in assuming that the bandwidth they consume is sensitive to time of day?

8. Are you hoping to exercise influence over US policy makers on the network neutrality question?

9. What means of traffic shaping, if any, do you believe to be legitmate?

10. What means do you propose for dealing with the fundamental problem of the Internet’s lack of mechanisms to enforce per-user fairness?

11. Can you please point me to the lines of code where you detect TCP RSTs?

These are fairly easy questions, I would think. I suspect the key issue is going to be how much upstream traffic on cable networks is generated by P2P at all hours of the day. The Glasnost folks make the assumption that upstream and downstream traffic are related, such that the periods of high interactive use would be the only times that significant upstream traffic can be expected on the network. But P2P seeding doesn’t necessarily follow this pattern, for a couple of reasons:

1. P2P seeding is an unattended service that runs 24×7.
2. It’s always peak download time somewhere in the world, so P2P seeders on high speed links are always popular, no matter what time zone they’re in.

It wouldn’t surprise me if as much as 98% of upstream residential traffic is P2P; it’s certainly over 90%.