Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Marc Aniballi | Personal [marcaniballi () gmail com]
Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2008 3:48 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: RE: [IP] Re:  ALSO MUST READ  NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic "People seem to be 
missing the point."

Hello Dave;

I find this scarcity to be "odd." A little back of the napkin calculation
says that your average 5Mb/s broadband connection could provide you with
about 1.5 TB of download capacity per month. (~375 DVD images or 2000 DivX
movies) - Now I know that Telco provisioning is based on the idea that your
5Mb/s capacity can be "shared" among many customers and is therefore not a
"committed" 5Mb/s unlimited full-time bitrate - but what exactly do they
consider a "reasonable" amount of sharing? 10:1? 100:1? More?!!! 10 or 20:1
still gets the average consumer WAY more content than they can likely watch
in a month (20-40 DVDs or 100-200 Divx movies!). Most consumers are quite
happy to wait for a download vs. real-time streaming when the price point of
the connectivity reflects the difference, but the difference should be
spelled out as a CIR (Committed information rate) with the "speed" being the
burstable maximum over short periods or periods of low congestion. If I had
a choice between 2Mb/s CIR with 5Mb/s burst and 1Mb/s CIR with 25Mb/s burst
- I would select the higher CIR because I do not care about "streaming" - I
can wait to buffer or download. Others might select differently - but this
is a clear method of "pricing" that reflects the service being offered,
allows the user to audit the SLA without any trust of the provider, and it
has been in place on leased lines for decades. P2P and YouTube would cause
no upsets to an infrastructure that was built/managed/billed this way. WHAT
you do with your purchased CONNECTIVITY is up to you and none of the ISP's
business (I'll ignore fascist considerations here).


Marc Aniballi

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-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: June-15-08 3:09 PM
To: ip
Subject: [IP] Re: ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb
Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."


________________________________________
From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2 () bobf frankston com]
Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2008 2:48 PM
To: David Farber; 'ip'
Cc: 'Roger Bohn'; 'Dave Burstein'
Subject: RE: [IP] ALSO MUST READ  NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb
Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."

 I do have three broadband pipes – RCN, Comcast, FiOS and while competition
does slowly work its magic it’s basically more of the same – until the whole
model collapses. There really is no magic and there is no real scarcity
either.

We keep getting sucked into a false battle over scarcity and let ourselves
be pitted against our neighbors who are stealing bandwidth from us. We miss
the larger point. We don’t even think of asking why we are billed for
wireless connectivity – we’re too fixated on broadband. The problem is in
the model that forces us into corralling bits into narrow billable paths and
we’re not allowed to be owners and invest in capacity.

Cellular phones are a good example of creating scarcity – why do they have
to go through the constrictions of towards? Apple was able to support 10,000
MAC (Mac MACs?) at WWDC at Moscone using 802.11 without creating billable
events.

If having your own fiber costs $1000 (before Moore’s law) then why do you
care what your neighbor is doing. You don’t solve this by creating in
incentive to create scarcity by creating a usage charge – you provide the
opportunity for individuals and/or the community to buy more capacity – just
like within the homes.

Why do we make streaming video the defining application? If you don’t have
the capacity to watch an HD real time stream then dynamically adapt or do
buffering. Don’t impose a morality tax on your neighbor because you want to
use bad algorithms. The networks are getting this and using smarter ways to
send video despite the problems in the middle – as Dave Burstein has noted –
that’s the real worry for the carriers – not sharing home movies.

This fixation on video forces us to tolerate billable wireless and that does
real damage in leaving us disconnected except when in front of our TV/PC
screens.

http://www.frankston.com/public/rss.xml



-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net]
Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2008 13:09
To: ip
Subject: [IP] ALSO MUST READ NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb
Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."





________________________________________

From: Roger Bohn [Rbohn () ucsd edu]

Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2008 11:13 AM

To: David Farber

Cc: Bob.Frankston () indigo pobox com;
"[bob37-2 () bobf frankston com]"@indigo.pobox.com;
Michael.O'Dell () indigo pobox com; "[mo () ccr org]"@indigo.pobox.com

Subject: Re: [IP] MUST READ  NYTimes.com: Charging by the Byte to Curb
Internet Traffic "People seem to be missing the point."



Regarding the reaction to the NY Times article and the whole subject of
charging by the byte, let me point out that the correct way to charge for
scarcity of bandwidth is ALSO something that many readers of this list will
distrust.



> From: Michael O'Dell [mo () ccr org]

>

> Since bit *rate*, not bit mass, is the instantaneously-exhaustable

> resource in packet network, if they were actually worried about

> network engineering, they'd be going to the burstable charging

> model which is known to worth both technically and economically.

> it relates the charges directly to the exhaustion of the

finite resource - bit *rate*, not bit mass.



Mr. O'Dell is correct about rate, but the scarce resource here is
_congestion_ flows, which are highly variable. The correct (economically,
and in my modestly informed opinion technically) way to charge for these is
with some form of spot pricing, i.e. prices that change in real time and
with location. When there's no congestion, no matter how much bandwidth
someone currently uses the charge should be zero. Conversely, when your
neighbors are running real-time movies via IP, both you and they should be
charged congestion fees for whatever each of you is  doing.  Even if you did
not "cause" the congestion, your usage is   exacerbating it for everyone.



The easiest analogy is to cellular phones, which have gone as far as a
two-level time-of-day price (free/ not free), but otherwise stayed away from
a "burstable charging model."  Electricity sellers are starting to play with
spot prices. But in general they are viewed as out of the question for
consumers because of the  uncertainty and variability they introduce. Your
monthly payment becomes even harder to predict than with a pure charge for
bytes.*



So like Network Neutrality, this is a case of "be careful what you ask
for...." How many of IP's readers would like to give some kind of real-time
pricing power to their ISP?  Imagine the problems of auditing your bill to
ensure that it was correct, for example. Solvable technically, but when
there is a rapacious quasi-monopolist writing the bills it would require a
lot of trust.



So a time-of-day based surcharge for bytes seems like a reasonable
compromise between tractability and theoretical optimality. This is not what
Comcast is proposing, though, which lends credence to the theories that they
have a very different agenda than what they claim.



Long-term solution: We need a third source of high-bandwidth to the home  -
probably nothing less will get the ISPs to behave. This would also, most
likely, solve the net neutrality problem without a lot of dangerous
micro-regulation of what behavior is acceptable.



Roger



*(Doing spot pricing  economically correctly for the Internet would be
harder than for cellular, because of  end-to-end issues, which can lead to a
lot of nonsense about capacity  reservations, "fair queuing," and the rest.
Hans-Werner Braun, KC Claffy, and I wrote a paper about end-to-end spot
pricing in the mid 90s. If they are only worried about local congestion,
though, as the Comcasts of the world imply in their PR, then backbone and
other-end congestion can be ignored.)









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