Does The Future Hold Infinite Bandwidth?Or a litany of roadblocks, restrictions and fees? 08:59AM Tuesday Jun 23 2009 by Karl Bodetags: competition · business · bandwidth · capsTechdirt directs our attention to one consultant's exploration of "infinite bandwidth," a concept that sounds good during business meetings but has some very obvious obstacles -- some of which are man made. As bandwidth gets cheaper and cheaper to deliver, and broadband penetrates every business practice from wired coke machines to the health care industry -- there's a certainly a world of opportunities awaiting innovative companies. We can already hear most ISP insiders reminding Stalk they "ain't goin' to use their pipes for free," though Techdirt's Mike Masnick makes the point that opening the flood gates and embracing the future makes better sense: Bandwidth is going to increase. Those who attempt to cap it or limit it are only going to make their own pipes significantly less valuable. However, those who recognize how empowering more bandwidth can be, and how approaching "infinite bandwidth" opens up the possibility for new services and apps that we can't even fathom today, will start to realize that providing ever more bandwidth increases value and clamping down on bandwidth kills value. We've seen how Verizon's decision to buck impatient investors and throw $23 billion into fiber to the home paid dividends through happy customers. The carrier doesn't cap or meter, offers the most bandwidth of nearly any carrier (particularly upstream) and is starting to reap the benefit in a market full of cable operators chomping at the bit to embrace metered billing. The very investors who thought Verizon's original idea was suicide are now back in line supporting the carrier. Go figure. On the other hand, while the cost of bandwidth delivery drops, the lack of competition has many other ISPs pushing bogus concepts like the exaflood, with the goal of hoisting artificial scarcity upon the market. In part, it's because monopoly and duopoly carriers have one foot in the delivery of content. As with Internet video, they fear that the Internet's innovators will create business models that erode their existing revenues (like cable TV), so to them -- squeezing the pipe and charging by the bit seems like a logical way to protect their futures. The "infinite bandwidth" argument isn't entirely unlike those who believed (including News Corp's Rupert Murdoch) that the price of voice services would ultimately declining to zero, as software applications made voice communications simply another form of data. But as we've seen with voice, carriers have found ways to use their market power to keep these threats at bay (AT&T's crippling of Skype 3G functionality is just one example).
Related:- Customer Battles Time Warner Overages
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- HughesNet Promises New Bird In 2012
- Grandmas Tell AT&T: We Don't Want Metered Billing Either
- Cogeco Metered Billing Goes Live, Confuses Customers
- Cogeco Unveils 50Mbps Tier
- What Network Neutrality Is REALLY About
- Wall Street Journal Tries, Fails To Cover Metered Billing Debate
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Neyland
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USA | Pipes? Sometimes you just can't get the genie back in the bottle.... | |
|  | yt
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| Re: Pipes? While there are many emotions, self serving positions and dooms day predictions in news similar to this, I don't often read many facts as the jury is still out on the future. That said I highly recommend people read Justin's (owner of dslreports.com) editorial on this topic. It actually makes sense and is pretty unbias (vs purely position or "consumer focused")
»Editorial: Caps are welcome
quote:
Clean fast bandwidth is not an inexhaustible resource. I want my ISP to deliver maximum speed without any perceptible congestion, and with minimal latency. I want them to invest heavily in their infrastructure to ensure they can meet the speed and latency targets morning noon and night. When an ISP engineer says that metering and caps are necessary for quality service, I believe them. Any customer of a data center understands the equation: they understand that BOTH speed and monthly usage are key factors in pricing. US ISPs, due to inheriting dial-up pricing plans (effectively included caps due to very low speeds) have been missing one pricing factor, to the detriment of the majority of users and the benefit to a minority.
The main issue is - historically, as speeds increased, the cost to serve the average customer has not (today) as their usage habbits don't substantially change. There is however a class of user that consumes all bandwidth that is given to them which in turn causes 1 of 2 things
•All the rest of us must share the cost of that group of users (small % of users consuming most of the bandwidth. It is estimated that those going over 250G are something like 0.1% of the user base) - I can dig up the data on this, but sources have been quoted before)
•Those few users should pay their own costs by moving to a business tier or some other method (vs the rest of us funding their traffic)
There is also a future prediction of more and more video services running over broadband vs. traditional means. This is good, but understand that if usage patterns change and double, tripple, +++ then there is an added cost to that as well as a lost revenue from traditional TV. You can say "greedy" all you want, but think through both sides of the issue.
Think through this from all angles. | |
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4 edits | Re: Pipes? It actually makes sense and is pretty unbias (vs purely position or "consumer focused") Yes, yes, one man's bias is another man's unblemished truth, depending on the degree it adheres to one's own belief.
I'd recommend readers read the responses to Justin's editorial as well. While I respect his positions, I don't believe his post explored the entirety of developments on the metered billing front, or acknowledged the use of the "exaflood" as a lobbying and policy weapon to keep prices high by over-inflating the threat of looming capacity requirements and the ability to adapt to them.
Secondly, Many people here aren't against caps, they're against unreasonable caps or steep overages that don't even remotely begin to accurately reflect costs. In Time Warner Cable's particular effort, the overages of up to 2,000% with caps as low as 5GB. Even accounting for delivery and support that was simply insane.
Network growth is manageable and the costs to supply bandwidth are dropping -- that does raise a lot of questions of what happens to a carrier down the line as bandwidth provisional costs continue to drop and content companies do a better job at innovation on the applications/services front.
I do believe carriers will do anything to avoid being unlimited dumb-pipe providers. That includes the the wholesale fabrication of capacity crisis and any number of anti-competitive tactics. That said, I don't exclude the possibility of innovative new pricing models that take consumption or even application use into consideration -- I just haven't seen any that actually deliver better value to the consumer over what they're getting now. | |
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2 edits | Re: Pipes? Your right Karl, his editorial also seemed to be wrong on several fronts. The carriers appearance of collusion on pricing models and now caps have raised flags everywhere. Proper network management can be implemented for capacity solutions. The geographical impediments seem to be the excuse to leave America in this stagnant growth period in regards to our "pipes".
And I don't buy the argument that capping everyone saves bandwidth. Your low usage customers still outweigh the "abusers" by far, so the mean usage should never hit the point where a network can't handle it. It's like with cable HSI. From 9:00am to 9:00pm when everyones on the shared node, the network handles the capacity, including most of these low usage customers. Are you going to dictate when people use their connection so the average includes the overnight hours?
Lastly, if these carriers didn't have the capacity, why did you sell to so many customers? weren't these carriers paying attention to growth forecasts?
Edit*for errors
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| Re: Pipes? If 0.1% of the customers are causing the problem (their own numbers), you put them on business tiers or implement a high cap that catches them in a net. You don't implement an entirely new pricing model that will impact a significant majority of your customers down the road. Particularly in a market that you've bred to be reliant on the simplicity of flat-rate pricing.
Time Warner Cable hadn't even implemented DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades before deciding they needed 5GB caps and $5/GB overages.
It's about Internet video and preventing "devolution" into a dumb pipe. While capacity issues are real, they're manageable. Capacity is used as a red herring to justify a move that's about protecting content revenues and maintaining market power...I don't think many network engineers see this bigger picture outside the NOC.... | |
| | | | | | yt
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| Re: Pipes? said by Karl Bode  :If 0.1% of the customers are causing the problem (their own numbers), you put them on business tiers or implement a high cap that catches them in a net. You don't implement an entirely new pricing model that will impact a significant majority of your customers down the road. Particularly in a market that you've bred to be reliant on the simplicity of flat-rate pricing. QFT. Bandwidth is not unlimited and major growth is not free | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | sonicmerlin
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| I wholeheartedly disagree with the implementation of caps. Considering caps are nonexistent in other countries with much faster speeds and much more competition, I believe caps are essence meaningless anti-competitive measures.
The whole point of "overselling" is that some users will use their connections heavily, while some will use them lightly. Punishing the heavy users who actually use their connections is disingenuous.
Furthermore, caps DO NOT manage network congestion. Putting a cap in to "net" the heavy users does nothing to prevent congestion during peak usage hours, when everyone including Grandma comes online to watch Youtube videos.
ISPs have never, ever revealed internal data to support the position that they're starved for bandwidth. Considering their massive profits and downward trend in infrastructure invesetment, it's hard to believe that they seriously need help 'managing bandwidth'.
Eric Massa's proposed bill would force ISPs to reveal their internal statistics to the FTC to justify their implementation of (ANY) caps and tiers. That's why they're so scared of the bill. They *can't* justify caps (even 250 GB ones), since they make so many billions in profits.
Bandwidth may not be unlimited, but major growth is a natural and cheap result of technological advancement. I believe it was only recently an article was posted on BBR about how backbone providers were awash with excess bandwidth, and content providers, consumers, and backbone providers were all putting the pressure on last mile providers to upgrade their infrastructure. It was these last mile providers who were lagging behind the rest of the world.
It's time to stop sympathizing for these vastly wealthy corporations. | |
| | | | | | | | patcat88
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| Re: Pipes? said by sonicmerlin :I wholeheartedly disagree with the implementation of caps. Considering caps are nonexistent in other countries with much faster speeds and much more competition, I believe caps are essence meaningless anti-competitive measures. How about these caps on cable in Belgium?
»telenet.be/219/0/1/nl/thuis/internet.html
Makes TW's 5GB look huge. | |
| | | | | | | | | sonicmerlin
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Cleveland, OH | Re: Pipes? Handpicking the offerings of one ISP in one country is hardly a meaningful rebuttal. | |
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funchords
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| The Unlimited Premium I can demonstrate this concept, both ways, using Verizon.
FIOS - people will pay more for it, even though the relative speeds are nearly equal, that it's unlimited and unencumbered means its truly superior. Cable might have the best ads, but techies recommend FIOS to their friends.
DSL - Even though cable is fast for surfing (and that's truly good enough for some people), others should and will choose DSL over faster cable because it's cheaper and more capability. The fact is, you can transfer twice as much on a 1.5 Mbps DSL account than you can on any of the the largest cable provider's tiers.
Now if we could get Verizon to quit blocking port 80 and quit errorvertising, I might be a bigger fan...
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| Re: The Unlimited Premium said by funchords : Now if we could get Verizon to quit blocking port 80 and quit errorvertising, I might be a bigger fan... Verizon no longer blocks outbound port 80 via DSL | |
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| Re: The Unlimited Premium said by Network Guy :said by funchords : Now if we could get Verizon to quit blocking port 80 and quit errorvertising, I might be a bigger fan... Verizon no longer blocks outbound port 80 via DSL They never did or you would not have been able to use a Web BROWSER. It is INCOMING Port 80 that might have been blocked to prevent the customer from running a Web SERVER. | |
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| Re: The Unlimited Premium Uh.. no
An INCOMING response is what its forwarded to your web browser after sending your OUTBOUND request. An INCOMING request to a web server results in an OUTBOUND response to the remote client.
Therefore, OUTBOUND port 80 would need to be unblocked. | |
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RARPSL
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| Re: The Unlimited Premium said by Network Guy :Uh.. no An INCOMING response is what its forwarded to your web browser after sending your OUTBOUND request. An INCOMING request to a web server results in an OUTBOUND response to the remote client. Therefore, OUTBOUND port 80 would need to be unblocked. We may be saying the same thing. If I am running a Web Browser, I must be able to establish a PORT80 connection with the Web Server (my outgoing port on that connection is NOT Port80 but somewhere in the 49xxx range. The Web Server then uses the 49xxx port to respond to me. If my ISP does not allow OUTGOING Port80 connections, I can not connect to any Web Server that listens on Port80. | |
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| Re: The Unlimited Premium I think what people were trying to say is that normally-configured web servers work from within Verizon's residential networks, now.
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funchords
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Washington, DC | Re: The Unlimited Premium Whoa! Cool! Thanks for the correction! | |
| | sonicmerlin
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| There have many several articles recently detailing statistics which demonstrate low bandwidth DSL providers have been hemorrhaging customers to cable. People in the US have consistently demonstrated they want higher speeds, and are willing (especially in the absence of competition) to pay premiums for those speeds.
This is why Verizon and AT&T decided to implement FTTH and FTTN, respectively. | |
| decifal
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| open it up! I've been reading articles on how companys wish to cap broadband and bill us by the byte... I figured that by the time they buildout to my house the internet will be soo useless that I won't even be interested no more... But at least outta the 100's pro metered broadband, we have one against it! 
Greed is what kills innovation | |
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|  Does The Future Hold Infinite Bandwidth? - NO
ISPs pushing bogus concepts like the exaflood, with the goal of hoisting artificial scarcity upon the market. Seems there ARE limits to ever increasing bandwidth:
»tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/2009···edby2014
That has reduced the financial incentive for carriers to invest in new cables, but they may have to do so by 2014, said Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt.
"The market prices for capacity on the trans-Atlantic routes today don't support the business case for building a new cable system," Kreifeldt said. The coming shift in the industry from oversupply to scarcity is likely to rebalance the economics of cables, raising the prices that service providers pay for capacity for the first time in years, he said.
However, demand is likely to rise by 33 percent per year between 2008 and 2015, Telegeography predicts. That will eat away the over-capacity by 2014, the company said. Before that happens, someone will have to lay new cable or risk not being able to accommodate more traffic.
The problem is that the price of trans-Atlantic bandwidth today only covers the incremental cost of the optical gear on either end of the cable to provision the circuit, according to Telegeography. It doesn't cover the cost of actually laying the fiber, because no one has had to do that for so long.
"You're not going to be swapping that stuff out," Kreifeldt said. Submarine gear that was designed to handle 2.5G bits per second per wavelength has been upgraded for 10G bps links, but it won't be able to support the coming 100G bps technology, he said. Even the 40G bps technology being used today on land is unproven on submarine cables.
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| Re: Does The Future Hold Infinite Bandwidth? - NO said by GOLFnSUN :Seems there ARE limits to ever increasing bandwidth: » tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/2009···edby2014That has reduced the financial incentive for carriers to invest in new cables, but they may have to do so by 2014, said Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt.... There is so much wrong with that article, it's hard to know where to start. However, even the article agrees that as the pipe fills, it will be filled with carriage that costs more given less supply. This will spur some kind of change -- another cable or technology.
However, it may ignore the fact that traffic has been migrating to avoid the US links and traffic has been migrating toward the edges. I do appreciate that it says demand is likely to rise by 33 percent per year until 2015, which tends to both exclude any possibility of an exaflood yet also tends to make me believe that they think that video and peer-to-peer will continue to ride across the net, whilst efforts are strong to move that stuff closer to the edges.
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| | | sonicmerlin
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1 edit | Re: Does The Future Hold Infinite Bandwidth? - NOA similar article was posted on giagom. A reader's response, however:
"I think there is missing information here:
For a fact we know that some of the existing conduit bundles are being raised and upgraded with new repeaters for upgraded optical “magic stuff”, the carrier line cards are evolving, and the monomode fiber that is in place has lots of room to grow.
I think this is a synthetic story. There is a technical, network upgrade challenge here, not a crisis in the making."
Another article from ovum.com: »www.ovum.com/news/euronews.asp?id=7969
To quote:
"There is a growing tension between broadband providers and backbone providers because of the rapid growth of Internet traffic. While broadband providers want to dampen this growth, backbone providers want to encourage it, and this is already causing conflict between the two groups. That conflict is only likely to be resolved when broadband providers both invest sufficiently to overcome bottlenecks and introduce tiered charging to pay for it."
In other words, backbone providers have *plenty* of bandwidth. In fact, there was a similar article on ars recently detailing how the year over year end growth over the backbone has DECREASED from the late 90s to early 2000s, and stabilized at an extremely manageable rates:
"In 1995 and 1996, there were periods in which Internet traffic could double in as little as a hundred days, a rate of growth that looked almost terrifying. But it wasn't long before it began to slacken. By the late 1990s, traffic was doubling each year; that is, it was growing at 100 percent a year. But from 2002-2007, the growth rate has dropped, and it now hovers at 50 to 60 percent a year." | |
| yt
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| Voice vs Data said by Karl Bode :The "infinite bandwidth" argument isn't entirely unlike those who believed (including News Corp's Rupert Murdoch) that the price of voice services would ultimately declining to zero, as software applications made voice communications simply another form of data. Comparing voice costs with data is good fodder, but it is illogical. Voice is very different than data as usage does not increase. We don't use our phone more each year (with texting and email it is actually less) and the bandwidth / call is shrinking vs growing. Technology has made voice cheaper, but DWDM was the last real technology breakthrough in network costs and I haven't see anything that big in a while. | |
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1 edit | Re: Voice vs Data I think you miss the point. The point isn't to suggest data/voice pricing and delivery is similar, the point is to suggest that market power can be used to prevent erosion of traditional revenues by using methods to curtail the threat....
On the wireless voice front, control over what applications run on the handset allows carriers to prevent Skype from eroding voice revenues (AT&T blocking 3G functionality).
On the data front, high overages can be used to protect TV revenues and manage content competition (Time Warner Cable protecting TV revenues by imposing 5GB caps and $2 per GB overages).
In both cases capacity scarcity is used to justify the behavior, but the reality is there's content/services competitive action at play too, though I know people in the industry don't like to admit that the sector that employs them is anything less than honorable... | |
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4 edits | Re: Voice vs Data Even if they didn't restrict Skype, you've got free applications like Fring that only a few people are able to make work successfully. Wireless data has improved significantly in the last decade, and yet high latency and jitter is still too variable in EVDO / GPRS / EDGE / whatever to work with most of the codecs that these clients use by default. Right now the biggest thing holding back the adoption of the technology is the functionality of the technology itself. Early tests with Skype indicated it worked just fine over HSDPA. I've seen no indication that the technology isn't there, but I've seen plenty of evidence of carriers doing their best to keep mobile voice applications from making voice minutes less relevant by restricting consumer access to such applications on handsets.Your argument works a lot better by taking the absolutely lowest tier offered to make your case. 100GB is more reasonable, but the intent is the same, and the overage costs ($1.50 to $2 on TOP of a fairly large monthly fee still aren't reasonable based on carrier costs). Metering bandwidth in turn meters content consumption, preventing life down the road as an unlimited dumb pipe where other companies innovate content and services.I'm sure at the corporate level there is a little bit of concern about the loss of some video business, but it's about as rational as an elephant being afraid of a mouse. Again, afraid I disagree when looking at a 20 year window. Time Warner Cable's efforts clearly illustrate they're worried. And while Internet video is only just nipping at the heels of TV, things will change over the next decade. No, TV will remain dominant for many years because of certain inherent advantages (live events), but the fear of lost TV revenue is valid. Especially as speeds increase and home media distribution solutions get simpler/cheaper.
TV viewership still outweighs the entire usage population of the Internet by about 100 million, which will change. Revenue from Web-to-TV streaming services will grow to $2.9 billion by 2013. These execs are crunching the numbers of future TV defections and the metered billing push is driven by that. To deny this motivation denies some very obvious realities IMO... | |
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| Re: Voice vs Data said by Karl Bode :Early tests with Skype indicated it worked just fine over HSDPA. I've seen no indication that the technology isn't there, but I've seen plenty of evidence of carriers doing their best to keep mobile voice applications from making voice minutes less relevant by restricting consumer access to such applications on handsets. Ok, so you've never tried it yourself.
Yeah, you can get it to work, but the quality ends to being crap if you actually want to use your mobile phone like a mobile phone. Standard cell phone voice works incredibly well between different tower handoffs because, shockingly, the network was designed for this purpose. When you take applications developed primarily for LAN-based network voice with predictable jitter and latency and port them to the highly volatile mobile data networks, it tends to work out poorly.
said by Karl Bode :Your argument works a lot better by taking the absolutely lowest tier offered to make your case. 100GB is more reasonable, but the intent is the same, and the overage costs ($1.50 to $2 on TOP of a fairly large monthly fee still aren't reasonable based on carrier costs). Metering bandwidth in turn meters content consumption, preventing life down the road as an unlimited dumb pipe where other companies innovate content and services. That's a nice line of BS, but reality doesn't line up. We pay per kilowatt hour of energy consumed, that hasn't stopped us from a massive growth in consumer electronics in homes resulting in higher power utility bills than at any other point in history. If it does something useful, the technology will succeed.
The converse of that is if you give something away for free, people will take it no matter how crappy and worthless it is. It's just the psychology of free.
said by Karl Bode :I'm sure at the corporate level there is a little bit of concern about the loss of some video business, but it's about as rational as an elephant being afraid of a mouse. Again, afraid I disagree when looking at a 20 year window. Time Warner Cable's efforts clearly illustrate they're worried. And while Internet video is only just nipping at the heels of TV, things will change over the next decade. No, TV will remain dominant for many years because of certain inherent advantages (live events), but the fear of lost TV revenue is valid. Especially as speeds increase and home media distribution solutions get simpler/cheaper. TV viewership still outweighs the entire usage population of the Internet by about 100 million, which will change. Revenue from Web-to-TV streaming services will grow to $2.9 billion by 2013. These execs are crunching the numbers of future TV defections and the metered billing push is driven by that. To deny this motivation denies some very obvious realities IMO... That's the joke of this whole scenario -- the infrastructure costs to grow Web-to-TV feeds to that level are insane.
Just look at Youtube and the sheer amount of infrastructure it takes for them to distribute 0-10minute video clips in "watchable" quality to 80 million people worldwide.
I think I'm starting to know what Greenspan felt like when he was talking about the dot com boom before the bubble finally burst. The Internet is a communication tool, not a business model. The problem of scalability are so hopelessly obvious that it amazes me that more people don't see it. The distribution model turns upside down in relation to costs compared to existing video broadcast methods. IP Video definitely has a play in the PPV / video rental / VoD space, which is an important and lucrative minority share in current video consumption.
To say that IP Video is going to take over completely is like saying we're all going to convert to cars running on BioDiesel made by refining cooking oil from fast food restaurants while remaining completely oblivious to the fact that there's not enough fast food discard oil to even power a single community. | |
| | | | | | yt
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| Re: Voice vs Data said by espaeth :The Internet is a communication tool, not a business model. The problem of scalability are so hopelessly obvious that it amazes me that more people don't see it. Two reasons many are blind to the business and technical issues:
• They have never built a large network and just don't understand what scaling takes. "Just upgrade your network (JUYN)" not realizing that they are constantly being upgraded to keep up with demand. The JUYN crowd is not made up of network engineers.
• They don't want to acknowledge any of the business issues as it defeats some of the arguments (not all). It is easier to put the burden of predicting the future on others. "Prove to me" something that no matter how much data is provided it will never be enough.
Calling people greedy is easier... Problem is, greed is a two way street. | |
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| Re: Voice vs Data They have never built a large network and just don't understand what scaling takes. "Just upgrade your network (JUYN)" not realizing that they are constantly being upgraded to keep up with demand. The JUYN crowd is not made up of network engineers. That's an easy way to invalidate an entire world of criticism you don't like. Must come in handy.
Andrew Odlyzko at the University of Minnesota, who's specialty is studying networks and capacity also says capacity growth is completely manageable with just modest capacity upgrades. Obviously people understand upgrades are a continual project. But Time Warner Cable proposed 5GB caps with $2 per gigabyte overages before announcing a single live DOCSIS 3.0 market.They don't want to acknowledge any of the business issues as it defeats some of the arguments (not all). It is easier to put the burden of predicting the future on others. "Prove to me" something that no matter how much data is provided it will never be enough. Well, when your (judging from your posts you work for a carrier) lobbyists keep telling the public Internet brown outs are coming unless the carrier gets "X" (X= deregulation, removed price controls, subsidies, tax cuts), then yeah, the burden of proof for unsustainable growth is on you. Facts works like that. | |
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2 edits | Re: Voice vs Data said by Karl Bode :That's an easy way to invalidate an entire world of criticism you don't like. Must come in handy. Nope, I normally consider the source and ignore the JUYN posts.
I think you get it Karl, but refuse to supply "the whole truth" and are very selective on what you call "the consumer interest" side of the story. I understand that is your mission/role, but I actually think it does a disservice to the consumer in the long run. It is just another form of managing the message. "He who rules the Mob rules Rome"
said by Karl Bode :Andrew Odlyzko at the University of Minnesota, who's specialty is studying networks and capacity also says capacity growth is completely manageable with just modest capacity upgrades. I don't think anyone really can say what is coming or predict the future based on 40% historical growth. Capacity to the home has never grown as fast as it has in the past 2 years, bandwidth prices for Content providers/CDNs has never been as low, and IP/Internet to the device technology has never been created so fast. I won't call exaflood, but I wouldn't count out much larger growth than historical trends.
said by Karl Bode :Obviously people understand upgrades are a continual project. But Time Warner Cable proposed 5GB caps with $2 per gigabyte overages before announcing a single live DOCSIS 3.0 market. Peace
said by Karl Bode :Well, when your (judging from your posts you work for a carrier) lobbyists keep telling the public Internet brown outs are coming unless the carrier gets "X" (X= deregulation, removed price controls, subsidies, tax cuts), then yeah, the burden of proof for unsustainable growth is on you. Facts works like that. Not sure about that, I call em as I see em. I think the industry is looking for 1) Keep the government out until there is a real problem and 2) Ensure there is an economic model in place if things do drastically change (but keep it sane as some ISPs have done) | |
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1 edit | Re: Voice vs Data I think you get it Karl, but refuse to supply "the whole truth" and are very selective on what you call "the consumer interest" side of the story. I understand that is your mission/role, but I actually think it does a disservice to the consumer in the long run. It is just another form of managing the message. "He who rules the Mob rules Rome" People looking for the carrier perspective certainly have no shortage of options. I can think of seventeen or so trade rags off the top of my head that will never question a carrier position on anything. Ironically most of the people who complain about unfair treatment or "bias" ironically work for and get paid by carriers, and honestly would have no problem were I to simply cut and paste ISP press releases, holding this as a proud example of quality content. Some day I intend to test my theory. 
I respect carrier opinions and the opinions of people who work there. I spend most of my weeks talking to them. If I'm wrong I admit it. If my opinion is incorrect, I will change it. If they contact me with real data, I always update a story. And with a comment section, there's no shortage of corrections -- and I read every one of them. That said.....I don't think anyone really can say what is coming or predict the future based on 40% historical growth. But carriers are predicting unmanageable growth without providing raw, verifiable data. Repeatedly. Every time this subject comes up. And they're doing so not because of real capacity issues, but to scare regulators into keeping their hands off the networks. "If you don't give us "X," we stop investment and the Internet grinds to a halt.
It's dishonest and self-serving, and isn't supported by real data. I've been studying these think tanks and this data for almost ten years now. The entire "Exaflood" idea was created by the same think tank (The Discovery Institute) that created the "Intelligent Design" brand for use by political partisans pushing creationism in the class room. Except the exaflood is a PR effort aimed at increased deregulation.I think the industry is looking for 1) Keep the government out until there is a real problem and 2) Ensure there is an economic model in place if things do drastically change (but keep it sane as some ISPs have done) Well we agree there, though I'd argue the carriers want the government out even if there is a problem. If you ask the carriers, there's never a problem. That's the nature of the beast. As for new economic models, I haven't seen any reasonable new economic models that offer increased value to the consumer. Time Warner Cable's certainly didn't. | |
| | | | | | | | | | yt
Premium
join:2008-06-03
| Re: Voice vs Data said by Karl Bode :People looking for the carrier perspective certainly have no shortage of options. I can think of seventeen or so trade rags off the top of my head that will never question a carrier position on anything. Peace. I'd love to see someone rise above that and not always start from the opposite end of a spectrum. Try and move the message towards logic vs emotion. Again, I know you get it and would love to see the full story here, but if it requires everyone else to do the same, so be it.
said by Karl Bode :But carriers are predicting unmanageable growth without providing raw, verifiable data. Repeatedly. Every time this subject comes up. And they're doing so not because of real capacity issues, but to scare regulators into keeping their hands off the networks. "If you don't give us "X," we stop investment and the Internet grinds to a halt. And the polar cycle continues. There is something coming... All the signs (stated before) point to something other than historical growth sometime in the future. Some can "chicken little" the message while others will "poo poo" it, but any respectable business will not discount the signs and get caught flat footed. Will it be like other change events in Internet history? Not sure. Video is bigger than anything seen in the past.
PS I think I am outnumbered in this forum. Hope the info was helpful in some way  | |
| | | | | | | sonicmerlin
join:2009-05-24
Cleveland, OH
| Ok yt, please explain this wonderful little article from arstechnica, posted last September:
»arstechnica.com/old/content/2008···osis.ars
"Internet traffic is booming, but Internet backbone capacity outpaced traffic growth again this last year. If there's network congestion, it's not in the backbone.
Even as international Internet traffic surged by just over 50 percent from mid-2007 to mid-2008, worldwide backbone capacity grew even faster. Despite the bandwidth horror stories, average link utilization on major backbone lines fell from 31 percent to 29 percent. Even peak utilization, often trotted out as a key reason for doing traffic management, fell from 44 percent to 43 percent.
But one point is clear: Tier 1 backbone operators, which handle the largest traffic flows in the world, have no trouble with capacity even when peak utilization is taken into account. The backbone business tends to be cyclical, due to the cost of major network upgrades; while for some years traffic had growing faster than capacity, backbone providers have now responded with significant capacity increases for two years in a row." | |
| | | | | | | | yt
Premium
join:2008-06-03
1 edit | Re: Voice vs Data said by sonicmerlin :But one point is clear: Tier 1 backbone operators, which handle the largest traffic flows in the world, have no trouble with capacity even when peak utilization is taken into account. The backbone business tends to be cyclical, due to the cost of major network upgrades; while for some years traffic had growing faster than capacity, backbone providers have now responded with significant capacity increases for two years in a row." That is REALLY easy. Studies like this use data from Tier1 backbones. Tier1 backbones are shrinking very fast as the content distribution is moving to broadband backbones via peering and direct transit relationships. When Comcast left AT&T they took with it the majority of AT&T's backbone traffic. Sprint, Qwest, AOL, etc are shrinking faster than ever with this shift of relationships and growth of CDNs. AT&T and VZ kept their transit prices very high and lost a ton of transit business. Impact = Tier1 backbones did not grow.
That said, there is still heavy new backbone growth in broadband and the big cost growth includes the full end to end with the middle and last mile included.
When the source of your data is bad, your analysis is not so good. | |
| | | | | | | | | sonicmerlin
join:2009-05-24
Cleveland, OH
| Re: Voice vs Data My data is bad? What sources do you have, besides the mindless PR releases of ISPs who have never been forced to justify their costs? The ISPs who have been given hundreds of billions in tax subsidies over the last decade to provide people with what amounts to mediocre speeds.
What you're saying basically means it's up to broadband providers to update their own networks. And yet they're making billions in profits every year while *decreasing* their annual investment into infrastructure.
The costs don't add up, nor have they ever made an attempt to explain them. Their SEC filings are the REAL data, not your glib handwaving and exaflood fearmongering. | |
| | | | | | | | | | yt
Premium
join:2008-06-03 | Re: Voice vs Data Sorry... forgot what we were talking about. You just added several additional topics vs the original one we started around Tier1 backbone traffic reduction and it's statistical significance to Internet growth as a whole. | |
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espaeth
Digital Plumber
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join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
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| said by sonicmerlin :But one point is clear: Tier 1 backbone operators, which handle the largest traffic flows in the world, have no trouble with capacity even when peak utilization is taken into account. The backbone business tends to be cyclical, due to the cost of major network upgrades; while for some years traffic had growing faster than capacity, backbone providers have now responded with significant capacity increases for two years in a row." Completely different infrastructure scaling model at the backbone layer vs a residential service provider.
In the US you're talking about hundreds to maybe thousands of connections that serve as backbone infrastructure across the various backbone providers. Network capacity is built out on a limited number of high-capacity chassis, and connectivity is city-to-city or market-to-market. It's 1 metric crapton easier to upgrade a Boise / Seattle route by upgrading 1 x 10GigE circuit to 2 x 10GigE circuits, or upgrading from 2 x 10GigE circuits to a single 40GigE circuit. For augmenting backbone capacity there is simply less hardware in place, there is more redundancy to be able to do it without impact to operations, and it can be done simply by making a couple hardware changes at centralized location. Unlike shared-access residential network systems, we're talking point-to-point circuits -- either through dedicated fiber or DWDM lambdas, you can upgrade everything 2 endpoints at a time.
Not only that, but connectivity to backbone providers is either billed at full line rate or 95th percentile usage-based pricing. So the cost structure is already setup at the backbone level that the more bandwidth you use, the more revenue increases -- which provides significant incentive for the growth of the network. | |
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Karl Bode
News Guy
join:2000-03-02
Host:
Road Runner
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| Ok, so you've never tried it yourself. I've sat with someone using a jailbroken iPhone using mobile VoIP and the quality was as good, if not better than my normal AT&T voice quality -- which here in NY state is nothing to write home about. I haven't tried Skype over AT&T 3G, but a quick Google search (or a forum search here) comes up with legions of people who thought the quality seems fine.
Obviously there's going to be early hiccups with mobile VoIP -- Not that anybody would know on most smartphones, since the applications are blocked to prevent the services from ever really taking off. Though I guess we're just going to keep ignoring that point as it suits us.That's a nice line of BS, but reality doesn't line up. We pay per kilowatt hour of energy consumed, that hasn't stopped us from a massive growth in consumer electronics in homes resulting in higher power utility bills than at any other point in history. No matter how many times people in favor of metered billing repeat it, the telecom and energy sectors are not the same. The metaphor doesn't work -- and if it did apply, telecom carriers would need to be ready to be heavily regulated and end any and all influence at the side of the home where a heavily regulated and continually inspected meter would sit. I'm betting they don't want that.I think I'm starting to know what Greenspan felt like when he was talking about the dot com boom before the bubble finally burst. Well, we can bookmark your Greenspan-level wisdom and you can tell everybody "I told you so" in 2020 when voice over IP and Internet video collapses before the glory and infallibility that is the legacy network and traditional carrier content delivery. I guess you and Mark Cuban (another notoriously stingy critic when it comes to evolution in the content delivery space) can celebrate?To say that IP Video is going to take over completely... Which I didn't say, but no matter, right? Nothing you've said really argues against the idea that metered billing is driven by a fear of being a dumb pipe. You're just kind of waving your hands and saying all challengers to traditional content delivery will fail -- ignoring potential alternative evolution along the way. The shift is coming. The move to metered billing is a reaction to fear of a loss of control.... | |
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espaeth
Digital Plumber
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1 edit | Re: Voice vs Data said by Karl Bode :Obviously there's going to be early hiccups with mobile VoIP -- Not that anybody would know on most smartphones, since the applications are blocked to prevent the services from ever really taking off. Though I guess we're just going to keep ignoring that point as it suits us. The iPhone != all smart phones, and ATT != all carriers.
If you want to make a case against ATT, feel free to do so, but to use it to characterize the entire industry is just foolish. There are millions of Verizon, Sprint, T-mobile, etc customers that don't have limited handsets with application restrictions. Customers with those carriers have had no issues running Sling applications, attempting to use VoIP apps, or other fun stuff like that. You made your choice when you elected to purchase a cute little restricted-functionality toy with the chomped-on fruit logo.
The current drive in mobile services is towards unlimited voice -- from Sprint and Boost all the way down to even Verizon with their Friends & Family plans. There are 2 parts to IP communications: call control and audio streams. The biggest bang for your buck is actually to use existing cell audio streams and layer call control on top of it, and the kids at Google are already preparing for options there with Google Voice with their recent acquisition of 1 million phone numbers. Why bother trying to make IP-based VoIP work over mobile data networks when you could just complete a free call (via Friends & Family, unlimited plans, unlimited nights, etc) into Google Voice and use a thin app on a smart phone to handle the direction of that call? You'd have the ability to have all of the features of call hold, transfer, common voicemail, etc while leveraging the consistent voice delivery that existing cellular networks are already designed to provide.
said by Karl Bode :That's a nice line of BS, but reality doesn't line up. We pay per kilowatt hour of energy consumed, that hasn't stopped us from a massive growth in consumer electronics in homes resulting in higher power utility bills than at any other point in history. No matter how many times people in favor of metered billing repeat it, the telecom and energy sectors are not the same. The metaphor doesn't work -- and if it did apply, telecom carriers would need to be ready to be heavily regulated and end any and all influence at the side of the home where a heavily regulated and continually inspected meter would sit. I'm betting they don't want that. As much as you want to separate the telecom and energy sectors, they have more similarities than differences. We have the same struggles in the energy world with being able to always produce more power, but at more cost and with a series of trade-offs. For that reason we have conservation programs that encourage smart use of energy so that we can defer the expansion of power generation systems while we wait for evolving technologies to make the system more efficient.
Accurate metering of usage isn't a problem -- tracking interface usage has been an inherent function in every SNMP enabled device for almost 3 decades now.
said by Karl Bode :I think I'm starting to know what Greenspan felt like when he was talking about the dot com boom before the bubble finally burst. Well, we can bookmark your Greenspan-level wisdom and you can tell everybody "I told you so" in 2020 when voice over IP and Internet video collapses before the glory and infallibility that is the legacy network and traditional carrier content delivery. I guess you and Mark Cuban (another notoriously stingy critic when it comes to evolution in the content delivery space) can celebrate? Hold on -- Voice over IP is a completely different scenario. For fixed networks where latency is consistent and bandwidth is sufficient, IP voice makes a lot of sense. Conversations that you have on the phone are individually unique, so leveraging individual flows over an IP network makes logical sense and represents a good use of the technology. From an efficiency standpoint either a circuit per call or a unique IP flow per call is about the same. The beautiful irony is what made VoIP so successful is that it was able to be classified as an "entertainment service" and thus sidestep all of the PUC regulated services and fees. It's not that POTS service itself was expensive, but my $11/mo standard pots line ended up being $26 after all the regulatory fees and taxes were assessed. That's why I just chuckle when people think that government regulation of Internet access will actually improve anything. Keep in mind in most states Internet access fees are not taxed, and if you're going to get regulators involved you can bet that won't continue to be the case.
On the video side, taking a feed of a common piece of content (ie, an episode of CSI) and replicating it as a unique feed for every single viewer is where the scaling model becomes ridiculous. For primary viewing, IP network distribution is just a ridiculous use of resources. This isn't like a software distribution model where the only alternative to network-based delivery is to ship physical media. Most shows are already delivered to your residence via ATSC broadcast on publicly licensed airwaves, on QAM channels via your local MSO, and from at least a half dozen different satellites. That's where the inefficiency of IP video starts to break down -- the most effective thing we can do is capture one of the feeds that's already coming in.
IP Video is growing in popularity because today it's free. The development of the content is still funded by advertising and pay-TV (MSO/Satellite) providers. If that funding erodes, then the cost model for providing content online is going to need to change or we'll find a similar situation to what is happening right now with newspapers.
At the end of the day the money has to come from somewhere, and I think once real costs are assessed against IP Video delivery, for a vast many cases the value proposition will prove to be nonexistent.
said by Karl Bode :Nothing you've said really argues against the idea that metered billing is driven by a fear of being a dumb pipe. You're just kind of waving your hands and saying all challengers to traditional content delivery will fail -- ignoring potential alternative evolution along the way. The shift is coming. The move to metered billing is a reaction to fear of a loss of control.... The move to metered billing is simply a better way to assign costs driven by expansion. It's not going to make things cheaper for light use customers -- at least not up front. Current net profitability of most MSOs is right around 10%, so even with a predominant mix of light users today profit margins don't support significantly dropping prices. (Keep in mind existing pricing is based on 40:1 or greater oversubscription ratios) What is going to change is what percentage of the cost burden they are going to share of rapidly expanding network access going forward. The flat rate model supports ordered growth based on predictable multi-year budgets and technology refresh cycles -- it doesn't give you a lot of flexibility to bump infrastructure funding if there is a rapid shift in demand, unless you increase pricing for everyone.
At the end of the day, the money has to come from somewhere, all we're arguing about is who is going to share what percentage of the cost burden. | |
| bamabrad
join:2006-01-27
Port Orange, FL
| MAKE them dumb pipes.... Remember AT&T? They got too big in their field and the government broke them into the Baby Bells. If these companies don't play nice(and won't with $$$ involved), then force them to become one or the other-pipe owner and they will want all the traffic they can get or content provider and they will want all they traffic they can get. If they have both then there is no motivation to go forward-only to milk as much money possible from what they now have-no competition. | |
| YellowSnow
join:2009-05-29
Temecula, CA |  The real issue???
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