Richard Bennett

Ken Camp is an interesting guy. He recognizes that net neutrality is a “fabricated issue” but he still wants to advise “netheads” to make more influential contributions to the political process:

That isn’t the only place the Bellheads win. Look to political process. I’ve oveen wondered about our own ranks. Jeff Pulver. David Isenberg. Tom Evslin. Several others. Leading voices fighting the battle from without rather than stepping into the political fray of politics to redirect the system from within. If we’re going to win some measure of control away from the Bellheads, there is only one way. The political power base needs to shift. Netheads have to become the influeinfluencerslicy, something we are clearly not today.

Why help them?

Allow me to digress. I don’t like the distinction between Bellheads and Netheads. I’ve worked with people from the Bell companies who’ve made heavy contributions to the networking standards and protocols that we all use today in and around the Internet. One example is the twisted-pair Ethernet standards, which started with something called StarLAN that initially came from AT&T IS. The bellheads understand networking – how to move data through the tubes efficiently – much better than the netheads, who are mainly concerned with what to put in and what to take out.

The people he mentions – Jeff Pulver, David Isenberg, Tom Evslin – are actually quite naive about the operational dynamics of packet processing, forwarding, queue management, error recovery, routing table management, and the other crucial aspects of network operations. They’re marketing people, not engineers.

They approach politics in the same way they approach network engineering, by formulating fanciful simplifications and then trying to influence the process as they would like it to be rather than as it is.

And that’s fortunate for all of us, because the worst nightmare for users of the Internet would be to subject it to the whims of philistine, dilettante regulators.

Network engineering is a tough subject that requires a great deal of study to crack. Political lobbying isn’t nearly as hard, but it takes a lot of time to perfect, as politics is largely based on trust. Developing relationships takes a long time and a long attention span, and that’s a good thing as it weeds out most of the people who shouldn’t be involved in it. I learned that the hard way, by lobbying my state legislature a weekly basis for three years while holding a full-time job. with a major supplier of networking equipment.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so:

With almost 1 million VoIP connections tested through its Web site, Brix said that about 20 percent of all calls had unacceptable quality. This is up from about 15 percent of calls made about a year ago.

Let me make this as simple as possible: there are 1 billion people on the Internet today, and they each want more bandwidth. Unless bandwidth is continually added to the Internet, it slows down. VoIP is the first casualty of bandwidth congestion.

Net neutrality only makes this trend worse.

Just FYI, here’s a bit of optical fiber cable for telecom applications like, you know, the Internet. It’s a tube:

Loose Tube Optical Fiber Cable

WLC’s loose tube cable consists of acrylate coated fibers placed loosely in a gel-filled thermoplastic tube 12 fibers are respectively colored. Required number of loose tube and fibers are stranded around a metallic center member, followed by water blocking filling and aramid yarn for flame-retardant cable only.) Then a black polyethylene inner sheath is applied. A water blocking tape shell is applied over the polyethylene inner sheath. The outer jacket is LAP or LSP, or FR-LAP. The application is good at urban junction & long-haul communication. Please call for further details.

Now you know.

T.J. Rodgers is probably the smartest CEO in Silicon Valley. So what does he think about net neutrality?

Rodgers: This is where basically the Net is not allowed to discriminate? I think it’s an obscenity. I think people that have paid for the wires and cables should able to charge whatever they want for their product. And for other people to come in and force companies to run their businesses and set their prices is absurd. If some of those companies came into being by virtue of a government monopoly–the old AT&T comes to mind–then fine. But to go and tell companies what they can and cannot charge money for–that’s un-American. It’s against freedom. It’s just bad news.

Like I said, he’s a smart guy.

Prominent network engineers Jon Stewart and Alyssa Milano have bashed Sen. Ted Stevens for his description of the Internet, but it was actually pretty accurate. See Prof. Ed Felton’s explanation:

I’ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But’s let’s give the guy a break. He was speaking off the cuff in a meeting, and he sounds a bit agitated. Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking in an unscripted setting? For most people, it’s pretty depressing. We misspeak, drop words, repeat phrases, and mangle sentences all the time. Normally, listeners’ brains edit out the errors.

In this light, some of the ridicule of Stevens seems a bit unfair. He said the Internet is made up of “tubes”. Taken literally, that’s crazy. But experts talk about “pipes” all the time. Is the gap between “tubes” and “pipes” really so large? And when Stevens says that his staff sent him “an Internet” and it took several days to arrive, it sounds to me like he meant to say “an email” and just misspoke.

So let’s take Stevens seriously, and consider the possibility that somewhere in his head, or in the head of a staffer telling him what to say, there was a coherent argument that was supposed to come out of Stevens’ mouth but was garbled into what we heard. Let’s try to reconstruct that argument and see if it makes any sense.

Not that we want to interfere with anybodys good time, mind you, but Stevens understands computers and the Internet better than say, Jon Stewart. And Stewart’s slam pretty well hits the Neuts in the face: if you believe Stevens is a clueless moron, why do you insist that he impose new and unprecedented regulations on the Internet for you?

Here they go again. The Neutralists are claiming that Comcast censored an ABC news segment on the sleeping Comcast technician, so we need heavy regulations for the Internet.

But like the last five such claims they’ve made, this one is also nothing but hot air:

UPDATE: ABC said they confim it was an editing error on their part. If so, the gaffe should be seen at any of their ABC News Now vendors, which include which include AOL, Bellsouth, SBC/Yahoo and Verizon. We’re still working on scanning and uploading the AOL manual, so if any readers want to go and try and corroborate with snagged video clips and send them to us, that would be awesome.

UPDATE: Comcast says the feed has been repaired and can be seen on their site here (requires subscription). They also say the problem was replicated for all their outlets, not just Comcast. Without any other verification available at this time, we’ll have to take their word for it. No complaints were heard from users of the four other services.

The Consumerist had the integrity to run a correction, albeit it really lame one. How many neut blogs will go even that far? Not Save the Internet, where the original false story is still the most recent blog, and a nice lead to similarly paranoid drooling about MySpace and Craig’s Listhas finally been deleted.

Incidentally, Precursor has a nice little Flash animation that goes after the Freudian slip committed by the owners of “It’s Our Net, Dammit”. After listening to Dave Farber “debate” Vint Cerf, I can see the Royal Sense of Entitlement the content barons have. Cerf simply recited sound bites for an hour, and nothing he said lead any credence to the claim that he has a technical background. You can read the same sound bites on Save the Internet, with pictures.

UPDATE: Save the Internet deleted my trackback from their uncorreced story.

That’s what censorship looks like.

UPDATE: Kudos to Save the Internet for deleting the phony story. Maybe there’s hope for them yet.

Orlowski’s review of the Grand Old Geezer smackdown is spot-on:

Comment The rolling net “neutrality” debate brought two of the internet’s most distinguished elder statesmen together in mortal combat this week. The two gentlemen, Vint Cerf and Dave Farber, said they agreed on most things. But where they didn’t, they tried to pull the chair away just as their opponent tried to sit down.

Farber had the factrs on his side, but he’s not nearly as smooth as the well-trained Cerf so it wasn’t apparent.

Debating tip for Farber: Don’t make your strongest points as “asides”, develop them full on.

Comment for Cerf: You’re the intellectual equivalent of polyester, dude. Thanks.

eWeek covers the debate between Dave Farber and one of his former students:

Professor Farber, on the other hand, said that he worried about too much Congressional meddling, if only because it might prevent the next major innovations from coming to the Internet.

He noted that he agreed with Cerf that there are plenty of mechanisms in place now to protect against abuse by broadband providers.

He did note, however that he doesn’t believe that the FCC has an unblemished record in such protection. He also noted that the FCC can have its decisions tied up in courts for a very long time, delaying enforcement.

But he also noted that the FCC can act quickly, such as when it acted to require phone companies that provided Internet service to also allow VOIP (voice over IP) calls.

What Farber is most worried about, he said, is poorly drafted legislation that would leave regulation of the Internet open to broad interpretations that could lead to unintended restrictions on the use of the Internet .

He said that regulators, in an attempt to somehow make the Internet more fair, could actually end up restricting access. “The net work never has been a fair place,” he said.

(I’ve always spelled it “network”, but that’s just me apparently.)

I’d like to hear a podcast.

Networks need Quality of Service mechanisms if they are required to carry low-jitter traffic such as voice or video-conferencing alongside a large volume of other traffic, such as large pre-recorded HDTV files. It doesn’t matter how much bandwidth the network has at maximum. File transfers on packet networks are designed to use all available bandwidth, so you’re always going to have situations where bursts of file data cause jitter to voice.

This is an inconvenient truth for the “fat pipe, always free” folks, so the generally try and define it out of existence. Here’s a good example from the U of Oregon’s head network admin, Dr. Joe St. Sauver:

Artificial/Unrealistic Demands

• At the same time I oppose metering, you should also know that I oppose artificial/unrealistic “tests” or “challenges” of converged networks.

• For example, a classic example of an unrealistic network demand for a converged network is uncompressed high definition video over IP – that can run 1.2-1.5 gigabit per second. At that rate, dedicated video networks make sense.

• There’s no problem handling MPEG1 video (at 1.5Mbps) however, or even reasonable amounts of MPEG2 video at 1.5 to 20Mbps (on a fast ethernet connection going into a gig core).

Are you getting that? Dr. Joe’s non-priority scheme only works if each users has: A) 100 Mbps straight to a 1 gig “core” and he never uses it to transfer large HDTV files, compressed or otherwise.

Gee, that’s nice. But here on Planet Earth, we’re trying to figure out how to move multiple HDTV streams over connections much less broad than that, because, you know, bandwidth isn’t free off the University of Oregon’s campus.

And even in this scenario, what happens if 10 people are using their 100 Mbps Ethernet connections to the Gig core to transfer big video files? The core is maxed out. And then somebody comes along and tries to use VoIP while all this traffic is flowing. Boom.

That’s what QoS is for. No matter how fast a link is, it can always be overloaded because a billion people use the Internet, and not always at the ideal time.

Bummer.

H/T Frank Paynter.

There’s an interesting interview up at The Register:

So on January 1, 1983 when TCP/IP was deployed, it all worked fine. Primarily the net was used for email. Then there were more FTP sessions, and it began to melt down.

So people were writing a lot of papers in mid-1984 about what was then called “congestion collapse” Some of the design features of TCP windowing actually made congestion worse; so protocol engineers went to work. They made enhancements to TCP such as Exponential Backoff – another thing stolen directly from old Ethernet and Slow Start – where the initial window size is small. They re-engineered TCP to solve IP’s congestion problem.

Today, the internet is only stable to the extent people are using TCP over it. People also tend to miss that you can defeat TCP’s attempt to limit traffic over something less than congestion of the backbone if you simply have multiple instances of TCP.

Some guy with strong opinions.