Re: A series of interchanges as a result -- How a few inches become 500 miles.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Bob Frankston" <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: September 21, 2008 6:20:23 PM EDT
To: "'George Ou'" <george_ou () lanarchitect net>, <fin () finseth com>, <nnsquad () nnsquad org 
>, "'Dave Farber'" <dave () farber net>, <oia () lists bway net>
Cc: <Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com>, <tkoppel () comcast net>
Subject: RE: [ NNSquad ]  How a few inches become 500 miles.

George, I’m not sure why you are trying so hard to defend the status  
quo when it is so obviously flawed and is within the context of a  
marketplace architecture that is so dysfunctional. If you could  
improve some of the current protocols and business models what would  
you do – is today’s system the best that we can have?

Perhaps I’m all-too-aware of the problems because I was around as the  
stuff evolved and still think of it as a series of fortunate hacks  
that have accumulated far too much sludge and have been forced to work  
within the context of a 19th century theory of telecommunications.

Note that I explicitly address the issue of logical vs geographic  
distance. The protocols still work but the real world aspects affect  
performance and we also are forced to run past a billing point.

As to cell phones – why are you an apologist for the current design  
even if it is fatally flawed? If you’re not near a tower you can’t  
communicate. Yet the phones are likely to both have 802.11 (though we  
should be able to do far better than 802.11). It would be very hard to  
make the current system more complex than it is – if you look at the  
protocols they are very complex because of the billing requirements  
and the channel allocation requirements. Don’t confuse your naïve  
design assumptions with what can be done.

You’re right that the routing between two points tends to be static –  
so why do we act as if the network has to dynamically track all the  
end points. Why don’t we learn from the post office and use relatively  
static addresses for routing and relatively static names for naming.  
That would make the protocols far simpler than today’s protocols which  
are all optimized for the most dynamic case and make it difficult to  
take advantage of any of the stability. And they fail in their task  
because there are no stable names and today’s network fails if you  
disconnect parts from the root!

From: George Ou [mailto:george_ou () lanarchitect net]
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 17:54
To: 'Bob Frankston'; fin () finseth com; nnsquad () nnsquad org; 'Dave  
Farber'; oia () lists bway net
Cc: Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com; tkoppel () comcast net
Subject: RE: [ NNSquad ] How a few inches become 500 miles.

Bob, you’re conflating geographic distance with IP distance and that’s  
a mistake.  There’s a good reason that you’re not meshed in with your  
neighbor who’s on a different ISP which in the IP world is as if he  
was in a different city.  No ISP is going to have mesh peering with  
another ISP with a million peering points and millions of potential  
routing loops.

As for cell phones not being able to peer with each other directly,  
that’s a design decision to keep the system simple.  For the vast  
majority of the time, you can’t assume that two cell phones will be  
within an earshot of one another and for the few times you’ll be able  
to do cell-to-cell communications, it just isn’t worth adding that  
complexity to the whole system.  It’s also imperative that that cell  
phones be able to communicate with the tower so that they can be  
scheduled to use the radio without fear of collision.  The last thing  
you want a cell phone network to be is an unmanaged wireless network  
like plain old Wi-Fi with thousands of ad hoc devices transmitting on  
the same channel anytime they please.  This is why your unmanaged Wi- 
Fi network using 20 MHz of spectrum is only capable of 4 simultaneous  
phone calls while a managed cell phone network can do hundreds of  
calls in half the spectrum.

“The whole point of the Internet is that these aren’t special cases  
that have to be managed individually. I shouldn’t be required to use  
path-dependent protocols.  And the whole point of telecom is that I  
must.”

Routing between any two devices on the Internet, contrary to popular  
belief, is generally very static and predictable.  At most, if both  
end-points are dual-homed with BGP, you might have 4 different paths  
to choose from but even then the other 3 paths are only used if  
certain paths fail.


George

From: Bob Frankston [mailto:Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com]
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 2:20 PM
To: 'George Ou'; fin () finseth com; nnsquad () nnsquad org; 'Dave Farber'; oia () lists bway net
Cc: Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com; tkoppel () comcast net
Subject: RE: [ NNSquad ] How a few inches become 500 miles.

George, you’re missing the point. I know I can wire around this  
problem. And of course I do. But be careful of excusing the status quo  
just because one can work around some of the problems some of the  
time. It’s an example, it’s not a problem I’m trying to solve in itself.

The problem is that if I go to my neighbor I can’t do this. I can’t  
watch the town hall meeting if it’s on one silo and I’m on another  
lest I use up my quota and/or get degraded performance.

There is indeed no reason to forward my packets between me and my  
neighbor via New York. So why must I?

And there’s no reason that if my son is using my Comcast connection he  
has to do anything special to use the printer on my Verizon-connected  
home network. Of course I can make that work too with enough effort.  
The problem with provider-assigned addresses much deeper and is one  
we’ve been wrestling with since the Domesday book in England a  
thousand years ago – how do you have identifiers that are independent  
of location and path.

The whole point of the Internet is that these aren’t special cases  
that have to be managed individually. I shouldn’t be required to use  
path-dependent protocols.

And the whole point of telecom is that I must.


From: George Ou [mailto:george_ou () lanarchitect net]
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 17:06
To: 'Bob Frankston'; fin () finseth com; nnsquad () nnsquad org; 'Dave  
Farber'; oia () lists bway net
Cc: Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com; tkoppel () comcast net
Subject: RE: [ NNSquad ] How a few inches become 500 miles.

“Today there is a real problem. I have both Comcast and Verizon. To  
get from a Comcast port to my small FTP server six inches away but  
connected to FiOS my connection travels through NY or NJ and loses 90%  
of the performance. A very long six inches.”

Bob, I would suggest that you have an engineering problem of your own  
making here.  Rather than blame Comcast and Verizon for this intra- 
home networking design flaw, redesign your home network to use Fast  
Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet between devices subnets and use a router  
that can intelligently route within the home network between your home  
networks and two ISPs using the shortest path.  There’s no reason for  
you to be forwarding your packets to either Comcast or Verizon if  
you’re trying to travel between subnets within the home.


George

From: nnsquad-bounces+george_ou=lanarchitect.net () nnsquad org [mailto:nnsquad-bounces+george_ou=lanarchitect.net () nnsquad org 
] On Behalf Of Bob Frankston
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 12:01 PM
To: fin () finseth com; nnsquad () nnsquad org; Dave Farber; oia () lists bway net
Cc: Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com; tkoppel () comcast net
Subject: [ NNSquad ] How a few inches become 500 miles.

As Craig notes “Unfortunately, traffic from your local city hall  
meeting may well travel halfway across the country and back before it  
gets to you.” Thus we should replace the requirement of "community  
access TV" with the requirement of local peering. But why not just get  
rid of the whole warped system?

Today there is a real problem. I have both Comcast and Verizon. To get  
from a Comcast port to my small FTP server six inches away but  
connected to FiOS my connection travels through NY or NJ and loses 90%  
of the performance. A very long six inches.

If a city selects Comcast Transport as its connectivity provider you  
can be sure that you'll get strong local connectivity and peering with  
nearby communities. CT would be a contractor maintaining the  
community’s common facilities and would bid against others for that  
contract. I doesn’t make sense to cede rights of way to a myriad of  
silos. That’s just like laying a separate track for each trolley  
company along each street. At least tracks would be visible and create  
outrage at the waste of space and money.

Distance doesn’t matter to the protocols but it does matter for  
performance and, far worse, it matters if the only reason for the  
complexity and overhead is a dysfunctional market model embodied in  
physical hardware.

Forcing bits to travel long distances is due to having Comcast  
Transport and Comcast Content fused into the a silo and doing the same  
for Verizon FiOS (and RCN and Verizon copper and ATT Cellular and T- 
Mobile and Verizon Wireless and Sprint and the MVNOs …). You have to  
transit within a silo to some distant land where they agree to  
exchange bits held hostage at a high price in money and in performance  
thus destroying value for no reason other than sustaining a market  
architecture that would not exist were it not protected from the  
threat of abundance (again – http://www.frankston.com/?name=AssuringScarcity) 
.

We see this with the again and again. Put two cellular phones one inch  
apart – the voice/SMS bits cannot get between them unless the signals  
can reach distant towers. Actually for some bits it’s just the  
opposite! You have to put two phones near each other to exchange  
information using IR or Bluetooth – strange when you have radios that  
can provide connectivity without regard to distance. It’s as if  
someone picked up an obfuscated C book and assumed it was guide to  
best practices.

I’ve got Vonage and ATT VoIP as line 1 and line 2 on one phone. Again  
– the bits travel the long way for no reason other than to create a  
billable event (or justify a very high flat rate). It’s all about  
billable events and nothing but billable events.

The current Internet protocols aid and abet this by being path- 
dependent rather than end-to-end. I get an IP identifier from a  
provider’s silo rather than generating my own (except for local-only  
addresses from my NAT which again give me different kinds of bits).  
Forcing the identifier to also act as a path-address reminds me of the  
1960’s when we’d put disk addresses in database records “for  
efficiency” or use octal disk addresses as user names (as on the  
PDP-10).

As our financial system suffers why are we trying so hard to assure  
profligate waste and costly hurdles by insisting on a horribly  
inefficient system that prevents us from creating our own solutions  
and takes what is already paid for and assures we can never get the  
benefits of local control and ownership. Why do we want frustrate the  
creation of new value?

Telecom – the real financial debacle. It’s like a mortgage that is  
100% interest and at a variable rate that can never ever be paid off.

Yet I’m told there is no political will for change? Is madness our due?

-----Original Message-----
From: Craig A. Finseth [mailto:fin () finseth com]
Sent: Sunday, September 21, 2008 09:54
To: Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com
Cc: Jason_Livingood () cable comcast com; tkoppel () comcast net; nnsquad () nnsquad org
Subject: Re: [ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast's FCC Filing Today

            ...
   One question is whether the cap will apply to local connectivity  
as well as
   distance. Is there a limit to how long I can watch a broadcasts of  
local
   city hall meetings? I presume the answer is "yes" and that it is a  
policy
   question.
            ...

Unfortunately, traffic from your local city hall meeting may well
travel halfway across the country and back before it gets to you.

Not a problem if you live in a major interconnect point (bay area,
Chicago, New York).  A big problem if you live in <somewhere>,
Nebraska.

This brings it around to the public policy side as well: depending
upon where the encoders are, the cable company may also bring the
video traffic along the same path.

Craig





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