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The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading)
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 06:04:37 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net> Date: May 6, 2007 11:50:18 PM EDT To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com Cc: smb () cs columbia eduSubject: Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: [IP] The House of Representatives on campus downloading)
At 06:44 PM 5/6/2007, Steven Bellovin wrote:
I think you need to distinguish between bandwidth consumption -- or overconsumption -- and illegality. While I agree that most of the bandwidth use you report is probably the result of illegal file-sharing, there are many legitimate uses for the same technology.
All burglary tools have occasional legal uses. ;-)
To me, then, your note poses several questions. Does the Internet need deployed QoS? (There's been a lot of work on general QoS, but this is a special case.) Is there an inherent problem with wireless, or at least with the type of wireless you use?
For some reason, several people on the list -- perhaps because they don't understand the problem -- have asked this same question. The answer is, emphatically, "no." If all of our users had wired links, a dozen of them becoming, for example, Kazaa supernodes would sap too much bandwidth from the network to allow us to maintain good performance for the legitimate customers on that portion of the network.
(You've stated elsewhere that you run a wireless ISP.) Alternatively, is the problem that your network is underprovisioned for the load your customers?
Our network is technically quite sound, thank you. But we need it to be sound financially as well. Remember, most ISPs oversubscribe their networks because they have to. If they don't, their wholesale costs surpass what they can charge at retail. We are one of the few that offer guaranteed minimum throughput, and to keep that promise we cannot oversubscribe the bandwidth which is "spoken for" when we make this guarantee. It must be available to the user at all times. However, users will be dissatisfied if they do not get substantially more than the guaranteed minimum most of the time. This, again, becomes a duty cycle issue. If users' computers do not attempt to monopolize bandwidth, everyone is happy and we can break even and perhaps even turn a small profit for our hard work. But if the pool of burstable bandwidth is monopolized, our network will be perceived as slow, users' productivity will be hampered, and they will leave. File piracy software tries, by design, to take ALL of the available bandwidth if it can. It tries to consume not only all of our burstable bandwidth but attempting the guaranteed bandwidth that is reserved for other subscribers. This constitutes network abuse.
In that case, is the problem economic -- the market won't let you charge enough to cover your costs? If there's a market problem, could there or should there be some intervention to correct it?
Perhaps a market intervention called "truth in advertising" would help a bit. When the phone company claims that you'll get 7 Mbps downloads on your DSL line because that's the raw speed at which the modem trains up (and then disclaims that you will get any speed at all in the fine print), it is deceptive. If users want a dedicated T1 to the Internet, they should be prepared to pay the $500 per month that it costs wholesale in our area. However, oversubscription of bandwidth works just fine, and allows users to get a better deal, if they are not abusing the network.
Or is there some technical shortcoming in your ability to do traffic-shaping
No; we can and do shape traffic. In fact, we have spent hundreds of hours developing techniques for mitigation of abuse by file piracy software.
or usage-sensitive pricing, in which case innovation may solve your problem?
The fact that the market will not tolerate usage-sensitive pricing is not a technical issue.
Should ISPs (including the university in its role as an ISP for faculty, staff, and students) have the responsbility for proactively blocking illegal traffic? If so, how can they distinguish between, say, a stolen Time-Warner movie and the legitimate copy that's being redistributed via BitTorrent at Time-Warner's explicit request?
Even the occasional legal use of BitTorrent can harm the network, because (again) it attempts to monopolize it and thus is abusive.
Do we give up one of the fundamental tenets of the Internet architeture, the notion that endpoints determine what traffic flows, rather than the center?
In real life, the endpoints of the network have never completely determined what traffic flows or how much.
In this regard, it is worth remembering that the three most radical Internet innovations -- the Web, Napster, and Skype -- came not from ISPs, "official" standards bodies (i.e., the IETF or the ITU), or major research labs or universities, but from the edges of the Net. (Yes, I know that CERN is a major research lab, but for physics!)
The Web was not a radical innovation but rather an evolutionary step. Napster and Skype likewise weren't radical. I daresay that wireless broadband as we do it is more radical and revolutionary than any of these. It was not supposed to be possible; you weren't supposed to be able to break the telephone or cable monopolies or to offer a commercial service without buying prohibitively expensive licensed spectrum (which the big guys could lock up). But we're doing it. All we ask is to be able to eke out a living -- something which we at least hope that those enthusiastic customers want us to do. After all, they do value our service. --Brett Glass ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading) David Farber (May 04)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading) David Farber (May 04)
- The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading) David Farber (May 05)
- Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading) David Farber (May 06)
- The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading) David Farber (May 07)