Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

cringely.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 392 posts

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#181

Post by [deleted] »

alex_doom wrote: post #170
exelius wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't completely insane as far as national infrastructure projects go. The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternati…

> if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose? They'll choose D. Build a new sportsball arena

[deleted]

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#182

Post by Spooky23 »

spindritf wrote: post #17

Except it’s actually right (not wrong) because those bits are only coming because customers of the ISPs — you and me, the folks who have already paid for every one of those bits — are the ones who want them. What is the source of the notion that, because you paid for your consumer broadband, all bits are paid for and the charge for carrying them cannot be split with the other side of the connection? Why is it so biza…

You're presenting a valid argument, but I don't think that you can equate postal distribution system with the internet.

The nature of the internet is such that it's a public network assembled out of a number of private networks. It works because these private networks meet at exchange points and transport each other's traffic at no cost. Everyone pays for access.

The difference between the Internet and the USPS is that the post office is a closed loop where the sender pays to admit its payload into the network. The post office delivers mail to me at any volume -- I don't have to pay to receive mail.

The whole point of the internet was to escape the rate tariff structure imposed by AT&T back in ye olden days.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#183

Post by Moral_ »

timr wrote: post #164

People keep claiming that there should be a "free market" for bandwidth...but then they say that the ISPs should have to absorb the costs of peering (which can be significant -- the hardware isn't free) without passing the costs on to anyone . The backbone providers complain when the cost is passed to them; the consumers scream bloody murder when the costs are passed to them in the form of a bill. Obviously, there's…

>which can be significant -- the hardware isn't free) without passing the costs on to anyone.

I'm not trying to be rube but have you seen how much comcast/verizion/TWC customers pay? It's more than enough to string another switch and fiber line at a route point.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#184

Post by talmand »

spindritf wrote: post #100
talmand wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, your comparison doesn't work for me. I don't see how those even remotely compare. What I was actually sold from my ISP and I'm currently paying for was indeed unlimited access to everything on the Internet. It's called an Internet connection and that's how I interpret what I'm paying for. If the bill can be split between me, my ISP, and Netflix then I want my bill lowered if my ISP is going to charge Netfl…

What I was actually sold from my ISP and I'm currently paying for was indeed unlimited access to everything on the Internet. There is no such service. Not only does it not exist, it cannot exist. No ISP can provide that. Any independent network on the Internet can start dropping your packets tomorrow for any reason. Including a lazy admin filtering out your entire country. Or due to a copyright agreement. Happens all…

I don't understand your point. If my computer hooked up to the internet can request traffic from another computer it sees on the internet then from my perspective I have that connection. You are trying to somehow say that an ISP offering unlimited access to the internet has to be held responsible for a server that refuses to be seen by my computer. I'm not making that claim. You are trying to refute a claim that isn't being made.

I see "unlimited access" to the internet as being my ISP is not preventing me from accessing what can be found on the internet. You are twisting definitions around to make it mean how you wish it to be defined.

It's not like I'm claiming "unlimited access" to public roads includes private driveways.

If there were no public servers at all on the internet, an ISP can still offer unlimited access to the internet despite there being nothing to see.

Also, there's a difference between "everyone paid something" and "everyone paid something twice". Your own argument supports the notion, it's a negotiation and our request in the negotiations is that bits are not paid for twice in the same transaction.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#185

Post by CocaKoala »

diminoten wrote: post #178
CocaKoala wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read both the blog post and the linked article. Can you provide specific quotes for the claims? Because the only thing that came close which I saw in either the post or the link was a graph of a different connection which isn't fully saturated, but has very little head room, certainly not enough to handle the spillage that L3 is dealing with. There's a mention of capacity upgrades in the works for that connectio…

This isn't the forum. Email me (provided in my profile) if you'd like to continue this discussion.

Your profile, at time of viewing. Congratulations; I'm done here.

user: diminoten created: 1831 days ago karma: 1799 avg: 1.51 about: QA/Wannabe Dev submissions comments

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#186

Post by rosser »

zokier wrote: post #175
exelius wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't completely insane as far as national infrastructure projects go. The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternati…

> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch But actually we did have an opportunity to reboot last-mile networks from scratch, because FTTx is essentially all-new network.

And FTTx could be done at considerably lower cost, if we simply had the will to do it, and the patience to leverage existing work.

For example, last week, they were tearing up the street in front of my building to put in new sewer lines. I don't even want to speculate what that might have cost. But now that the work is done, to lay fibre, they'll have to do it again. If, instead, they'd said, "Well, while we're here, let's just drop some conduit for fibre", and continued to do that going forward, a national FTTx last-mile infrastructure would cost considerably less.

It wouldn't be free, of course. It's not merely "[dropping] some conduit", and there are plenty of places where they'd probably have to tear up the streets just for this purpose anyway. But, if every time we tore up the street for unrelated work, we leveraged that to put in place the FTTx-relevant things we'd also need to tear up the street for, we'd be so much closer, and at so much lower a cost...

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#187

Post by thedufer »

jsz0 wrote: post #154
thedufer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like Level3 wants to enter into bigger-money contracts with the ISPs As the article points out, peering rarely involves money (and shouldn't ever; as the word peer implies, its a largely symmetric relationship). The ISPs' customers are paying the ISPs for bandwidth and then requesting traffic. Level3 is providing said traffic and then the ISP drops it because they don't have enough bandwidth. How can a re…

> stop promising things they aren't willing to deliver on. Very few ISPs offer residential Internet access with SLAs that guarantee performance or even availability. They mostly promise only a 'best effort' class of service.

That's a good point. I meant promise in the sense that that's how customers often interpret a bandwidth claim - legally, they're making no such promise (otherwise they'd be in a lot of trouble).

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#188

Post by ChuckMcM »

exelius wrote: post #159
ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

There is an interesting unbalance because Comcast has so much leverage by owning the last mile, they can push around Tier 1 providers. I'd like to fix that, mostly by creating a public policy around municipally owned Layer 1 infrastructure between customers in their cities and a city exchange building. Conceptually it would be no different than the city owning the sewers and outsourcing the water treatment plant to a…

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't completely insane as far as national infrastructure projects go. The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternati…

Good points, allow me to share with you a bit of my strategy.

There is a case to be made that much of the tearing up of the streets is a function of people laying down multiple communication infrastructures along side each other. We looked though the permits for the last 12 months and compared that activity to a on-going repaving and road maintenance work. There are several interesting variables at play in that, cost to maintain (tax based), property tax (revenue), new permits (revenue). If you consider switching the physical layer to an infrastructure basis you eliminate multiple fiber/copper paths under the street, multiple fiber/copper vaults in sidewalks and on street corners, and replace them with a common set of conduits. That helps a number of costs, site surveys for digs, delays for city work, and multiple trenching/paving jobs with different standards of integrity. My city, Sunnyvale, is dealing with ways to make maintaining the city more efficient. This sort of change helps that in ways that are not immediately obvious to folks because they happen with dozens of different actors across dozens of different departments.

My goal is to get the city thinking differently about communications (more like roads and sewers than 'optional thing some folks have') so that we can move past the current hodgepodge into a more efficient and maintainable system. If I can get my city to change, then other cities can see the change and see how it helps or hurts and decide independently to change. As a particularly tech savvy city we have a strong alignment with citizens who want better communications, and we've seen from places like Kansas with Google fiber that such communications upgrades increase property values, which increases property tax revenues. My hope is we can get everyone (communication providers, city, citizens) all aligned on this idea. If so it will get done.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#189

Post by Spooky23 »

jsz0 wrote: post #154
thedufer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds like Level3 wants to enter into bigger-money contracts with the ISPs As the article points out, peering rarely involves money (and shouldn't ever; as the word peer implies, its a largely symmetric relationship). The ISPs' customers are paying the ISPs for bandwidth and then requesting traffic. Level3 is providing said traffic and then the ISP drops it because they don't have enough bandwidth. How can a re…

> stop promising things they aren't willing to deliver on. Very few ISPs offer residential Internet access with SLAs that guarantee performance or even availability. They mostly promise only a 'best effort' class of service.

"Best effort" doesn't mean "Here's your dinner, take it or leave it."

ISPs have been successfully managing aggregate network bandwidth growth for over twenty years.

I work at a place that has transformed it's utilization of the internet via cloud services -- utilization going from 80-120MB/s to multi-gigabit. Adapting to that change was relatively easy and cheap. With the economies of scale that a large Telco has, it's a drop in the bucket.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#190

Post by Jtsummers »

zokier wrote: post #175
exelius wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't completely insane as far as national infrastructure projects go. The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternati…

> The problem is that we're not starting from scratch But actually we did have an opportunity to reboot last-mile networks from scratch, because FTTx is essentially all-new network.

Sort of, but doesn't a lot of it reuse existing routes? Depending on who "owns" it (based on leases and contracts), this could limit the ability to make a clean break at this stage. If you had to sublet the routes, would it be cost effective? If you had to dig new trenches, how many and how much would it cost?
Post reply on HN