The Technical Side of Network Neutrality
I’ve been wading through the posts on this issue at Slashdot. This one has some of the best explanations on why the whole issue has been:
- manufactured by the Telecomms in the first place.
- grossly misrepresented by those same Telecomms.
The explanation of what was done, posted by Arivanov is this:
Traffic is carried between two autonomous systems on the Internet if there is a transit or peering agreement. In your example either Covad or Comcast is paying for transit from AT&T. Otherwise they will not get the routing table entries for each other. AT&T is definitely not doing it for free. If Covad and Comcast were directly connected it could have been either a peering agreement under which they exchange traffic at no cost to each other or once again a transit (one of them buying from the other).
What is happening here and what Net neutrality is all about is that in the US the public peering points used to be run by big telcos like MCI (f.e MAE East or MAE West). MCI and friends deliberately made them suck really bad around 7 years ago so that people switch to buying transit. The telcos themselves switched to private peering agreements. Thus, the tier 1 cartel creation was complete (it started to coalesce around 3-4 years prior to that). As a result in the US an ISP like the ones you mention usually has 2-3 transit connections for which it pays and very few private peerings where it exchanges traffic.
Compared to that in EU a similar ISP has 2-3 transit connections and 20-30+ peering agreements across public peering points. The private peerings can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This changes the overall traffic pattern considerably and most of the traffic is going across peering points not across a tier 1 telco like AT&T. As a collegue of mine jokingly put it a few years back: “The UK Internet backbone consists of one floor in a building in Docklands”. In other words the Linx has become the backbone. As a result the transit ISPs can no longer hold their customers for ransom with QoS threats the way the Tier 1 cartel is doing it in the US.
Futher to that, the fix for the no-net-neutrality is trivial. Someone with the resources to do this who does not have the conflict of interest (the way MCI used to) should reestablish the public peering points and run them using the same model and rules as the successfull ones on this side of the pond like Linx, DGIX, etc. The resources to run this are a drop in the ocean for the likes of Google and Yahoo and it will restore the healthy network economics in less then half a year. In fact it will be cheaper than moaning and trying to graft congresskriters.
And if they do not do this the telcos will get them by their balls and their wallets will quickly follow. Frankly, I would be surprised if we do not see Google Peering or Yahoo Peering by the end of the year
It’s also clear that the Telecomms aren’t the only ones passing Misinformation. This Ars Technica Article points to gross misrepresentation of how peering and bandwidth work in an article in the Washington (DC) Times, a newspaper many of Congress Members read. Whether that’s deliberate obfuscation or simply a gross lack of research on the part of the reporter is another question that could use answering.
Over and over again the Telecomms say that Google and Microsoft have to pay for their bandwidth. What they don’t say is that Google and Microsoft ALREADY pay for their bandwidth. Tier 1 and Tier 3 connections to the backbone are not exactly cheap. They aren’t the only ones who pay. So do folks who pay ISPs when they access the internet. So do small site owners like me. We ALL pay for bandwidth. So this statement by the Telecomms is nothing but smoke and mirrors so they can extort money by controlling the gates.
All I can say is that I hope the Senate realizes that passage of this legislation without Network Neutrality protection could see big changes in the Senate when seats come up for re-election. And if that happens I hope Arivanov is right, and this all blows up in the Telecomms’ faces. If traffic is rerouted around them, and consumers start to look elsewhere for the unregulated access they’ve become used to, then that high speed “premier tier” access the Telecomms are fighting for won’t be worth much, will it?
Technorati Tags: Net Neutrality, Public Peering, Tier 1 Cartel, transit connection, Senate, bandwidth
June 17th, 2006 at 1:39 am
I have a different view of net neutrality……
Asking FOR government regulation of the internet to protect against the threat of monopolists just seems like opening up a can of worms. Is balkanization really so bad anyway? It seems more likely to foster the development of new technologies and business models that an internet in permanent homeostasis.
June 17th, 2006 at 8:40 am
The point being that this regulation would NOT be new. The network was neutral from its inception, BY LAW, and it worked fine. They want to fix something that isn’t broken.
You say it seems more likely to foster development of new technologies but that’s not the truth, as an article in the Bangor News points out. “The network operators’ plans to violate network neutrality to create tiered networks will only inject more complexity, and cost into operating networks and at the same time create incompatible networks with no standards for performance. And while quality network access will cost more, the resulting infrastructure will be technically capable of far less, diminishing the United States’ traditional leadership role in the development of Internet technologies . . . For example, today, students and faculty at the University of Maine in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and other research labs and schools are engaged in developing new life-changing technologies like those in the areas of biomedical engineering. With the two-tiered Internet being proposed, what may be the fast lane for the University of Maine, may be the slow lane for the NIH rendering collaboration opportunities futile.”
The last time we gave the Telecomms tax incentives to build out the network in 1996 they used the money for their bottom line and didn’t spend a dime on “putting broadband in every home.” Instead those who in rural areas are as disenfranchised as ever, while European and Japanese broadband users pay MUCH LESS for better quality broadband and have many more choices of providers. And a huge chunk of that money went to lobbying Congress for ways to protect their bottom line even more. They’re spending OUR tax dollars to screw us. That pisses me off.
June 19th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Net neutrality ensures that websites like this don’t have to use the “country roads” while the big corporate websites use the “superhighways”. It sounds to me like you’re shooting yourself in a foot for a little ad revenue.