How carriers mismanage traffic and then blame us

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Bob Frankston <bob37-2 () bobf frankston com>
> Date: April 22, 2008 8:47:53 AM PDT
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>, 'ip' <ip () v2 listbox com>
> Cc: 'Lauren Weinstein' <lauren () vortex com>
> Subject: RE: [IP] How carriers mismanage traffic and then blame us

> I’ll admit that I’m not very interested in the details of Comcast  
> traffic management because it’s a transient problem caused by asking 
>  a company that specializes in content delivery to provide infrastru 
> cture. C’mon – how foolish can you be? Next you’ll ask Cable  
> and Wireless to give up all their phone revenue in Jamaica because a 
>  single copper pair can handle all the traffic for a village at esse 
> ntially no cost.
>
>
>
> There is a basic fallacy – the idea that transit necessarily costs a 
>  lot of money. And, of course, we confuse cost with price. We are st 
> uck in the idea that the Internet is some distant land that’s hard t 
> o get to. So the carriers make decisions that exacerbate the problem 
> . The situation is akin to making it too expensive to put in a path  
> from your house to your garage because you burden it with the cost o 
> f a trip around the world.
>
>
>
> I don’t care what it costs to get bits from here to Timbuktu – I  
> care very much what it costs to get from my house to my local school 
> . Comcast and the other carriers chose not to peer locally and then  
> tell me that it’s very very very expensive to haul bits from me to m 
> y neighbor because I just might want to watch a webcam in Tonga over 
>  a satellite link.
>
>
>
> If I pay $1k for a fiber from my house to the center of town and so  
> does my neighbor then can we amortize it across many bits even if we  
> stream gigabits each second. Or I can put some inexpensive DSL  
> modems on a copper wire and get megabits. It’s even more extreme for 
>  connectivity within my house but at least there no carrier is going 
>  to force me to pay for those bits though that was very much what th 
> ey tried to do in the 1990’s when they tried to argue that connectin 
> g more than one computer to a cable modem was stealing from them.
>
>
>
> They configure networks as if the Internet were far far away they  
> come up with arbitrary peering prices. That doesn’t meant that  
> it’s intrinsically expensive – it means they’ve managed to make  
> it expensive. What happens if they light up all the fiber they have  
> and follow Moore’s law? We get the fiber bubble bursting again and t 
> hey go belly up. But that’s not because it’s expensive – it’s  
> because selling transit is a business that does worse the more capac 
> ity it delivers and there is no direct relationship between the supp 
> lier and the user. Without tight control of the path you can’t refle 
> ct the price of a given infrastructure element back to the user. Isn 
> ’t it strange that dedicated fiber is cheaper than sharing a path? T 
> he solution is not to charge the highest price you can – the solutio 
> n is to make capacity available and let the users discover what work 
> s and what doesn’t.
>
>
>
> Today we’re confused because we keep trying to treat the Internet as 
>  a TV channel and it works far better than it is “should” so  
> instead of buffering and using peer caching we find we can just stre 
> am video content. And then we get surprised if sometimes that doesn’ 
> t work as well because we don’t use algorithms that degrade graceful 
> ly.
>
>
> The bigger problem is that we don’t see the value of the Internet as 
>  basic infrastructure and don’t see the high value in the myriad oth 
> er was to take advantage of connectivity. Yet we keep worrying that  
> we might use up the Internet.
>
>
>
> PS: I actually do care what it costs to get bits between here and  
> Timbuktu because it acts as a punitive tax on developing economies  
> (and they should all continue to develop). We can’t afford to keep t 
> he worlds’ economies captive within houses of glass.

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