The Network Systems research group of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems recently published a cool little online tool called Glasnost. It tests for BitTorrent traffic manipulation.

I’m not providing a link to the tool mostly because the institute – recently popular from Slashdot – seems to have been hijacked by malware that is causing pop-up windows to appear. Some of the pop-ups are pornographic – so I wouldn’t go checking out the site at work. Still, the basic idea is pretty damn cool.

In addition to testing for BitTorrent blocking, you can also get a pretty accurate bandwidth and latency reading. I have no idea if this program can be modified to keep WAN service providers honest and get a real measure of latency on a WAN, but the source code has been released to the public and anyone can use it.

But most people will just use it to check to see if their ISP does any BitTorrent traffic manipulation.

There is a bit of irony to the project as well; Glasnost is named after the well known economic and political reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and de facto last ruler of the Soviet Union. He opened up Russia to criticism from within.

The Planck Institute’s Glasnost has been gathering data on which ISPs are blocking or throttling BitTorrent transmissions. A copy of a map on which that data was plotted is found below – the black dots are tested connections that have no throttling, the red dots are tested connections that have throttling. I think I’ll just let the map speak for itself. (Click on the map for a larger version)

The raw numbers on the site confirm what is on the map. 889 total ISPs were tested. 14 of those had some sort of BitTorrent blocking. 10 of those were located in the United States. That’s 10 out of 199 – or a little over 5%.

The only other countries that have any sort of BitTorrent blocking ISPs are Canada (1 out of 99), Ireland, (1 out of 7), Malaysia (1 out of 2), and Singapore (1 out of 6). All the countries that were part of the former Soviet Union, and tested, came out with no blocking whatsoever.

Glasnost seems to be an appropriate name.

Editorial
by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Today (May 6, 2008) the House Telecommunications subcommittee is meeting to debate network neutrality legislation; the ramifications of which are likely to be far reaching and quite controversial no matter what the conclusions are.

Neither this blog’s editorial stance nor the position of NetQoS is to endorse or denounce any particular piece of network neutrality legislation. But that does not mean that there are not deeper issues that the debate over Net Neutrality is part of, nor does that mean that where aren’t some more fundamental truths that we cannot agree on.

Richard Stallman at MIT
--Credit: Sam Ogden

The only problem with this is that this isn’t a software development blog – we deal with networking. So I wrote an essay to him about what I felt were the moral issues behind the network neutrality debate – something I personally feel has a moral component.

I’m printing some of our conversation below. Now, this is not a debate in the classic sense – we agree on many things and disagree on others; and what I am trying to do is not so much to convince our readership of a position, but rather to convince our readership to think about this issue philosophically, and to join into our conversation – whether via the comments section here or elsewhere.

EDITOR BRIAN BOYKO: …Just as you believe that free software is a moral right, I happen to think that effective and efficient networks are a free speech issue. Throughout history, improvements in the quality of life – whether through technology or social activism – have been proportional to the abilities of people to communicate. Europe suffered 1000 years of the dark ages until Arabic scrolls allowed them to recapture the lost wisdom of the Greeks. Technological development booms with every innovation in communication; the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet.

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system; I believe that Metcalfe’s law can be applied to humanity as a whole – that the value of us as a species is proportional to the square of the number of us who are in communication with each other.

For these reasons I believe that open and effective communication is a fundamental human right. Now, as I believe communication is a human right, the only limit one should have on their ability to communicate should be when that communication harms someone else’s right to communicate.

RICHARD STALLMAN’S RESPONSE: It is hard for me to accept that, as stated, because it would imply that until the 1990s all governments were acting unjustly no matter what they did. That cannot be justice.

I think it that the term "human right" can only properly apply to matters of not hurting other people. Thus, it is abuse of language to speak of the "human right" to have food to eat. I think states have a duty to provide food to the hungry, and more generally, to operate a welfare system to help the poor and disadvantaged. Perhaps we have reached the point where wealthy states also have a duty to provide broadband to everyone. But that is a different kind of duty from that of respecting rights.

It is easy to imagine a situation in which there is insufficient supply of food for everyone to eat. But there cannot be an insufficient supply of freedom of speech to go around.

BRIAN BOYKO: But bandwidth is a limited resource. It is entirely possible for some types of traffic to overwhelm others, and this is not an exaggeration; at NetQoS we see this happening on corporate networks all the time.

Right now, Network Neutrality proponents believe in the idea of a “dumb” network. Yet, this does not reflect the realities of the situation; if UDP traffic (VoIP, Gaming, Streaming Live Media) is on the same pipe as TCP traffic without some sort of limitations on the traffic in place, the UDP traffic will eventually overwhelm the TCP traffic entirely, blocking it out.

The scenario that Net Neutrality opponents trot out of heavy users degrading the quality of communication for light users is entirely plausible. Overhyped, to be sure, but plausible.

On the other hand, this does not in any way make the anti-neutrality position in any way correct. Neutrality detractors often argue for solutions that are worse than the problem. Some want to block certain types of traffic – BitTorrent is seen as the perpetual scapegoat – others want to limit the amount of data that people can download, or charge them more for more data. But data is unlimited. Given enough time and enough reliability, I could download a GNU/Linux distribution over a 2800 baud modem. Data is not the issue; bandwidth – or the amount of data that anyone could download at any one time – is.

RICHARD STALLMAN: I think it is legitimate to give small transfers priority over big ones. I do not understand why UDP traffic would overwhelm TCP traffic, but I have no objection to giving TCP priority over UDP if that is useful -- because anybody could, feasibly, use either one to talk with you.

I also see nothing wrong with charging you as a client more for more bandwidth.

What I object to is that your ISP privileges some sites over others when you, as a client, access them -- either explicitly, or indirectly as a consequence of something else. If your ISP does that, it is not working honestly for you.

As mentioned above; this is not so much an endorsement of any position as a hope that we can start talking about these philosophical issues openly. (If you have any problem with the CAPTCHA, feel free to e-mail me directly at brian.boyko@netqos.com and I will be happy to publish your comments.)

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released their 2008 report comparing countries around the world in broadband access, speed, and price; the United States comes in at 15 out of 30. 

Every year since 2001, the United States has fallen further behind in broadband access.  We are now being beaten by Australia.

Last month, we released an editorial entitled: “U.S. falling behind in broadband; enough is enough.” We ended that column with the following words:

What I’d like to see are articles talking about how Americans are trying to solve the broadband problem – not articles dwelling further about how bad things have gotten. 

I don’t have any panaceas, but if you know of something – or have an idea, feel free to leave a comment below.

The report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation actually does propose a number of solutions to increase broadband adoption in the U.S.  Here are some takeaways from the report:

• The United States poor performance is roughly about 25 percent to blame on poor policy, about 75 percent on environmental issues like the distribution of homes in suburbia and exurbia, as well as the very long copper loop lengths that such an arrangement necessitate.


• The culture of Wall Street also plays a large part – Japan’s NTT faces less pressure to continually post quarterly profits; as such they can plan on a more long-term basis.  The United States focus on quarterly performance discourages investment in infrastructure that will not show a profit in 90 days.


• Support at the highest levels of government for broadband correlates positively to broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing.


• Competition between providers both inter and intra-modal usually correlates positively to  broadband adoption, speed, and low pricing – but not always.


• There is an upper ceiling on broadband penetration in the U.S.; as only two thirds of American households have computers, the maximum broadband penetration can be is 66%. 

And here are some of the recommendations:

To encourage the development of broadband infrastructure (supply) in the United States, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take the following steps:

1. Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation.

2. Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks.

3. Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available.

4. Reform the federal Universal Service Fund program to extend support for rural broadband to all carriers, and consider providing the funding through a reverse auction mechanism.

5. Fund a national program to co-fund state-level broadband support programs, such as Connect Kentucky or North Carolina e-NC Authority.

6. Promote the widespread use of a national, user-generated, Internet-based broadband mapping system that would track location, speed, and price of broadband.

7. State and local governments should take action to make it easier for providers to deploy broadband services, including making it easier to access rights-of-way.

To encourage the growth of consumer demand for broadband, we recommend that U.S. policymakers take these steps:

8. Support initiatives around the nation to encourage broadband usage and digital literacy.

9. Fund a revitalized Technology Opportunities Program, with a particular focus on the development of nationally scalable Web-based projects that address particular social needs, including law enforcement, health care, education, and access for persons with disabilities.

10. Exempt broadband Internet access from federal, state, and local taxes.

11. Support new applications, including putting more public content online, improving e-government, and supporting telework, telemedicine, and online learning programs.

What are your thoughts on these recommendations?

We've recently covered Bell Canada throttling P2P service. Today, in this podcast, we speak to Professor Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, regarding the controversial move by Bell Canada to use traffic shaping on wholesale service providers.

A transcript of this podcast will be provided at the earliest opportunity.

I'll be frank - I couldn't think of a good idea for an article today. There are a couple of interesting links in the news, of course, which I could share with you. And we will get to those in a second, but…

…truth is, I wanted to get a little introspective about things.

This blog is based on Movable Type v.3, and while we can talk about what I should have done, switching to a different system, such as WordPress really didn't make a whole lot of sense.

The one problem that MT had was that we were getting deluged with spam. Hundreds of spam messages a day.

Now, there is a setting that is supposed to catch junk posts. However, this was worse than useless, as it didn't catch a great deal of the junk messages - and it was classifying some good messages as junk mail. In fact, I think it might have been classifying most good messages as junk mail, which may be one of the reasons that we didn't get many comments on this blog for - oh, the first 16 months or so.

A few weeks ago, we moved to a CAPTCHA based system, using ReCAPTCHA. This has been working well - we've gotten more comments, more frequently, and spam is almost entirely gone. Yeah, I know CAPTCHAs are a pain, but it's the only solution we can think of at this time.

Still, 16 months of bad comment moderation may have discouraged regular readers from becoming regular commenters. What I'd like to ask is that, if you've tried to comment in the past but got discouraged, try it now. And if it still doesn't work, for whatever reason, feel free to send me an e-mail to my work address, brian.boyko@netqos.com. I really could use your suggestions for stories to investigate or issues in technology to talk about.

That said, here are those interesting links:

New York Times: Hopes for Wireless Cities Fade as Internet Providers Pull Out:

EarthLink announced on Feb. 7 that "the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company's strategic direction." Philadelphia officials say they are not sure when or if the promised network will now be completed.

For Cesar DeLaRosa, 15, however, the concern is more specific. He said he was worried about his science project on global warming.

"If we don't have Internet, that means I've got to take the bus to the public library after dark, and around here, that's not always real safe," Cesar said, seated in front of his family's new computer in a gritty section of Hunting Park in North Philadelphia. His family is among the 1,000 or so low-income households that now have free or discounted Wi-Fi access through the city's project, and many of them worry about losing access that they cannot otherwise afford. Philadelphia officials say service will not be disconnected.

"We expect EarthLink to live up to its contract," said Terry Phillis, the city's chief information officer.

The problem was that EarthLink's plans required more routers than they initially predicted, which makes me wonder if those predictions were tested on smaller scales first. However, there is no problem with the technology - it performs as advertised. The problem is that there's no real clear way to make a profit from that technology - which, to me, makes it an ideal service that the municipality should provide, rather than outsourcing it to a private company.

George Ou: Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control:

George Ou at ZDNet claims that "swarming" is causing a significant bandwidth problem, and goes to great lengths to explain why, in a four page article.

Simply by opening up 10 to 100 TCP streams, P2P applications can grab 10 to 100 times more bandwidth than a traditional single-stream application under a congested Internet link. Since all networks have a bottleneck somewhere, a small percentage of Internet users utilizing P2P can hog the vast majority of resources at the expense of other users. The following diagram illustrates the multi-stream exploit in action where User A hogs more and more bandwidth over User B by opening more and more TCP streams.

But as I read it, it seemed a bit dubious to me. After all, if my multiple TCP-stream connection on my home computer allowed me to have multiple bandwidth links, wouldn't that mean that a download on BitTorrent of a Linux distribution operating at max capacity would be faster than a single TCP stream and FTP connection to a server? In practice, I've found that both speeds are roughly equal - except when there's a lot of demand on the server side; like the first few days after a new Ubuntu version comes out. Then the multiple TCP streams come in handy because they are coming from multiple TCP connections to different locations. But it's impossible for the multiple TCP connections to take up more bandwidth than had been allocated by the service provider under their QoS policies.

Where there is some validation to this is when the pipe gets completely congested to the point that the available bandwidth per user is less than the bandwidth allocation provided by the ISP to the individual users. In other words, it only occurs when the provider has under-provisioned for the network demand and is delivering less than promised to begin with.

Ou suggests an update to the TCP/IP stack that prevents this problem, but for ISPs, the solution is simpler. Either add more bandwidth so that you can deliver the service promised, or promise less if you can't deliver.

PC World: Tech Workers favor McCain, Obama:

Not getting into politics, but this little fact from the article is interesting:

The survey, of 600 self-identified IT workers, found that 27 percent have used the Internet to contribute to a political campaign. By comparison, less than 0.3 percent of U.S. residents have contributed more than US$200 to a U.S. political campaign during the 2008 election cycle.

Which implies that the techies, who by definition are likely to be Internet savvy, are highly politically motivated and therefore very interested in events from the 2008 presidential race.

Hmm, did you experience a bump in recreational network traffic around the time of Obama's speech on race?

Verizon and NBC are working on serving up TV shows to home computers. The problem is, high definition video, (and I've done some HD video work for the Web - shameless plug), takes a whole mess of bandwidth.

Now, the obvious solution for NBC would be to move to some sort of peer-to-peer distribution system, right? I mean, it works for Linux distros.

The problem is that a normal peer-to-peer connection doesn't distinguish between the cheap local links - that is, links on the same ISP, in roughly the same geographic area - from the expensive remote links. So while P2P provides a more cost effective solution, it doesn't provide the most cost-effective solution for the ISP.

A third party, Pando, has developed a P2P system for pre-authorized, pre-approved content, and has come up with a way to force peer to peer connections to look for local nodes first. This increase the efficiency of the system, lowers the cost, and generally increases the performance of the streaming/downloading video.

This is exactly the type of thing we talk about when we say that how the application is coded can have a huge impact on the application performance over the WAN. Sometimes instead of needing more bandwidth, you need to find a way to make the apps work more efficiently.

In this case, decentralized P2P systems developed after the destruction of Napster. Though they were much less likely to get shut down by the RIAA, they were also much less efficient. This dominated development of P2P applications for years. But for offering only pre-authorized content, a centralized system - especially one that takes advantage of the structure of the physical network, makes a certain bit of sense.

NBC will be offering Verizon customers their shows via Pando's P2P service - which they're calling P4P, later this year. The name is a logical outgrowth, P2P, or "peer to peer," versus P4P, or "peer for peer." P3P was disregarded because it sounded too much like PCP. And if a kid with a lisp goes around school saying: "I downloaded the latesth Methallica album on P3P" and a teacher hears: "I downloaded the latest Metallica album on PCP," well, that's just not going to be a story that ends well, now, is it?

There's only one problem with Pando's plan: Each ISP will have to give up information about its subscribers in order to participate - that is, the Pando platform requires knowing which nodes are "local" and which nodes are "remote" in order to optimize for the local connections:

For other ISPs to reap the benefits Verizon did in the test, they too would have to share information about their networks with file-sharing companies, and that they normally keep that information close to their chests.

''That's one of the objectives we have to solve -- how are we going to consolidate this data and distribute it?'' Pasko said, adding that the result of the test gives ISPs plenty of incentive to collaborate.

(Okay, maybe there's two problems: No offense to NBC, but when your biggest hit is a veritable case study in game theory… you need some new shows.)

Windows Server 2008 officially launched today with little fanfare; but the new enterprise-class operating system has been eagerly awaited by people who eagerly await operating systems, instead of going out and having a good time with their lives.

NetworkWorld has a thorough review of the W2K8 OS up on their site, but spends a bit of time tracking the performance of the network input output in various tests.

We tested network I/O performance using both emulated I/O and various traffic/assault tests (see How we did it) and found Windows 2008 Server performance has improved - and especially improved when Vista is the client….

The new stacks also have the ability to dynamically respond to communications latency in network connections as they possess the ability to dynamically change TCP packet window size, which allows a communication channel to be more efficiently stuffed with data.

In our testing we found that under light loads, the effects in terms of speed of tasks like copying folders, streaming media and loading complex Web pages aren't strongly demonstrated, but the effects under heavy loads, however, favors performance for Vista, strongly. Depending on the mixture of I/O (but pronounced under streaming media and heavy file copying), Vista can be as much as 43% faster than Windows XP SP2 in copying operations and 18% faster in opening concurrent streams.

This also means that there's a two-class affinity for clients of Windows 2008 Server Editions - Vista and everyone else, including Windows XP SP2, MacOS (we used 10.4.10 and 10.5.2) or other SAMBA clients that use SAMBA 3.0.2+ connection methods. If you have a client with the new stack, you're more efficient, and, therefore faster under higher loads, but you're a second-class citizen if your stack isn't up to date.

What I'd like to know is what, specifically, makes W2K8-server/Vista-client combinations so powerful. Is it just the compound TCP protocol? Are there kernel optimizations for network data processing? (I don't have the technical knowledge to address those questions, I'm hoping that my readers will be able to share their theories and the results of any tests they may run.)

At any rate, while W2K8 is a significant milestone release, good or ill, the history of server software distribution usually means a slow rollout period - to the point where naming your operating system by year becomes almost a bitter irony; chances are most companies who use W2K3 will want to roll out W2K8 in 2009 at the earliest.

With mysteries abounding about the undersea cables cut in the Middle East, Network Performance Daily talked to Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst at TeleGeography, a market research firm specializing in telecommunications supply, demand, and pricing. We wanted to get to the bottom of what's happening with the undersea cables and widespread network outages, and see if there's any truth to the various rumors floating around.

Network Performance Daily: Could you tell me a little bit about the effects of the undersea Internet cable cuts?

Schoonover: The undersea cables that were cut are part of the global network and in fact a heavily used part of it. And as such when they were cut, it limited the amount of capacity connecting the Middle East to Europe. I'm specifically referring to the cuts on January 30th - the first two. And because of that, the Internet and things that relied on the communications to Europe, you know, phone traffic and business-to-business type communications were severely hampered until the carriers that were affected were able to find alternative routing.

Network Performance Daily: When they were able to find alternative routing - was that immediate? Did the traffic find they couldn't get connectivity and just routed around it, or did someone have to pull a switch somewhere?

Someone had to pull a switch. With this amount of capacity, in terms of percentage, there's not that level of restoration available on the direct route. So, for instance, I know an affected carrier that has been quite vocal about the things they have done to restore capacity to their customers - even to the point of having to enter into some short-term contracts to transit traffic around the other side of the world, you know, via India, Sinagpore, Japan to the U.S.

So it does take a little bit of time. And each carrier that was affected responded a little differently in a little different time as well. So anywhere between a few hours to a few days to get service back, depending on the type of carrier and their relationships with the wholesale providers in the area.

Network Performance Daily: Has this increased network latency for those kind of connections?

Schoonover: Absolutely. Two kinds of factors increasing the latency - anytime you go the other way around the world from the Middle East, it's going to add a little bit of distance and distance equals latency, because of that "physics" thing. The other thing is that 75 percent of the capacity connecting the Middle East to Europe was cut, which, when you try to move that type of demand around, then you're going to create congestion on the remaining line.

Between those two factors there is a higher amount of latency and it does take some creativity on the part of the carriers to keep their business customers operating and keep their voice calls at a higher performance level.

The thing to suffer the most would be the Internet. Because that's not as latency sensitive as voice or real-time business communications, the carriers allow it to be more affected by the problems than the other services.

Network Performance Daily: Is there any basis for any sort of conspiracy theory here at all?

Schoonover: No, I don't think so, really. Cables are damaged with relative frequency, and I think that this is more along the lines of coincidence that there were a few different incidences within a couple days than anything else.

Network Performance Daily: What about the two main lines?

Schoonover: Well the two main lines were close enough that it probably was the same event. Whatever cut one most likely cut the other one as well. I know that the initial speculation was that a ship had dragged anchor across the two cables which would very easily snap them. That was later refuted by the Egyptian regulator. You can then look at things like seismic or geological events, something like that.

But most likely because those cables went down together, and they were so close - most likely that's one event.

The other cable breaks in the gulf - there's two others - were separate events that happened within a few days of the initial one.

Network Performance Daily: So if this stuff happens all the time, what can companies do to preserve mission-critical network connectivity and performance?

Schoonover: Finding restoration paths and having existing agreements for having restoration in place is very important, and many carriers have diversity in route and upstream providers, as well as the option to exercise a backup plan. And as we've seen, even if it takes a few hours to a day to get things back up and running with some amount of regularity, that's a result of having these pre-existing redundant relationships available.

I think businesses are getting smarter about that and I think carriers as well, particularly after the Taiwan Earthquake from December [2006], that cut a significant amount of capacity in the inter-Asia region. A lot of businesses quickly realized that their disaster-recovery plans were not sufficient, and went about getting better ones.

The fact that businesses have been able to recover relatively speedily is indicative of good planning to a large extent.

Network Performance Daily: How important are these sea cables to global communication?

Schoonover: Very. A lot of people don't realize, but undersea cables are the backbone of the global communications network. Obviously Europe has a lot of terrestrial cable as does the U.S., but as soon as you need to cross an ocean, the bulk of the traffic is travelling via submarine cable, not satellite.

Network Performance Daily: Well, why couldn't we just use satellite?

Schoonover: Higher latency, less capacity, and more expensive.

Network Performance Daily: What's the most important thing that people are learning from this incident?

Schoonover: I think there's a fragility to any sort of infrastructure, and I think you can take away that businesses and carriers do need to prepare for the unexpected. With the Taiwan earthquake taking seven of eight cables, and this taking two of three on a particular route, there has to be physical redundancy, both geographical and capacity.

But that being said, the carriers knew that and they're working towards it. There's at least four cables being planned and built on the exact same route that the cables that were cut are on. It'll be another year or two until the new cables are operational, but the demand for this type of thing was known and is being addressed, it's just that the timeline didn't work in the favor of the Internet users in the Middle East.

Network Performance Daily: The whole thing - just to get this whole conspiracy thing out of the way - what would it actually take to knock Iran's communication infrastructure off the Internet?

Schoonover: Well, it would take a lot more than what's been done. Really, when you look at Iran's connectivity, while they have been affected by the cable cuts, they are not the most affected country. They have terrestrial connections to surrounding countries, satellite connectivity, and redundant submarine connectivity.

Really, what's been done, if it were a directed attack, it has not been particularly effective.

• Network World: What those oceanic cable cuts mean to you.


• Wired/Threat Level: Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web

How is your company weathering the cable cuts? If you've been affected, let us know how you got back up and running by leaving us a comment below.

Things have gotten slower for many Web users making international communications because of three (or four) undersea cables recently cut. This is especially true for those in the middle or near east, but as the traffic normally reserved for the lines that were cut is now being routed over alternate cables, everyone's traffic is a little affected.

However, for most users, the Internet is merely slower than usual. Not to make light of anyone's current pain, but it is a reminder of the triumph of computer science and computer engineering that is TCP/IP. TCP IP was designed to route around this very type of damage to deliver accurate messages.

Depending on what news reports and analysis you read, there may have been three undersea cables cut, or four undersea cables cut, and these cables were cut over a short period of time by independent, dumb decisions by civilian ships located hundreds of miles apart to drag their anchors along the bottom of the sea to cut through cables armored with steel and polyethylene. However, the AFP news service is reporting that the Egyptian government saw no ships in the area for the 12 hour periods before and after the cable was cut.

An improbable coincidence combined with contradictory evidence? That's breeding ground for conspiracy theory.

This is either an amazing, "win-the-lottery-twice" type of coincidence combined with general widespread confusion, or some sort of deliberate damage. Some on the Internet are suggesting that these lines were cut, possibly, maybe, crazily, as a precursor to a U.S. invasion of Iran.

The "Iran invasion" speculation is fueled by the fact that the router that Internettrafficreport.com uses to measure the amount of traffic coming into and out of Iran is showing a 100% packet loss. As theories go, that's a bit concerning, but that's just one router, and as blog "Cryptogon" points out, other Iranian domain names are still serving up Web pages.

Of course, this panic is caused by U.S. rhetoric regarding Iran. Many online commentators, frightened of the possibility of an expansion of the Iraq war, have taken these outages as fear that the "other shoe is about to drop."

Network Performance Daily, as the vendor blog of NetQoS, isn't in a position to make an editorial statement about war or policies from a U.S. foreign policy angle. But that said, we can tell you that there has never been a war that has improved network performance. While there are many advances in communications technology that have been made as a result of dual-use technology defense spending - TCP/IP among them - the actual act of waging war destroys communications infrastructure. In fact, as far back as electronic communication has existed, destroying the ability of the enemy to communicate effectively was seen as a tactical advantage. Indeed, telegraph poles and the rail lines which brought mail through when the telegraphs weren't working, were targets back during the American Civil War.

Even when this destruction isn't intentional, bombs - even the smartest of them - are indiscriminate. As we see with the Iraq war, delivering even basic electricity when things are frequently blowing up is a challenge.

At any rate, the why isn't quite as important as the fact that the cables are currently disconnected and it will at least take a week or two to get them repaired. In the meantime, now might be a good time to monitor carefully the performance of your global network links to adjust to this new turn of events.

Do you know what's going on out there? If you do, please send us a comment because we have no clue whatsoever.

SuperTuesday is coming up in less than a week, and many people, (including myself,) are chomping at the bit to talk about politics.

Don't get me wrong; this is a blog focused on issues that affect network performance in enterprise (read: business) environments, and politics and vendor blogs go together like potassium chlorate and gummi bears - a whole lot of heat, sparks, and violent reactions that take forever to die down. But, if nothing else, U.S. technology policy affects U.S. technology companies. Network neutrality and broadband policy will affect those companies hoping to roll out SAAS solutions, H1B visas will affect the tech job market and innovation, and of course there are the fundamental questions about data security and privacy that have become issues over the past decade.

Among the tech blogosphere there were two politics-related events that may be of interest to our readers. The first was that Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch interviewed Mitt Romney. Arrington focused on technology growth policies in the U.S., Internet taxes, H1B visas, venture capital tax issues, and renewable energy, and it's an interesting read if you're a Republican currently mulling which candidate to support in the primaries.

The second, from a stranger source, came from Randall Munroe, the author of the technology focused webcomic, XKCD, who used his public forum to endorse Barack Obama, because of Obama's association with copyright-reformer Lawrence Lessig, his support for network neutrality, among other reasons.

(This may not seem significant, but Munroe is not just any comic artist. XKCD focuses on high tech issues - including a few editorial cartoons regarding technology and science policy - and it is one of the most popular on the Internet, rivaling Penny Arcade. Because of this, Google invited Munroe to speak last month as part of their Authors@Google series of lectures, an honor shared with Paul Krugman, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Brokaw, among others. In less than two years, Munroe has become the pre-eminent technology editorial cartoonist - all with a few crudely drawn stick figures.)

Whether or not Munroe's endorsement will carry any weight is yet to be seen, but that doesn't mean that technology issues aren't real and considerable, and if the guys who actually know something about technology don't speak up, well, then we're left with the talking heads on cable news shows who have trouble understanding even basic computer concepts, let alone subtle computer issues.

During the main election season, technology issues will probably not be the foremost on voters' minds, so primary elections are extremely important for those who believe that a solid technology policy is important to U.S. national prosperity. While we'd feel uncomfortable (and kind of icky) endorsing any particular candidate, we've put together a list of the top ten current technological controversies which you should consider before voting.

1) Intellectual Property Laws

There is not one portion of the tech industry that is untouched by the intellectual property laws, both current and proposed. First, any company that makes software, either for resale or in-house, has to be aware of their rights under copyright law to preserve their own products. Any company that uses - in whole or in part - open-source software needs to be aware of how open-source licenses work - that is, open-source code remains under the copyright of the author, who may be very specific about who may or may not use the license.

Additionally, the current entertainment industry crackdown on pirated materials affects enterprise networking in a number of ways. First, there's the question of liability of an end-user on the corporate network uses it to distribute material when they do not have the permission of the copyright holder - while traffic is a consideration, it's also a consideration that if you aggressively patrol your network for copyright violations, you can find yourself liable if a copyright violation gets through the tracks. This leaves enterprise networking in a precarious position - police the network and assume the legal liability, or take sanctuary in "safe-harbor" provisions and allow the traffic of illicitly traded files to clog up your network.

There is a middle ground where certain types of traffic can be prevented from taking up bandwidth necessary for business applications - without looking at the individual files in deep packet inspection, using QoS policies, and that seems to be the best solution right now. However, any changes to copyright law would have a profound effect on the ways that companies do business, and that is why everyone in IT should be keeping an eye on this issue.

2) Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure

American broadband infrastructure is simply not quite up to the standards of other countries. Japan, Korea, and France are often touted as having much better broadband than the U.S., with various explanations given regarding U.S. having a lower population density. However, it seems dubious because there's little correlation between population density and broadband penetration when you look at actual states.

The U.S. population density may be 31/km^2 compared to France's 113/km^2 or 337/km^2 for Japan, but a lot of that is Alaska and Texas and whatnot. California has a population density of 90.27/km^2 - rivaling France - yet does not have France's broadband speed - and considering that California is one of America's technological "bread baskets," this is a serious problem. On the other coast, New Jersey has a population density of 438/km^2 - and New Jersey's broadband is not better than the rest of the nation. Additionally, even considering that nationwide population density number, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have lower population densities and both faster broadband speeds and greater household penetration.

Just as the highways developed by the Eisenhower administration helped to foster America's post-war manufacturing boom, better broadband infrastructure can help foster America's technology industry. An ubiquitous, high quality broadband can mean more applications can be run as a Web service out on the Internet instead of the WAN. More bandwidth for everybody means that the bandwidth for your company becomes cheaper and they can afford more of it, which means that existing apps will run faster (presuming there aren't other network performance problems) and that you'll be able to run high-bandwidth apps such as Cisco Telepresence.

Even if your company is sitting on more dark fiber than a bowl of NinjaBran™, every company relies on smaller companies as vendor product makers, as distributors, as customers - and those smaller companies are relying more on SAAS solutions. In the grand scheme of the business world ecosystem, communications infrastructure policy can have far-reaching effects.

3) Spectrum Regulation/Allocation

When people think of bandwidth, they often think of bits traveling down pipes. The other type of bandwidth is just as important; the bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Because you can't run two different signals on the same frequency (they would interfere with each other,) the FCC allocates which frequencies are going to be used for which purpose - and some frequencies are better suited towards different purposes.

For example, currently, there is an auction for the 700MHZ band - a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum which can penetrate through walls, and can cover a very wide area. This made it very desirable for the television stations which now control the bandwidth, and also very desirable for cell phone companies currently bidding for the bandwidth when the television stations must return the bandwidth to the FCC as part of the analog/digital TV switchover in 2009.

Anything that deals with broadcasting of any sort - wireless networking, WiMax, even telecommunications ownership - goes through the FCC, making it one of the most important and powerful Federal commissions. Decisions made by the FCC can affect any rollouts your company makes regarding wireless networking or cellular technology.

4) Network Neutrality

If you haven't been keeping up on this one, it's a doozy, and you might want to check out the very informative Wikipedia page on the subject. The possibility of network neutrality legislation - or the actions of big-business players in the absence of network neutrality legislation, can mean fundamental changes in the way that bits travel over the wire.

We won't get into a rundown of issues here, but while you can plan for a neutral Internet or a non-neutral Internet, it is much harder to prepare contingencies while this matter remains up in the air.

Some candidates have expressed support for network neutrality legislation, others opposition, and still others ambivalence - and depending on which position is the best for you and your company, it may be something to consider.

We'll cover Telecom Immunity and Privacy, Open Government Initiatives, Energy Policy, and Immigration and Education in Part II of this series tomorrow. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment below to discuss these issues.