Why all the fuss? The best way to look at it (and the thing that ISP's are worried about) is not so much the stuff that people are doing today, but the changes that are on the horizon to how media gets delivered. Do any of you remember the old days, when kids were respectful, policemen kept order, the summers where always hot, and music and books where things you bought in shops? God knows how people got them into their kindles, but hey.
To the ISP's these things are not huge deals. An eBook is a few hundred kilobytes, an album is say 18-25Mb. And the key point I guess is that they are one off transactions. A typical user is only going to download them occasionally.
TV and video are next. At the moment we go to the video store, or maybe occasionally rent videos from iTunes or whoever, but primarily we still watch live TV via traditional methods. The ISP business in the UK got a real wakeup call when the BBC launched their iPlayer application, which allowed people to ignore shedules, and watch their tv whenever they wanted. Unlike PVR type systems, the content is delivered in demand from the cloud, rather than the user storing the media locally.
This hurt their networks really badly. But what really scares them is the question of what happens when this becomes the mainstream. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when google announce Google TV. A set top box which allows people to scour the Internet for tv content (no doubt with the help of YouTube acting as a CDN). Moderatly scary. Then the fact that they've tied up with Sony to build it into their TVs.. Scary. Also the story around the campfire is that Sony can hit the switch on however many million PS3's are out there and turn them into into GoogleTV set top boxes. Oh and Microsoft can do something similar with the Xbox. Terrifying.
The Internet as its designed today (a unicast based, far away datacentre centric network) simply couldn't cope. It would die horribly. It simply can't do that huge sustained volume. And this is why they want to be able to limit it. They have to.
Now in reality, this is a when not if scenario. So in reality, someone (IETF?) needs to start planning for this, because it's perfectly possible to do, it just takes a different design than we have right now for how traffic gets for A to B across the Internet. Unlike when I say 'someone should do it' at work, i doubt it'll end up being me. However I do suspect CDNs will become extremely important.
The main conclusion I came to over the weekend was to buy some Akami stock! I know this will end up with big nasty corporate telephone companies controlling what we get access to, rather than the current system where Rupert Murdoch does, but hey, whoever said speech was free right...
Location:Dublin, Ireland
7 comments:
"The Internet as its designed today ... simply couldn't cope. It would die horribly. It simply can't do that huge sustained volume. And this is why they want to be able to limit it. They have to."
Says who? Can you cite any research, or even rough estimates, to support this prediction? Alarmists have been foretelling of an impending "exabyte flood" or such similar nonsense for years, yet the Internet manages to keep humming along.
Network neutrality pertains simply to disallowing favoritism of a particular type or types of traffic over others. Service providers are inclined to dislike this, because it removes their ability to arbitrarily throttle or block traffic when customers begin to fully utilize the service which they have been sold.
Before I joined an ISP I held the position that net neutrality should be a given. I felt that ISP's should not be allowed manipulate the users traffic in any way.
Once I joined an ISP and began to tackle the problems that net neutrality bering, my position changed.
Today's ISP business models are built around an average user rate. That is with X customers, we need Y capacity. This rate is increasing at an alarming rate, when ARPU is decreasing due to competition. While Edge costs (Transit, Peering etc.) are decreasing along with ARPU, the network costs are increasing.
The network is under constant upgrade to handle the increase in traffic. But when you start adding TV to the typical users usage, these costs skyrocket. As internet TV becomes mainstream, users are expecting their access to this content to be free (i.e. included in their internet connectivity). Clearly adding a usage pattern of orders of magnitude higher bitrates than they currently use is going to cause the ISP's to have problems.
As I see it, there are 4 ways that the ISP industry can/are/will/should use to change their business model.
1. Increase base package costs - This is unlikely to happen as competition doesn't allow them to charge higher base package rates, as they would likely churn their customer base and have no customers.
2. Metered bandwidth - New packages are being invented which start us on the road to metered bandwidth. It has started with low bandwidth caps (i.e. 20GB for $10/month, 50GB for $20 etc.), but will probably ultimately end up as metered just like your utility power (a $ per GB rate).
3. Tiered services - $10 for basic internet access, $20 for base "premium" video services at 2.5mbps, $30 for everything. - While I don't agree with tiering for voice (which is competition killing), the idea of increased prices for access video services (Hulu, Global iPlayer, GoogleTV) means that the user of these services pay, leaving the base package costs low enough for the Mom+Pop who just want to check if there's any new email from the Grandkids.
4. Producer pays - this involves charging the content producers to allow access of their service to the ISP users. This is the most contentious as it changes the way the (highly strung and regulated) ISP industry works with Transit, Peering and paid Peering. It reverses the direction of payment and gives the content producers too much power over the ISP ("If you don't accept our offer, we'll cut you off").
To my mind throttling and DPI is an arms race that no-one will win. It's not feasible long term and is a stop-gap until a new model rises to the top and overall acceptance.
To put some real world figures on it. From the ISP I worked for, and ran the team who had to scale the network to deal with the changes in user behaviour I give you the following stats.
2 years ago, the average user bandwidth was 80kbps. (Total traffic from Transit, Peering, Content etc. and divinding by the number of active users)
1 year ago, this was 200kbps. Today it's 550kbps.
That's a 7 fold increase in traffic in 24months.
The curve at the moment is a hockey stick - and it's not stopping any time soon.
To combat this, we brought in bandwidth caps to try and stop people from gaming the system. This hit at personal pride and lost us a lot of favour with our customers, but was necessary to ensure the survival of the ISP. (else everything would have come crumbling down) Unfortunately, this only bought 6 months of growth at current rates.
Forced Net Neutrality will kill the ISP industry. It ties their hands and leaves them at the mercy of their customers. The networks are being expanded at a faster rate but the ISP does not have a customer base that are willing to pay for the increased bandwidth that they consume.
Some ISPs are embracing TV and Video. Mine has recently released an IPTV/VoD service which I will be subscribing to soon. If customers want it and are prepared to pay for it, the ISPs will provide it ;)
@stephenc: "...we brought in bandwidth caps to try and stop people from gaming the system."
By which you mean approaching the downstream and upstream limits that are advertised for their service plan? What you consider "gaming the system" customers consider "getting what I pay for."
At any rate, there's a simple solution: if an infrastructure can only support 1 Mbps sustained throughput to or from a user, don't sell the service as supporting ten times that. Sell it as a 1 Mbps CIR ("at minimum", not "up to") service with maybe a little room for burst.
@stretch
>> By which you mean approaching the downstream and upstream limits that are advertised for their service plan? What you consider "gaming the system" customers consider "getting what I pay for."
By which I mean that 2.7TB a month was considered excessive and outside the realms of fair use. The caps we brought in were over 300GB/month, with an option for an additional 300GB for less than $10.
It ensured that people who were downloading the entire internet did not do so on a residential line to the ultimate detriment of everybody on the network.
There is a sense that buying 24mbps access to the internet should allow you to download at that rate 24x7x365 for no additional charge than if you use it for an hour a day. This is not what residential Internet access models were built on.
If that's what people want, there are other packages (business) that are tailored more towards this (low/no contention, no caps).
>> if an infrastructure can only support 1 Mbps sustained throughput to or from a user, don't sell the service as supporting ten times that
The "Market" won't allow it.
Why would the average user pay for a package that only allows is rated at 1Mbps? To advertise packages like that would be suicide to an ISP. Network engineers understand a CIR and what that entails, an average consumer (or even non-networking techie) would not.
The ISP industry is in flux at the moment. I believe that stopgap measures (such as caps) are here until the new business model surfaces. I think it's going to be metered bandwidth, and internet access becomes just another utility.
@#21217
The ISP I worked for was one of the major proponents of IPTV. They had both a small scale FTTB deployment and a large scale IPTV network over DSL. The constraints on the network were very different than a sort of GoogleTV IPTV system. And everything was under the ISP's control. From the customers that were eligble (line quality/distance etc.) to the bitrate of the streams. The live stations were all multicast - 100 channels was 250mbps. But mainly the scaling of VOD was managed by the ISP themselved. Programmes could be cached locally and storage engines could be placed closer to the customer.
The problem a GoogleTV brings to the ISP is the lack of control. It starts with Youtube bitrates, followed by YouTube HD. Then comes video encoded on the fly (which has a much higher bitrate) and Google then launches live HD which runs at 10Mbps. And it all runs as unicast. Not having engineering control of the traffic passing through your network means you can't plan ahead. This means that you're always at least 1 step behind your customer and having to plan, develop and deploy publically (which never goes well).
The trick here would be for Google (or whoever it ends up being) to work with the ISP to deploy caching servers, local access, early access to plans etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google bought Akamai or Limelight or BitGravity or random CDN in the future.
@stephenc
Again, if the infrastructure can't support those speeds, don't offer those speeds. There is no technical need for an additional absolute (transfer) cap to be placed on an already restricted (speed) service.
Granted, the term CIR is esoteric, but the average residential customer no doubt better comprehends the concept of a guaranteed minimum speed versus how many gigabytes of transfer they're going to consume next month.
Here's a great article that examines TWC's recent shenanigans with transfer caps and the money behind them.
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