by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

I remember my first computer.  I remember deleting files to save space on it – files like “config.sys” and “autoexec.bat.” 

I remember my second computer.  I remember forcing a RAM chip in too hard and breaking off a piece of the slot. 

I remember my third computer.  I remember not grounding it properly. 

Around that time I started working in a mom-and-pop computer repair shop.  I remember accidentally reformatting the wrong hard drive. 

Luckily for me, I was generally better at computer repair than the one incident otherwise this would be a very long editorial. 

Does this story have a point?  No, but I’ll shoehorn one in anyway: What I’ve found is that as geeks we learn through trial and error.  The best of us become best at it by making mistakes and by learning from them.  Sure, we may have accidentally fried a few CPUs, or, in some cases, siblings, but the point is that the surest way to learn something is to do it, learning from mistakes.

One of the problems with rote memorization and studying for certification is that it is through our mistakes that we can discover strange new things – the phrase that heralds the greatest advances in science and engineering are not “Eureka!” but “Hmm… that’s funny….”

And with a very long rant, a poster on the Overclockers Australia forums talked about how things in IT are going from “bad to worse.” Reading the whole thing is time consuming, and there’s some salty language, but it’s worth it.  Here’s some highlights:

Why is it then, that over the last three years I've seen fewer and fewer people who call themselves sysadmins understand these things? Why is it that I've been surrounded by "IT professionals" from junior sysadmins to CTOs who don't have a g*****n clue about one tenth of the above? Why is it that in three years I've met ONE person in professional IT who I would consider worthy of sitting down and having a conversation with?

Why is it that professional IT services today consist of service reps who tell you the things you are doing are untested, dangerous, unsupported, different, not usual, or a host of other words meaning they are scared s***less and unwilling to learn something new? Why is it that I spend my time building things people tell me for 6 months during build and test "will never work", only to have them go into production and work ten times faster for one tenth the cost of the old system? Why is it that IT professionals today choose brand labels over intelligence, and post-justify it by hiding behind "board confidence" when providing a solid, working, profitable system is the best thing to boost confidence from the board?...

Many moons ago, I used to have a mentor. A man who quite frankly I considered genius level. I don't throw around words like "genius" frequently. In my life I've met three people who would rightly qualify as geniuses. Only one I've had the pleasure to work with, and more importantly learn from. In the small amount of time I worked with the man my rate of learning tripled. He had the right amount of sage advice coupled with the sense to let you make your own mistakes from time to time.

This, I think is one of the biggest elephants in the room with regards to network engineering in general and network performance specifically.  There’s a reason we cherish “the old guys” in IT – these are the guys who were working on networks when it wasn’t a big deal – or at least, it wasn’t as big a deal as it is today – if they were broken.  In an environment where fault is expected and accounted for, you had a little bit more freedom to experiment.  Sometimes this leads to trouble.  Other times it leads to insight.  You repeat your insight and remember not to repeat your failures.

But the thing about enterprise networking is that the only people who own infrastructures large enough to support large networks are the companies who can absolutely not afford those large networks to fail or under-perform for any reason.  Going with the “safe” option instead of the one that offers the potential for learning is the only option that makes sense to the business.  But it is stunting IT.

I often wonder why computer security gets more coverage than computer networking.  After all, computer security doesn’t do anything, it just protects the stuff that does something.  Computer networking allows you to do amazing things.  Some of it, no doubt, is due to the “hacker mystique” – a fear of an active agent of destruction is more powerfully on the mind than planning how to eek out a 1% performance increase.

But there’s also the fact that security, rather than networking, is one of those fields where you are encouraged to try to get in there and break things.  This process of breaking things (and putting them back together) leads to more learning and more innovation… it’s a hell of a lot more fun and you learn more. 

Maybe what we need is for someone – I don’t know… academia?  The government?  Cisco?  - to develop a simulation of a working multinational Fortune 500 WAN, and just let students go hog wild on it, destroying and recreating it many times over, each time learning. 

And now, some additional notes.

Though Network Performance Daily is the company blog of NetQoS – it should be considered that this video and this posting are my own sole opinion as editor of the blog, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of NetQoS, their management, employees, or customers.

I know that many of our readers are D&D players; and most probably have a D&D player as a good friend. As mentioned in the video, we have had success explaining why those in IT tend to like playing D&D and using D&D as a metaphor for broader trends in IT. Since this blog owes D&D players some measure of its success, I felt compelled to speak up for those who play D&D.

As a general rule, whenever Network Performance Daily discusses politics, we do so from a viewpoint of looking at the issues involved that will affect network performance, or from a viewpoint of the IT structure of major modern campaigns, and not commenting on particular candidates or political issues. This case is a clear exception as I very specifically mention Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee for President.

The reason we usually avoid commenting on political candidates and campaigns is additionally because this blog reflects on the entirety of NetQoS – and as you can imagine, among our employees and management, we have many McCain, Obama, and third party supporters. It would be inappropriate professionally – and insulting personally – if I was to profess to speak for all of them.

Nor do we think that Network Performance Daily’s readers would be interested in the political campaign season. NPD’s readers are typically interested in Network Performance, and unless it’s something like: “How to prepare for the traffic when Obama’s Veep is announced,” it just isn’t the appropriate venue.

But in this case, I do not think there would be any disagreement that Michael Goldfarb’s statements comparing liberal bloggers and New York Times editors to D&D players was meant to be a personal insult. We have no problem with Goldfarb insulting those he perceives to be against his campaign’s interests – that’s how politics is played, and liberal bloggers and the Grey Lady can defend themselves. What was offensive was using D&D players as the insult. It implies that playing D&D is somehow bad, wrong, or undesirable. That’s what prompted me to address this topic.

Goldfarb actually apologized on August 1^st for his conduct after the first incident when he called the New York Times editors. However, the fact that he repeated it on August 18^th shows the apology was less than sincere.

In the interests of fairness, we also did a search to see if Obama, or anyone on his campaign, ever posted, said, or implied anything negative about those who played D&D. We did not find any.

     -- Brian Boyko
     -- Editor, Network Performance Daily.

A note from Joel Trammell, CEO, NetQoS.

Recently, there was an article by technical marketing manager Ben Erwin about why the company is named NetQoS, talking about the importance of Quality of Service policies.  While the message about quality of service as it is known today is important, there are a few things that should be corrected.

See, “Quality of service,” in the field of telephony, was defined in 1994 in the ITU-T Recommendation E.800 as the collective effect of service performance which determines the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service.

At the time of this definition it was believed that ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) would be the future networking technology that would allow for combining voice, video and data traffic on the same circuit. ATM had by design many sophisticated traffic engineering approaches available within the protocol for ensuring QoS.

Over time IP (Internet Protocol) became the key competitor to ATM as a standard network protocol. IP’s only traffic engineering capability was the ability to provide differentiated classes of service. In an attempt to make IP seem similar to ATM, IP proponents began using the term QoS instead of the more technically correct term CoS (Classes of Service) to describe IP’s capabilities.

As IP won out in the marketplace over ATM a whole generation of engineers have come to believe that QoS and CoS are equivalent terms. NetQoS was named with the original, broader definition in mind.

(Also, the domain name NetQoS.com was available.  That was a big part of it too.)

Series Summary and Editorial
Part One: Interview with Texas State Rep. Joe Driver
Part Two: Interview with Matt Miller, Institute for Justice
Part Three: Interview with Capt. RenEarl Bowie, Texas Private Security Bureau

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

We’ve written three stories and conducted three interviews regarding HB2833.  The first was with the author of the law, Texas State Representative Joe Driver, the second with Matt Miller of the Institute for Justice, and the third with Texas Private Security Bureau Captain RenEarl Bowie.

Here is our editorial summary:

HB2833, the law designed to make changes to laws regarding private investigation but has PC and Network techs worried that their work may now be illegal, has caused confusion and worry from normal people doing normal jobs in a normal manner.  Whatever the original intent of the law, it is clear to see from its effects that the law itself is poorly written. 

Ultimately, words like “open to interpretation” and “case-by-case basis” are not words you want to use when describing either the meaning of, or enforcement of, the law.

So, where did things go wrong?  I think the man problem was a key misunderstood concept by Texas State Rep. Driver when he wrote the law.  It is clear from the interview with him that he believes that there is a clear and well defined line between “retrieval of data” and “investigation.”

“’Review, analyze, and investigate’ are the three key words, in my opinion, that drive the need for people to have some kind of license. Because if they're doing some of that, then they don't need to be - it doesn't need to be just anybody able to do that - they need to have somebody that has a security license. But if someone's just retrieving information and providing information for someone who is going to analyze, to use one of the words, then that's just a regular computer repair person.” – Rep. Driver.

But what Rep. Driver simply did not realize is that in the practical realities of IT, no such line exists. Any and every interaction that any IT person has with a computer requires some sort of “review, investigation and analysis,” whether it’s simple troubleshooting or complex network latency optimization. 

I can see where Rep. Driver was going with the law and what his intent was when writing it – rooting around through someone’s Windows Recycle Bin can be just as invasive as rooting around in somebody’s trash. 

But rooting around in the guts of a computer to discover the cause of a malware infection is different from rooting around in the guts of a computer to discover infidelity.  However, instead of making the criteria of “investigation” the purpose and use to which the information could be put, the law makes the criteria the way that the information is stored – “computer-based data not available to the public.”  The end result is that the net was cast too widely. 

Compounding this problem is the interpretation provided by the Texas State Private Security Bureau of the law – a literal one.

“Computer repair or support services should be aware that if they offer to perform investigative services… they must be licensed as investigators” – Texas Private Security Bureau Opinion Summary.

Unlike the law itself, the opinion summary is an unambiguous statement, and while Capt. Bowie may say that the law will be interpreted on a “case-by-case” basis, that is not what is in the official statement of opinion. 

As for the court case brought by the Institute for Justice – unfortunately, the Institute for Justice seems to want to fight this case on Constitutional grounds.  However, that will be a hard sell, as qualifications and licensing are clearly powers that states exercise, from state bar associations for lawyers, and state medical boards for doctors.  If the state of Texas wants to make a PI license a requirement for PC repair techs, it certainly has the power to do so.  It may be absurd, but absurdity is not unconstitutional. 

So, where does that leave technical practitioners like network engineers and PC repair gurus?  As a practical matter, I think most people are going to continue going about this, “business-as-usual” style and make a stink only after the law is enforced on some, most likely unsuspecting, tech somewhere in Texas.

The good news is that I think that it is indeed possible to clarify and change the law through the legislative process – Rep. Driver has stated that he would indeed make changes to the law if it needs clarification or amendment. 

It clearly does.  

By Brian Boyko

We'll get back to network performance, routers, switches, IT and enterprises shortly, but something happened today and I think there’s someone out there that should deserve some recognition.

So, before I tell you this story, I should tell you a little bit about the circumstances surrounding it. I’m 29 years old, weigh in at 300 pounds, and while much of it is fat, a whole bunch of it is muscle too.  Long story short, when people can’t remember my name, they often address me as “big guy.”

I went to the local supermarket to pick up some lunch.  I load up my heavy items in the trunk, and head towards the driver’s side of the car. 

That’s when I get hit with what feels like someone throwing a cactus at the back of my head at high velocity.  When the initial shock wore off, I was able to figure out that it wasn’t, in fact, a drive-by cacti, but a crow who had attacked me for some as-yet-unspecified reason.

My immediate suspicion was that the bird was somehow attracted to – or annoyed by – the mousse in my hair.  See, I’ve got kind of a reputation around here of being the local mad scientist/evil genius, and I’m trying to cultivate mad science hair.  I think I was shooting for something a lot like Ludvig von Beethoven but every time I tried it ended up more like Willard Scott’s Bozo – so I just slicked it back and vowed to try again the next day.  But it didn’t turn out to be the mousse.

Some supermarket attendees who saw the exchange explained to me that on the other side of the car rested a baby bird, who would not move.  As such, the parent birds attacked me for having the audacity to get between them and the baby. 

Various methods of getting to the car were tried, but ultimately failed. I tried to get to the car through the passenger side, only to be warded off by the threatening caw-caws of Poppa Crow, caws that penetrated to my very soul.

I then informed work that I might be a little late in getting back to the office. 

I called Austin’s local non-emergency service – 311 – to get in contact with animal control, hoping that they somehow had Steve Irwin’s lost twin brother on staff who could guide me to getting to my car without provoking the large animal.

Okay, well, strictly speaking, a crow isn’t very large, but it certainly hit above its weight class.  Anyway, I was informed that animal control really doesn’t “do birds.”

It was along this time that I saw, from a distance, a young girl, who couldn’t even be in middle school yet, holding a small handtowel, and approaching the baby bird.  I warned her about the crow that attacked – she just kept on heading towards the baby crow, scooped it up into the towel, and took it to safety.

The little girl, Naomi*, is nine years old. I gave her my business card and earlier today, she e-mailed me and told me that the baby bird was eating, and that the bird trusted her like she was its mom.

I want to thank you, Naomi.  You showed both bravery and compassion that should be applauded. 

(Now, if only I was a bit less of a 300 pound wimp!)

*Because she is a minor, "Naomi's" name has been changed.

As you might notice, we’ve got a new “Twitter Live Feed” on the left sidebar of Network Performance Daily – this is being maintained by the thoroughly awesome Chandra Hosek, who gets to add the moniker “Twitter Wrangler” to her already impressive resume.  You can also follow our Twitter at http://twitter.com/NetQoSLive using whatever twitter-following app you prefer. 

You’ll notice that we’ve put this way down on the sidebar, so you might have to look for it.  This is for a very important reason: Twitter’s servers have this annoying habit of occasionally seizing up and drooling on themselves at random intervals. 

See, we would have liked to put the Twitter feed prominently on the page, but because many browsers, including Firefox 3, load the page line by line, any content below after the slow loading Twitter feed resolves gets delayed.  Placing Twitter at the top of the page would mean the entire site would take seconds to load. 

This is actually more than just a specific concern for us – one of the advents of the 21^st century is the idea that we get added value from our Web applications by combining with other Web applications – mashups. 

Many Web 2.0 services, Google maps, data from Craigslist, etc, provide APIs so that third parties can use the applications to develop their own applications or add functionality to their Web apps and Web sites – creating mashups of multiple applications.

So now, instead of having all your apps running in the same place, the apps are running from multiple different places which network engineers have little control over.  And in many cases this can result in a delay to the end-user – because your performance is based on the performance of other computers, other networks, other hardware. 

Some of the apps that contribute to these mashups may be in turn based on multiple services themselves.  The problem can compound itself. 

So this is a concern that should be on any network engineer’s mind when talking to the application developers. 

by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Time Warner Cable has rolled out its plan to cap the data of high-speed Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, a town about 20 miles west of the Louisiana border.

The plans include $29.95/mo for 768kb/s downstream and a 5GB monthly cap - or $54.90/mo at 15Mb/s and 40GB monthly cap - with $1 additional charge for each GB above the cap. 

For comparison, the same service in Austin is $29.95/mo for 768kb/s downstream with no cap, or $59.95 (or $5.05 more) for 15Mb/s downstream with no cap. Here's Ars Technica quoting Kevin Leddy:   

Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable executive vice president of advanced technology, told the Associated Press that the variable billing model is being adopted to address the disparity in bandwidth consumption among Time Warner Cable users. Five percent of the subscribers are consuming half of the local line capacity, Leddy says.

Yes, the old "X% of users are using X% of bandwidth" argument, with an implication that those top 5% are hurting the ISP’s network performance.

I think by now we can shoot this out of the sky - not that there aren't bandwidth hogs, but mentioning that the top 5% of users are consuming 50% of the bandwidth is pretty much saying: "Apparently, Internet usage follows a power law curve." 

The Power Law Curve, or "Pareto Principle," or "80/20 rule," is part of the Internet.  Roughly 20% of people who participate on Forum X will leave 80% of the comments, roughly 20% of the gamers on World of Warcraft will log 80% of the game hours, and there's been an entire philosophy of thought called "The Long Tail" about how the power log curve affects many aspects of Internet business.  Business, by the way, has known about the 80/20 rule for a long time - which is why 20% of a supermarket's products will result in 80% of it's sales, or in a small business, why 20% of customers will provide 80% of the revenue.

So let's put this old argument to bed - 5% of the users will consume 50% of the capacity.  If you removed those 5% of the customers from the pool, chances are that the new top 5% - or what used to be the second 5% - will now consume roughly 50% of the capacity! 

Of course, this doesn’t stop Time Warner from offering 15Mb download speeds to customers who pay for the service. You’d think that if Time Warner was really concerned about network congestion, that they would scale down the bandwidth that they offer, rather than the data that people download.  Because data – data is an infinite resource.  There’s no limit to the number of bytes out there that you can download.  What is a limited resource is bandwidth – that is, the amount of data traveling along the same pipe at the same time.  And caps simply don’t help with that. 

Whatever Time Warner’s actual rationale, it has absolutely nothing to do with network performance.  (Which is why you’re finding this discussed on Network Performance Daily.  I know.  Irony can be so ironic sometimes.)

Instead, and this is a wild guess, I think that Time Warner wants bandwidth caps because it is working to preserve an old social order upon which the Time Warner enterprise is built, all while being pressured by the new social order that is emerging. 

The Boredom Killing Machine

Do cable companies with caps establish them with the express hope that those heavy-usage customers will move to other services, removing the need for them to spend money on upgrading their infrastructure?  Well, this is practically axiomatic: by removing those customers that are least profitable, they make more money.  What about the idea of anti-competitive behavior – as services like Hulu, NetFlix, AppleTV, and others use the Internet to deliver video-on-demand? I could understand a cable company being nervous about that. 

But there's more to it than that, and to dismiss this as merely the work of the “evil cable company” is to dismiss the bigger picture and ignore something more fundamental.

There is an entire paradigm shift that is occurring with the rise of broadband, and to understand it, we have to go back seventy years. 

In the 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed.  This act provided for the federal minimum wage, but what we want to look at is that it also established the standard of the 40 hour work week.

There were a number of changes that occurred because of that 40 hour work week.  Workers had something they never had before – an abundance of free time.  And for the most part, they didn’t know what to do with it. 

Similarly, trends towards suburbanization continued – helped by FHA loans and other programs, but also, a move to the suburbs required an increase in commuting time.  You could live near where you worked, but it was cheaper to live in the suburbs.  It meant you spent more time driving to and from work, but because of the 40 hour work week, people had more time than they had money. 

Additionally, Robert Putnam noticed in his book, “Bowling Alone,” that while his main thesis was that, past 1965, Americans were spending less time together engaged in group activities, from post WWII to around 1965, public participation in groups waxed.  But, starting in 1965, it declined sharply.

1965 was also the year when television reached 90% household penetration in America.

People spent more time in group activities before 1965 because – well, there was nothing else to do with the free time that they had been given.  (Yes, this is a simplification, but this is a relatively short article.)  And people spent less time in group activities after 1965 because they finally found a way to get rid of all that excess free time. 

The television. 

The television is not primarily a communication device – it only broadcasts one way.  I think an argument can be made that it is not an educational device. 

The television is a free-time killing machine.  It eliminates boredom.  It simply gives people the ability to shed themselves of the excess free time which was previously impossible. 

The Fertile Soil of the Suburban Mind

The 40-hour work week, suburbia and television are all related trends.

Now, the 40-hour work week, suburbia, and television, are all changing, for related reasons. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, 40% of America works 50 hours or more each week.  There’s also been a trend towards “re-urbanization,” due to desires to have shorter commute times, fewer gas bills, and a realization among young professionals that the social scene is better in the cities than out in the suburbs.  More free time and better ways to spend it.  But not all of us live in the cities - yet. 

The real threat to television that the Internet poses is not that you can watch the same shows on the computer that you could on the TV.  It is because the Internet was able to get people with varied and disparate interests to communicate and to organize.

When people who don’t participate in the Internet ask: "Where do people get the free time to create YouTube videos, or the free time to edit Wikipedia into a massive resource, or to spend hours on Slashdot replying to comments with jokes about Soviet Russia, or time to organize a protest complete with "V" masks?” - that free time is coming from the time once killed in front of the tube.

In other words, people are watching TV less - and when they do watch TV, it's usually a conscious choice to watch a particular TV show rather than a result of a lifetime habit of zoning out in front of the TV and watching "whatever's on."  Indeed, PVRs and TV-on-DVD are markets which evolved specifically to take advantage of this niche.  You can talk about the "convenience" of time-shifting, but the true effect that TiVo has had on American TV is that people don't have to watch crap unless they want to.

Clay Shirky, who gets credit for espousing these ideas in the first place, said:

"Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement....

...So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation."

So, what is the use of a bandwidth cap?  A bandwidth cap limits the amount of free time that can be spent on the Internet, leaving people once again, with a surplus of free time. 

Free Time, by Hook or by Crook.

I did some math here – remember, lowercase "b" represents "bits", uppercase "B" represents "bytes."

Here’s Time Warner’s “low-end” Beaumont plan.  
$29.95/mo at 768kb/s and 5GB monthly cap.

768kb/s = 96kB/s
96kB/s = 0.09375MB/s
0.09375MB/s = 0.000091552734375 GB/s
5GB / (0.000091552734375 GB/s)=
54613.33(repeating) seconds. =
910.22(repeating) minutes =
15.1703703(repeating) hours.

On the low-end plan, you have 15.1 hours of using your Internet connection to its fullest potential, before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 3 hours, 2 minutes.)

Now, here’s the “high-end” Beaumont plan.
$54.90/mo at 15Mb/s and 40GB monthly cap.

15Mb/s = 1.875MB/s
1.874MB/s = 0.0018310546875 GB/s
40GB / (0.0018310546875 GB/s) =
21845.33(repeating) seconds
364.088(repeating) minutes
6.06814814 (repeating) hours.

On the high-end plan, the "turbo" plan, you have 6.07 hours of using your Internet connection to its fullest potential before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 9 minutes, 6 seconds.)

By limiting the amount of data that can be downloaded, what caps really do is limit the amount of time, and therefore cognitive capital that one can spend on either the Internet or on "real world" activities enhanced or facilitated by the Internet. 

If you can't use the Internet, after all, because you've either gone over your bandwidth cap or you're afraid of going over your bandwidth cap, what are you going to do?  For most people, the answer will probably be "watch TV." 

And most cable providers are vertically integrated – Time Warner also owns numerous other interests, many of which are dependent on you sitting down in front of a television, including HBO and HBO Films, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Boomerang, truTV, TBS, CNN, TBS, TNT, a slew of production companies for TV, and a slew of production companies through Warner Bros. 

Television production companies are going to be faced with a dilemma as the boomers die and the millennials take charge: A population that won’t bother with watching the crap.  This will force production values up.  Additionally, with fewer and fewer viewers during fewer and fewer hours, broadcasters can demand less from advertisers.  Will this kill television?  No.  But the television industry is built almost entirely on the idea that people will watch because they have nothing better to do.

Now, people have something better to do.

After the Shift

Human beings are creatures of habit.  The baby boomers are much less likely to use the Internet to create, to organize, or to participate – they’re much more likely to simply use the Internet as a passive, one-way conduit of information, where you read, listen, or watch.  The younger generations are much more likely to use the Internet to converse – to engage, to participate, to do.

The “5%” that’s often touted out aren’t just the most savvy.  They are early adopters.  They are pioneers of a way of life that future generations will see as routine.  Eventually, that 5% will grow into 10%, then 20% - until we can’t think of a way of life without broadband.  (Some of us already can’t!)

Instituting bandwidth caps probably will not work in the long run – it is “stuffing the genie back into the bottle,” or “fighting the tide of history,” or whatever cliché you want to assign to it.  It is a desperation move. 

This isn’t much of a post today because this afternoon, the entire company is going out to catch a matinee of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I think now would be an appropriate time to link to our “careers” page, don’t you?

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?