Along these lines, can someone ask whether net neutrality ever existed at all? Akamai and F5 have been helping big corporations like Disney circumvent internet bottlenecks for over a decade now. Those who have had the money have managed to purchase faster delivery schemes for over a decade.
Could it be, then, that telecommunications companies are consolidating so that they can extort money not from the small guys, but from the big guys? Are Hulu, Netflix and others willingly submitting to the extortion because they see no other way out?
To be sure, the telecommunications industry is in desperate need of regulation because providing good service at a reasonable price for a reasonable profit is not good enough for them.
Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
331–340 of 392 posts
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#332Just for scale, backbone links these days are not 10 gigabits/sec, more in the order of 40-100 gigabits/sec.
The Amsterdam Internet Exchange is the largest and most important exchange in Europe, and it's peak traffic each day reaches 3 terabits/sec.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
The laws of physics prohibit wireless from serving current needs in an urban density. It's not a solution for the future.
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem limits the information that can be transmitted through a given channel. If you want to send more wired data, you add more channels by adding more wires. Wireless doesn't have that luxury.
Strictly speaking this is true, however you can add more base stations with lower transmit power so the shared media is shared by lower number of clients. This is what is already done in urban areas with smaller base stations.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#334The problem is not to peer or not to peer. The problem is WHERE to peer.
I work for a european ISP and the problem we have is the location of the peering. Big content providers will happilly peer with you in, say, Palo Alto or Miami; but they will refuse to add a peering connection in Europe. Why? because today the problem is about WHO pays the Intercontinental route (which limited and is expensive bandwidth).
Level3 is known in the industry as a pioneer for bit-mile-peering agreements. This means you have to sample the origin and destination of the IP packets and make some calculations to know how many miles the packet has traveled and pay / get paid if someone dumps long haul traffic to a peer. Getting to this is complicated with current tecnhology and many companies are refusing to peer with Level3 because they don't know what will happen with their business with bit-mile-peering agreements.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#335There 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…
Utah already has something like this called UTOPIA ( http://www.utopianet.org/about-utopia/ ). The participating cities run fiber optic lines. The city pays for the fiber optic lines (lots and lots and lots of political controversy about this!) then subscribers can pick and choose what services and from which providers they want. I'm in a participating city and love it! Unfortunately politics, both the governmental a…
Interesting, I thought no government were competent enough to make this happen. Clearly I was wrong.
Once the last mile is owned by the government / building / land owner. They should be able to choose what ever ISP they have without being locked into any one of them.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you able to expand? I tend to agree but dont really know why or what / where the physical limits are. Is it the 4g etc tech that can't perform with real load or WiFi that will fall over? Is a mesh network an answer?
The problem is that wireless is a shared medium. If you have a certain amount of spectrum, you can transfer a finite number of bits per second using it, and that capacity is shared between all devices in range. The bandwidth available in a certain chunk of spectrum is a physical limit. There is no way to expand capacity other than by allocating more spectrum, and radio spectrum is extremely scarce. So the more users…
Thanks mostly confirming what I suspected. I did think we would be able to use the spectrum more efficiently over time with better, more precise measurements but my guess is that will scale to its own limits a lot faster than a hard line will.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#337Earlier 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…
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…
In California, I feel like 'increases property values' is not that valuable to cities due to prop 13. Big increases in property values serve to lock people into their current homes because they lose their property tax subsidy if they move.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#338There 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 close to what Britain has. The last mile infrastructure is owned by BT, who used to be a US-style monopoly, and now they have to give access to their infrastructure to the other ISPs. Unfortunately, quality is restricted by the fees BT charge being too high, and their general woeful underinvestment into much of their network. Having the last mile infrastructure be nationally owned would be a far better idea.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#339There 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…
Exactly what happened in France circa 2000. France Telecom the national operator was forced to maintain the last mile and open to other ISP at the city exchange.
This has allowed newcomers like Free (Free ISP), to disrupt the high speed internet market both in costs and speeds.
It seems that telecom is one area where laissez-faire leads to less competition, and worse offers for potential customers.
Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was unaware these problems were addressed with a large cache. It's a good thing Google has sufficient cachet to persuade public officials to work with them, though!
Please excuse the typo.
Well now I feel bad. It was meant lightheartedly, and your comments were valid!