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Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

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

#351

Post by exelius »

nknighthb wrote: post #310
exelius wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wired connectivity certainly isn't either. I find myself using my home internet connection almost exclusively for movies and games -- not exactly the great innovative services everyone talks about. I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high ba…

How do you think your wireless signals get to the rest of the world? Microwave backhaul is almost dead, those cell towers (and there are tons of them in urban environments, partly for want of spectrum) are wired up with fiber.

Of course wired is used for backhaul between wireless nodes and the internet; but I'm speaking as a consumer technology. Wired access is definitely here to stay for infrastructure uses.

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

#352

Post by vidarh »

Angostura wrote: post #275
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…

Sorry to be dense, but it is not quite clear to me how ownership of the last mile affords such leverage. It would seem that if you need to buy bandwidth for end users, you would be negotiating transit like anyone else - I'm clearly missing something.

Internet peering has been a giant game of chicken ever since commercial connections were allowed.

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

#353

Post by vidarh »

diminoten wrote: post #9
JoshTriplett wrote: post #3

Somebody has to pay the money to upgrade the equipment and bandwidth available at these exchange points. The very reasonable argument in this article is that the ISPs should pay that cost, which seems reasonable given that their customers are demanding it. It sounds like the ISPs are playing a game of chicken, trying to see if their peers like Level3 will throw money in to pay for the ISP to upgrade its equipment and…

The ISPs aren't dropping the packets, Level3 is. From the article linked to in the blog: "A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers." "We"in the quote is Level3. They're dropping the packets. Why do the ISPs have to pay for Level3's dropping of packets? Shouldn't the ISPs repl…

> Shouldn't the ISPs replace Level3 if they keep dropping packets?

How would that help when the reason Level3 is dropping packets is because the ISPs don't have enough capacity to receive them?

Level3 can't magically make a 10Gbps port take 20Gbps of traffic, nor could any hypothetical replacement the ISPs might go to (there aren't many realistic alternatives).

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

#354

Post by exelius »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #290
exelius wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know that wired broadband is even the answer? Wouldn't wireless connectivity be more attractive if the goal is social justice? Many lower-income homes don't own a PC, and at this point they probably never will. How attractive is a home PC to you if all you've ever known are smartphones? Wired broadband, to me, is more of an entertainment consumption platform. Wireless serves the needs of low-bandwidth infor…

Its a reasonable question, the challenge is spectrum management. As the city would provide layer 1 (connectivity) not any above layers, they would have to become the spectrum manager for wireless base stations. That is percieved to be too complex. Also this has to meet the needs of consumers and businesses alike. Currently fiber scales from 1mbit > 1TBit [1] so it has that flexibility. Maintenance of the fiber is ind…

If it's too complex for a municipality to manage the right technology, is it the right thing to deploy the only technology they can manage? There are market solutions in place for wireless; and spectrum management is already handled by the FCC (would a municipality even have jurisdiction?)

I guess I remain unconvinced how this is not effectively a subsidy to the media companies (Netflix et. al; including Comcast once they start offering a cable-over-internet product) given that the primary use case of wired high-speed internet access is overwhelmingly streaming video (since over 80% of Internet traffic is streaming video). I also don't imagine it would lower costs significantly over a company like Comcast in the long run; the margins aren't great on a business like that and line maintenance is much more expensive long-term than people realize.

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

#355

Post by cobookman »

seehafer wrote: post #225
cobookman wrote: post #219

I've previously interned at one of the mentioned Cable Companies, and I see both sides. The solution is to make it 'capitalistic'. Change all of our internet contracts from Unlimited (up to 'x' GB/month), to a simple $/gb cost. It would be in the ISPs best interest to provide their customers the fastest internet connection as possible. E.g, if a customer can stream a 4k video vs SD then the ISP would make more money…

How does changing plans from unlimited to metered data make them more 'capitalistic'? An example of making things more capitalistic would be to make illegal the municipal contracts granting monopolies on last mile service.

In an unlimited system, a customer which uses 10GB/month grosses the company the same amount as a customer who uses 1TB/month.

Going to a metered system, people who use more bandwidth are charged more.

Technically ISPs don't pay for bandwidth, but for a 'x' GBps link. But our electric companies do the same, they pay for 'x' Kw/h (a power plant can only output so much electricity per hour).

>...make illegal the municipal contracts granting monopolies on last mile service.

Thats a very hard peice of legislation to pass. I'm not even sure if Google Fiber would agree to this. Even if this legislation passed, would that fix our net neutrality rules?

Moving to a metered system gets rid of most of the ISPs arguments against net neutrality....all of them except having a company pay for your bandwidth.

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

#356

Post by vidarh »

diminoten wrote: post #236
_ikke_ wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without customers asking for content, L3 wouldn't provide anything to Comcast. It's at the specific request of the customers that L3 relays the replies. The customers initiate the request, and L3 provides the response. Without the service L3 provides, Comcast wouldn't be able to (as efficiently) provide the service to their customers. In a sense, Comcast should pay L3 for their access to the content.

But they're not asking for L3, they're asking for Netflix. So maybe Netflix should hire a CDN that can play ball with Comcast, instead of L3, who is apparently being shut out.

So what you are saying is that Netflix should pay extortion money to Comcast - either directly, or via a CDN - because Comcast have a monopoly situation.

You can try to package it any other way you like, but that's what you are suggesting: The only reason Comcast is in position to try this gambit is because there are alternatives (albeit very few) to backbone providers, and major content providers can be bullied directly, but most Comcast customers do not have alternatives to Comcast.

If anything, that Comcast even dares ask for this should be evidence that they are abusing a monopoly situation, and ought to be a trigger for massive reform - in a free market, they'd get told to take a hike.

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

#357

Post by vidarh »

cobookman wrote: post #355
seehafer wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does changing plans from unlimited to metered data make them more 'capitalistic'? An example of making things more capitalistic would be to make illegal the municipal contracts granting monopolies on last mile service.

In an unlimited system, a customer which uses 10GB/month grosses the company the same amount as a customer who uses 1TB/month. Going to a metered system, people who use more bandwidth are charged more. Technically ISPs don't pay for bandwidth, but for a 'x' GBps link. But our electric companies do the same, they pay for 'x' Kw/h (a power plant can only output so much electricity per hour). >...make illegal the munici…

> Thats a very hard peice of legislation to pass.

That may be so. But all of Europe manage to go from monopoly telcos to a system with guaranteed access for ISPs to the last mile.

> Moving to a metered system gets rid of most of the ISPs arguments against net neutrality..

In my experience, from having run an ISP: It also massively curtails usage, to the extent that it is a net negative for the ISPs because users become less dependent on you, yet don't pay you as much.

There's a reason why ISPs went to "unlimited" contracts: If users have to meter their usage, they tend to turn out to be willing to pay less, because their internet connection is suddenly something where they have to think about the money they spend from day to day, rather than something that's just a fixed "thing" in the background they don't think about. People are willing to pay extra for "unlimited" to not have to think about it, and when they don't think about it, they don't cancel.

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

#358

Post by vidarh »

runeks wrote: post #255
wmf wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?) No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage. So now we have a situation where a company's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its cus…

> No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage. When I went around asking for a price for a shared connection to out apartment complex, I was asked how many tenants we had. And the reason -- I was told -- that they asked for this, was that the more tenants the more traffic consumed. So it seems to me that somewhere , someone is paying for traffic. Or el…

End user ISPs often charge by traffic. But buying transit from larger ISP for colocation or to operate your own ISP for example, is typically done based on some combination of port speed, committed information rate (CIR) and peak usage within a defined interval (burst).

For example, at work we pay abour $6 per Mbps 95th percentile use averaged per 5 minutes, with a 10Mbps CIR and 100Mbps port speed at one of our data centres. This means we always pay for at least 10Mbps. Our ISP then measures our traffic and averages it over 5 minute intervals. They then throw away the top 5% of samples (so we can have short traffic spikes up to our port speed without paying extra), and we pay for the higher of 10Mbps and the next sample.

Any bandwidth above the CIR is entirely dependent on whether or not our ISP has spare capacity. The higher your requested port speed, the less likely you are of being able to burst much more than your CIR - any halfway decent provider will have 90Mbps excess capacity much of the time, so paying for 10Mbps CIR and bursting to 100Mbps is not unlikely, but paying for 1Gbps and being able to burst to 10Gbps gets far more dicy.

At some higher speeds some providers will only offer links where CIR == port speed - effectively a "unlimited" connection. If you know your bandwidth exceeds the CIR a lot of the time, you will typically want to pay for a higher CIR for the reason that you otherwise risk getting throttled even if your port speed is higher and your connection in theory is burstable.

Effectively the sum of the CIR of their customers + some margin is what the ISP will turn around and contract with their transit providers and peering partners for. If other customers don't use their CIR, and your CIR is lower than your port speed, your ISP is likely to let you burst (at a cost) that moment, but traffic within the CIR (should) always have priority.

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

#359

Post by exelius »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #316
lugg wrote: post #276

Earlier 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…

It all depends how much bandwidth you need for a given use case. For most use cases other than video, existing wireless technologies are sufficient and will only continue to improve as things like beam shaping and micro cells become more prevalent. Wireless is easier to deploy and as its use grows, more spectrum will likely open up. Free markets have the benefit of deploying scarce resources where they are most in demand. Implementing that spectrum is often as easy as a configuration change that can be deployed remotely.

The biggest advantage of a wired home broadband connection over a wireless one that I see is the ability to stream video. A wired connection has a lot of disadvantages: it's useless outside the home and the infrastructure is significantly more expensive. Wireless has signal and coverage issues for sure, but wireless is a much more competitive industry than wired access in no small part because it's cheaper to deploy.

I don't think it would be going out on a limb to say the HN audience is much wealthier and more technology-literate than the average citizen, and thus would be more likely to want multiple Internet connections and have more use cases such as running file servers, etc. I think the HN crowd overestimates what people use their Internet connections for; the average person uses their home broadband connection primarily to watch video. It's not a bad use case by any means; but I'm not sure the government needs to be building infrastructure that will be primarily used by video streaming companies. Traditional cellular wireless (which can use any mix of wireless, wired or satellite backhaul depending on the application) and Wi-Fi are flexible enough to cover the "access" part of Internet access; especially in an increasingly post-PC world.

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

#360

Post by jmcqk6 »

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…

>Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't.

I hear this criticism quite a bit, but I really don't understand. Do we have any evidence at all that the government is actually less efficient, less trustworthy than private companies? The problem we're discussing is caused by private companies not living up to their responsibilities. There are endless examples of this other places as well.

Sure, there are dangers inherent in public services that are not present in private, but the inverse is true as well.

What we're talking about in this specific instance is infrastructure that is a societal benefit, and if that doesn't fall into the domain of public government, I don't know what does.

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