Broadband Developments

Here is an opinion piece written by John Chambers CEO of Cisco.  Talk about a vision for Broadband no better to post on Broadband Developments.

President-elect Barack Obama’s ambitious economic recovery plan has a goal to create 3 million American jobs in the next two years. Broadband is a part of the answer.

Broadband has the potential to transform our country. It will create jobs in the growth sectors of our economy — jobs that are driving the collaboration and interaction economy. Obama deserves our full support as he looks to revitalize our economy. An economic stimulus package that focuses on infrastructure must put America’s broadband infrastructure at the head of the list. We have the opportunity to bring broadband to those who do not have access to it today and to dramatically improve the quality and speed of existing broadband to 21st century standards. Broadband is the highway to our future.

Obama understands the correlation between broadband and job growth and will be the first U.S. leader to execute a nationwide broadband plan that will spur innovation, productivity, growth and collaboration for generations to come.

He has discussed using the proposed stimulus package to rebuild our aging physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, water and energy systems. This is important and needed. If we want a new 21st century economy and society, he also recognizes that broadband connectivity is the additional infrastructure that is essential to our future.

Broadband’s economic power derives from two sources. The first is reach — how many people are using broadband at work, at home and in the community. The second is speed — the speeds of the connection determine the impact it has on user behavior. We are all aware of how little things have changed over the years when it comes to broadband rankings for the United States. We continue to fall behind.In 2002, TechNet, a group of technology executives that I co-founded with John Doerr and Jim Barksdale, called for 100 Mbs broadband adoption in 100 million American homes and small businesses by 2010. We are clearly not going to reach that goal, but the leadership from government that we asked for seven years ago still applies. We need to upgrade existing infrastructure to 20/50/100 Mbs and there should be tax credits provided to do this. And to prevent the disparity between the technical haves and have-nots from widening, we need funding to promote and provide broadband in unserved and underserved areas.

Including broadband in a stimulus package is not just about the longer-term vision — it will immediately create jobs, with the Communications Workers of America estimating that 97,500 jobs result from every $5 billion spent on broadband infrastructure. Longer term, an increase in broadband usage in the United States of 10 percent would add more than 2 million jobs, according to the group Connected Nation. And in California alone, increasing broadband usage could add 1.8 million jobs over the next 10 years, according to the Sacramento Regional Research Institute.

But it is more than a mere connection. Behavior is dictated by Internet speeds.

Imagine what the United States could accomplish if our broadband speeds were not just competitive, but leading-edge. Imagine what broadband could do for health care: A medical specialist in Cleveland, Ohio, could do a virtual house call via high-definition video to a homebound retiree in Henderson, Nev. We have the technology now, but we need the connectivity. Imagine applying that same technology to education and changing the very nature of the way students learn — or the way we train workers.

Our economic challenges are too dire to merely rely on Band-Aids. It’s time to broadband our economy. The innovation, the productivity and the growth that is possible with a proper broadband infrastructure is nearly limitless. The time to act is now. Doing so will not only help stabilize and stimulate a recovery but create the foundation for long-term prosperity and competitiveness.

uTorrent has released an alpha client that uses UDP for P2P traffic delivery. UDP makes up roughly 2% of all Internet traffic today, and generally isn’t used for data delivery because it doesn’t guarantee either the delivery or the quality of the data being delivered (nor is it quite as easily managed). While the migration to UDP could potentially make filtering of P2P more difficult — raising the hackles of some anti-network-neutrality ministers and ISPs — BitTorrent tells us the decision was aimed at actually making BitTorrent more friendly.

According to posts at the uTorrent forum, the new version lays uTP, the micro transport protocol, on top of UDP, which provides for better flow control and prevents the kind of TCP RST packet attacks Comcast has used to throttle upstream P2P traffic. Robb Topolski, the DSLReports user who first discovered Comcast’s packet forgery tactics, thinks the shift to uTP/UDP is a good one:
It’s a very good thing for the network. This new protocol YIELDS to other streams. In other words, it’s less aggressive. The idea, eventually, is that background file transfers are handled like — well — background transfers — similar to the way that background processes take a lighter toll on the CPU while you’re actively using the computer. P2P users have the same concerns — this change keeps their interactive uses snappy, and during crunch time it ought to help others as well.
Yet Richard Bennett, perhaps the Internet’s most vocal opponent of network neutrality, pens a piece over at The Register proclaiming that the shift will result in an Internet meltdown — and worries that network neutrality laws would prohibit ISPs from taking on this new throttling challenge. The author quietly states his case by suggesting that those who would support the use of UDP for P2P transfers (like apparently, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen), are little more than selfish junkies, mindlessly braying for the looming apocalypse:
Some of the people who use this system are spoiled children with no more concern for the greater good than junkies looking for their next fix. They can’t be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us, and the only practical means to prevent their doing so is to unleash effective management upon them. . .The best way to ensure that uTP doesn’t kill the internet is to throttle it at the source, and any law that stands in the way of ISPs exercising that level of management is deadly to the internet.
Simon Morris, head of Product Management at BitTorrent, thinks Bennett is a little confused.

While it’s true that a UDP-based P2P network will cause some problems for ISP throttling (something confirmed by our users), that isn’t the goal. “We’re doing this to implement our own more sensitive congestion control on top of UDP,” he notes. “We felt that TCP’s congestion control was problematic in that it relies on looking for packet loss as an indication of congestion. TCP spots the problem only after it has occurred.”

“By contrast, our prototype UDP-based protocol (called uTP) detects congestion by measuring transmission times between peers – if packet delivery *slows down* then we infer that congestion may be about to occur and immediately throttle back on delivery speed,” he says. “The point here is a protocol that is more sensitive, NOT a protocol that is more greedy,” insists Morris. “The idea we’d “declare war” is unfortunately sensationalist nonsense.”

Yet according to Bennett, “even the downloading fiends who haunt the message boards at Broadband Reports” can see the use of UDP for P2P transfers will result in an Internet implosion. Any thoughts, haunting downloading fiends?

Update: The reviews are in!

GigaOM notes that when it comes to Richard Bennett, “a little scaremongering can go a long way to make the case for an ISP-based network management clampdown on P2P traffic.”

Torrent Freak proclaims that a significant chunk of what Bennett’s saying simply isn’t true (but it does get the Register plenty of hits).

The Industry Standard says Bennett offers broad assumptions with few references.

Writer Robert Hallock pens an interesting explanation of TCP vs. UDP in a counter piece to Bennett, suggesting “we wait to attack the potential problem with data and evidence rather than suppose and conjecture our way into the unforgiving embrace of network non-neutrality.”

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Mashable has a good post today about the America CTO situation. What does that really mean?  Why don’t we get real broadband - faster speeds, all kinds of access wired and wireless, p2p, rural broadband,..etc.

The blog post is worth a read.  Here is a snipet of the story that I liked

For years, already, the major telecommunications firms have been receiving major subsidies to wire up the world. In some instances where the telcos have performed as they have promised, it’s proven to be a boon to the economy.  In most of the cases, though, the major telcos have taken the governmental subsidies and done very little to complete the work they were contracted for.

The first example that springs to mind is the case of AT&T and how they, as Slashdot put it, “Pillaged South Africa’s Economy.”

“For 8 years, SBC and Telekom Malaysia controlled South Africa’s only telecommunications company, Telkom. Telkom had a government granted monopoly in order for it to connect the large parts of South Africa that had been neglected under apartheid. Instead of helping, SBC abused their position and raised Telkom’s prices to be among the highest in the world. The billions they made here ultimately went to fund their AT&T merger. From the article: ‘SBC, described as “congenitally litigious”, is said to have played a major role in the failure of South Africa’s telecoms policy to develop a competitive telephone service. Under SBC’s control Telkom not only failed to meet its roll-out obligations but behaved “as a tax on industry and a drag on economic growth.”‘

Rather than act as evangelists for free market economics, they masqueraded as such elsewhere in the world while lobbying for maintained corporatist restrictions on pricing and competition in South Africa. Sure, it ended up being a net positive for AT&T, but in a short-sighted sense since it nigh-killed the broadband market for the entire country.

We don’t have to look to the other side of the world to see how badly things go awry for citizens when their government meddles on a national level with the broadband providers.

If you have a land-line still, or at least a DSL connection to the Internet, go check out one of your bills. Chances are, you’ve got something called the “Universal Service Fund” listed in your miscellaneous taxes section (or it could be abbreviated to USF). The USF is a tax created by the FCC in 1997 to meet the mandates of “Universal Service” as determined in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That act says that all ISPs and telecoms must contribute to the fund so that all schools, classrooms, health care providers, and libraries should have “advanced phone services.”

Guess who ends up footing the bill, though? You do, since the telecoms couldn’t be bothered to pay out of their own pocket, and decided to give you the privilege of paying.

So how much, exactly, got collected into the Universal Service Fund, and what did we get for that? An excellent question; one that Jeff Pulver’s guest blogger Daniel Berninger asked in the summer of 2006. You can read the whole answer over there, but the short version is not much (single digit increases in basic service penetration, and overall double-digit per customer increases in consumer costs).

How Bad Is US Broadband Deployment? by Scott Bradner, Network World is worth a read - please support this. Scott has been writing about networking for as long as I can remembering reading Network World (which is a great trade magazine).

Face it we need better Broadband (hence the name of this blog - Broadband Developments).  As an aside I am looking for regular contributors to this blog in this area - please email me if you want to contribute information (no PR releases) - john at g mail dot com

Scott posts:
Congress has passed — and the president has signed — the Broadband Data Improvement Act. It may now be possible to get some useful information about where the United States sits in the world when it comes to the deployment and adoption of broadband Internet services. If this turns out to be the case, it will be the first time we would have any real idea.

For reasons best known to itself, the FCC has for years adamantly refused to collect the data necessary to understand the true state of the deployment of broadband Internet service in the United States. Earlier this year the FCC, under the threat that Congress would order it to change its ways, did say it would collect better data in the future.

(See “FCC: Consistent to a fault, but there is a (small) hope”.) Even with the somewhat better data there was no good reason to think that the FCC would produce more useful statistics, considering its track record. Now Congress has acted and there is some additional reason to hope.

The recently adopted law is aimed at improving “the quality of Federal and State data regarding the availability and quality of broadband services and to promote the deployment of affordable broadband services to all parts of the Nation.”

The law mandates some useful ways to attain the first goal but does not do anything useful towards the second other than enable regulators to shame broadband service providers that are not doing a good job.

The law requires the FCC to compile a list of poorly served parts of the country. I guess this is so carriers in those areas can be publicly chastised for their poor behavior.

Here are Congress’ findings where it is cited as the `Broadband Data Improvement Act’.

The Congress finds the following:

• (1) The deployment and adoption of broadband technology has resulted in enhanced economic development and public safety for communities across the Nation, improved health care and educational opportunities, and a better quality of life for all Americans.

• (2) Continued progress in the deployment and adoption of broadband technology is vital to ensuring that our Nation remains competitive and continues to create business and job growth.

• (3) Improving Federal data on the deployment and adoption of broadband service will assist in the development of broadband technology across all regions of the Nation.

• (4) The Federal Government should also recognize and encourage complementary State efforts to improve the quality and usefulness of broadband data and should encourage and support the partnership of the public and private sectors in the continued growth of broadband services and information technology for the residents and businesses of the Nation.

Over at ZAYNE HUMPHREY’S BLOG he posts that Verizon is saying that they need the freedom to delay p2p packets in favor of VoIP?

Layne is sourcing an ArsTechnica story.

Finding a balance of cost, performance, and service quality depends on an optimized traffic flow, and to Lynch, this means dividing traffic into two classes: time-sensitive and everything else. Such a management technique amounts to protocol discrimination, though Verizon commits not to deal in content discrimination—all VoIP calls, from all services, will receive the same treatment. Under heavy loads, the network would prioritize the time-sensitive protocols and delay the others until capacity is available. Lynch believes that few customers would even notice the “22ms delay” in other services.

Why not look at the critical service of video delivery? Why just voice?

Comcast putting a limit on usage 250GB just opened the door on the P2P business model. GigaOm (Om) who is an authority on this subject weights in. Om nails it by saying that in the short term it might not look good but it certainly raises question about what the future might look like. I agree with Om on this. Caps are bad and possibly foreclose the future innovation. Wait it’s a free market. The answer is P2P.

P2P is not hip today but this move by Comcast opens the door for the p2p business model. Why? The innovation in acceleration and performance has to come from new innovation in the transport. Comcast can’t deny p2p after this move. They have to let it “play” (pun intended). P2P is the only way the guys like Comcast can increase user experience while offering faster performance for both Live and On-Demand programming.

It’s also a red herring to allow Comcast (in the short term) to own HD quality programming. Here Comcast doesn’t care about the net and wants the HD side of it (see NBC playbook from the Olypics - HD trumps everything).

HD is the end game and the question is will Comcast keep the broadcast franchise or will the net technologies get there fast?

From Om Malik at GigaOm: He writes…

Comcast is out defending its bandwidth caps and how they are not bad. And how 250 GB transfer is plenty and enough to do whatever we want to do. Of course, in today’s terms that is more than enough, but what happens in the future? Nevertheless, if they are going to put caps, then they need to give us what I think is an acceptable expectation: a meter.

Metered billing needs a meter we can see, use and monitor any time we desire to do so. Water and electric utilities provide that meter (regardless of whether we use it or not), so why not Comcast?

If a customer surpasses 250 GB and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month timeframe, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year. After the one year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs.

Figure out a way to tell us what our monthly usage is, and let us know if we are running up against a 250 GB cap, so that we know when to stop and not pay overage. I want to know at every single minute how much bandwidth I have used.

After all, if someone crosses the 250 GB twice in six months, they are going to get tossed out. The burden of proof lies with Comcast to prove, measure and meter to the most accurate byte of data transferred.

Another Question For Comcast: If you’re going to meter, then please let us know how you are factoring in the overhead associated with TCP/IP. Will this be included or excluded in the cap? After all, overhead includes control messages (session control, packet headers) and this can be as high as 40 percent.

This is where FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has to step up and do something. If he is going to allow Comcast to put caps in place, then the FCC needs a firm bond from Comcast saying that they wouldn’t lower the caps to, say, 150 GB or 100 GB using the same lame excuse of 1 percent people degrading the network.

You want to know why I think they are going to obfuscate the issue and fudge the numbers sooner or later using some Enron math? Just go to the FAQ page that explains their 250 GB cap decision. You will consume 250 GB in a month if you do any of the following:

* Sending 20,000 high-resolution photos,
* Sending 40 million emails;
* Downloading 50,000 songs; or
* Viewing 8,000 movie trailers.

…but then lower down on the same page, they say:

* Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
* Download 62,500 4 MB songs (at 4 MB/song)
* Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
* Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

What is it with you guys? Can’t do the math? Forget that…how about answering a simple question: How many HD movies can you download with 250 GB cap? That’s the only answer I need.

If you love a political, technical, and sometimes religious debate head over to Om Malik’s post on metered broadband. Read the post and then jump into the comments. Good stuff.

I love Om when he gets back on his broadband horse. His post and comments are worth bookmarking and taking your time to read and revisit.

Highlights:

In an effort to burnish his public image, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin has taken up a populist and politically lucrative crusade against the evil cable company Comcast and its nefarious efforts to block certain kinds of traffic.

The reality is that all this talk is nothing but hot air, a diversionary tactic that taking the attention away from a bigger, more evil problem that’s emerging for the U.S. Internet: metered broadband.

If Martin wants us to believe in him as one of the people, the 21st century Robin Hood who is looking out for the U.S. Internet consumer, then he should start by putting an end to this metered broadband nonsense right now.

Enjoy the post. This is certainly a great conversation to hear from the experts.

Robert McDowell wrote a piece for the Washington Post about the Internet Crisis. It worth reposting the story here. I’ve added some color of my own.

The year was 1987 and the Internet had a problem. It was growing (aka broken). What to do?

The loosely knit Internet engineering community rallied to improve an automated data “traffic cop” that prioritized applications and content needing “real time” delivery over those that would not suffer from delay. Their efforts unclogged the Internet and laid the foundation for what has become the greatest deregulatory success story of all time. (Of course the building blocks for the Web and other great networks).

The Internet has since weathered several such crises. Each time, engineers, academics, software developers, Web infrastructure builders and others have worked together to fix the problems. They have remained largely self-governing, self-funded and nonprofit, with volunteers acting on their own and not on behalf of their employers. No government owns or regulates them.

The Internet has flourished because it has operated under the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.

Today, a new challenge is upon us. Pipes are filling rapidly with “peer-to-peer” (”P2P”) file-sharing applications that crowd out other content and slow speeds for millions. Just as Napster produced an explosion of shared (largely pirated) music files in 1999, today’s P2P applications allow consumers to share movies. P2P providers store movies on users’ home and office computers to avoid building huge “server farms” of giant computers for this bandwidth-intensive data. When consumers download these videos, they call on thousands of computers across the Web to upload each of their small pieces. As a result, some consumers’ “last-mile” connections, especially connections over cable and wireless networks, get clogged. These electronic traffic jams slow the Internet for most consumers, a majority of whom do not use P2P software to watch videos or surf the Web.

At peak times, 5 percent of Internet consumers are using 90 percent of the available bandwidth because of the P2P explosion. This flood of data has created a tyranny by a minority. Slower speeds degrade the quality of the service that consumers have paid for and ultimately diminish America’s competitiveness globally.

While the Federal Communications Commission are trying to spur more competitive build-out of vital “last mile” facilities, especially fiber and wireless platforms, this congestion will not be resolved merely by building fatter and faster pipes.

Last summer, a new nongovernmental organization, the P4P Working Group, was formed to find a solution. The group has already field-tested dramatically increased delivery speeds of P2P content over cable networks (up 235 percent) and other networks (up 898 percent in some cases). It is working with industry and consumers to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.”

Such dynamic work is progressing without a government mandate or regulatory framework. Soon, however, that could change.

Since the fall, the FCC has been considering allegations filed by public interest groups that cable operator Comcast violated FCC rules by “managing” or “interfering with” the upstream flow of certain P2P video applications, namely those of a company called BitTorrent. The allegations boil down to a suspicion that Comcast was motivated not by a need to manage its network but by a desire to discriminate against BitTorrent for anticompetitive reasons. Comcast maintains that any interference was imperceptible to consumers, occurred in minuscule amounts of time, and was limited to peak congestion periods and areas. Comcast and BitTorrent settled their dispute in March; in fact, they issued a statement saying in part that “these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention.”

Despite this settlement, some are calling for the FCC to rule that Comcast’s actions were illegal and should be punished. Others contend that the FCC has no enforceable rules that apply to such situations and that the issue should be addressed through a rule-making proceeding, with an opportunity for public comment, or through congressional legislation. We have examined the arguments on both sides and are poised to decide the matter this week. But regardless of what that ruling stipulates, the issue of what constitutes appropriate Internet network management will be debated for some time.

Our Internet economy is the strongest in the world (debatable but not the fastest). It got that way not by government fiat but because interested parties worked together toward a common goal. As a worldwide network of networks, the Internet is the ultimate “wiki” environment — one that we all share, build, pay for and shape. Millions endeavor each day to keep it open and free. Since its early days as a government creation, it has migrated away from government regulation.

If we choose regulation over collaboration, we will be setting a precedent by thrusting politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions. Another concern is that as an institution, the FCC is incapable of deciding any issue in the nanoseconds that make up Internet time. And asking government to make these decisions could mean that every few years the ground rules would change based on election results. The Internet might grind to a halt in such a climate. It would certainly die of clogged arteries if network owners had to seek government permission before serving their customers by managing surges of information flow.

A better model would allow collaborative groups to continue to do what they have done for years. If they can’t reach an agreement, — which has never happened — then government could examine the situation and act accordingly. Sometimes shining sunlight on issues produces amazingly beneficial effects, and the public interest groups that raised the BitTorrent matter should be praised for doing so. Yet before venturing into the unknown, we should remember something President Bill Clinton said in 1997: “Governments should encourage industry self-regulation wherever appropriate and support the efforts of private-sector organizations to . . . facilitate the successful operation of the Internet.” What we do, or don’t do, will affect tomorrow’s networks. Let’s stick with what works and encourage collaboration over regulation.

Editors Note: we need more broadband and we need faster access. With advances at the computing power and HD like video it’s a matter of time that the US advantage diminishes (at all levels).

I saw this on CNNMoney today. AT&T is asking federal regulators to provide a stricter review of Sprint’s acquisition of Clearwire.

Sprint and Clearwire announced their intention to merge last month, saying the venture would facilitate a national wireless Internet network that would operate on a block of airwaves partly reserved for schools, cities and other nonprofits.

Indeed, late last year AT&T sold Clearwire the rights to some of the spectrum Clearwire will use for its WiMAX network. The issue for AT&T is fairness. When it acquired Dobson Communications last year, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) evaluation considered airwaves that AT&T bought rights to, but which won’t be available until next February.

AT&T charges that when it comes to evaluating the Sprint-Clearwire deal, the FCC and other regulatory bodies are not considering airwaves Clearwire has yet to access.

Ok complete bullshit. We need more broadband in this country for rural, urban, and schools both wired and wireless.

This is a competitive issue for our country. AT&T needs to stop this behavior now.