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.

Yesterday, we covered four issues that you should keep in mind before voting in the primaries, covering Intellectual Property Laws, Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure, Spectrum Regulation/Allocation, and Network Neutrality.

We conclude our list of issues below.

Whether or not it is justified, we know that it has been the policy of the current government to intercept communications without warrants, and that there have been major telecommunications players that have helped the government to do so. As one can imagine, this has got a number of people very upset. At the core, the two questions are: "How much data should the government be able to collect?" and "How well can data the government collects be kept secure?"

Regardless of the supposed value in "fighting terrorism," or any "unreasonable search and seizure" or "due process" issues, these warrantless wiretaps create a third party privy to any confidential data that travels along the wire. While some may trust the government with keeping data confidential to the best of its ability, that may not be very reassuring to yourself or whichever department is in charge of things like Non-Disclosure Agreements and company secrets if they don't have much faith in the government's ability to keep confidential data confidential.

Additionally, the government collects alarming amount of data through more traditional methods - social security records, tax records, and the like - which need to also remain confidential. Computer security policies that are effective and followed are crucial.

6) Open Government Initiatives

One of the ways to increase transparency in government is to make information that the government collects available to the public in an easily computer-parseable, standard format - some candidates have made this a priority, other candidates have ignored it. The idea is that if the government data is online and both easily searched and easily crossed referenced, citizens can use that information effectively.

There are, however privacy concerns that accompany an open government. Additionally, any move to standards begs the question of "which standards" and whether your IT department will need to conform to those standards in order to interoperate with governmental computers.

7) Energy Policy

While energy policy will be a key part of the campaign this year, most people won't be thinking about energy policy as it affects IT departments. Energy costs directly affect the operating budgets of major enterprise IT departments, which need to power, and cool, racks and racks of servers, switches, and routers - not to mention the end-user PCs distributed throughout the enterprise. If one candidate proposes a carbon-tax, that could raise energy costs. Then again, if another candidate develops no oil alternatives, energy costs could increase naturally.

By encouraging and perhaps subsidizing the invention of computer processors that consume less energy, the government can have an additional impact on IT departments. Additionally, a more subtle effect can be found from the military-industrial complex - that is, technologies which get their start in the military often eventually find their ways into the private sector. A military demand for low-power consuming technology - such as chips and routers to be used in small, autonomous devices, may eventually result in low-power consuming data centers.

8) Immigration and Education

Immigration is a double-edged sword when it comes to IT, and nowhere is this clearer than with the H1B visa program. The H1B visa allows the best and brightest of the world's technological geniuses to work for companies within the United States. Too few, and companies are starved for brain power, too many and domestic IT workers begin to feel the pressure of competing against immigrated labor. Where the H1B quota is set has a large impact on both the IT job market and the U.S. technology industry as a whole.

One of the concerns is that the demand for H1B visa-granted immigrants is the idea that we do not graduate enough competent technology professionals in the United States to fill the demand of large companies since computer science and computer engineering went from the "guaranteed good career" major in the late 1990s to a career to be avoided in the post-Dotcom era. Through grants, scholarships, and loans, the federal government has a great deal of influence in what people choose to study.

There have been some interesting proposals around training those with Associate's Degrees from junior colleges to prepare IT "operators" with training less than a full four-year degree in computer science to stem this tied. As hiring and retention are always important concerns for CIOs, this is a major area of concern.

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.

The Ten Other Reasons To Attend NetQoS Symposium 2008.

As you may know, NetQoS's annual Symposium will be held April 20-23, 2008 at the Barton Creek Resort in Austin, Texas. And if you're not familiar with the Symposium, it's three days of presentations, workshops, training, and entertainment.

Combining the best parts of "seminar," "study group," and "shindig," the marketing department has come up with ten reasons to attend the Symposium. You can view these on the Symposium Web Page, but we'll just re-iterate them here.

1. Hone your skills at Network Performance Management Best Practices Workshops.
2. Broaden your horizons and hear about emerging trends in the General Sessions delivered by leading network management experts.
3. Maximize the value of your NetQoS investments through product-focused best practices tutorials.
4. Roll up your sleeves in Hands-on Labs with NetQoS technical experts.
5. Don't just take it from us, benefit from real-world examples, presented by your peers in Customer Case Study sessions.
6. Advance your skills by attending Cisco IOS® NetFlow Boot Camp and network traffic analysis best practices.
7. Enhance your career through expanded technical tracks on:
   • Networking Theory and Best Practices
   • Network and Application Performance Management
   • WAN Optimization
   • Next Generation Network Operations
   • Network Behavior Analysis
   • VoIP Call Quality Monitoring
   • Packet-level Forensics, Capacity Planning, Troubleshooting, and more
8. See the future at NetQoS Product Roadmap Sessions.
9. Flock to Birds of a Feather sessions to share advice and collaborate with your peers on the topics you care about most.
10. Keep Austin weird and experience "Austintatious" nightlife. Enjoy Texas BBQ and Live Music Entertainment provided by Mingo Fishtrap at Stubbs.

However, those aren't the only reasons that you should attend. Goodness gracious no.

Here are the top ten real reasons to attend Symposium 2008.

1. First 100 confirmed attendees automatically become Libertarian Party delegates.
2. Pulse-pounding action as you ride "The Elevator™!"
3. Finally, an excuse for over-40 year olds to come to Austin!
4. Barton Creek Resort's Fazio Foothills golf course is a lovely shade of green in April, is considered the best golf course in Texas, is par 72, 7,125 yards long, and if you hid a body there, no one would ever find it.
5. On Tuesday, April 22, Texas BBQ and Live Music Entertainment will be provided by Mingo Fishtrap at Stubbs. On Wednesday, April 23, Pizza and a Dungeons and Dragons Session will be provided by Brian Boyko at his apartment.
6. Discuss the results of WrestleMania XXIV, and hypothesize about the results of the upcoming Backlash Pay-Per-View event, with your intellectual peers.
7. Feel invigorated by knowing that, due to Texas's liberal "concealed-carry" laws, any of your fellow network engineers could be "packing heat."
8. Every fifth application delivery controller at the symposium is filled with delicious candy!
9. Every day starts with a prayer session, thanking Huitzilopochtli, Left-Handed Humming Bird, for postponing the end of the world. (We will choose an MCSE to sacrifice at noon the previous day.)
10. Slumber Party!

Does art imitate life, or life imitate art? I don't know, and really, it has nothing to do the fun we at NetQoS are having with the new movie Untraceable and it's uncanny resemblance to our Network Performance Daily post on Wafaa Bilal. Here's a little slice of life into our day:

Pam: Hey, Brian, have you heard about this new movie, "Untraceable?"

Brian: No, Pam, I haven't, actually. What's it about?

Pam: It's about a serial killer who kidnaps this guy, ties him up and puts a webcam on him, and then hooks him up to poison, and the more people who view the site, the more poison he gets. Or that's the impression I got from the trailer.

Brian: Uh…

Pam: I think you should write about this in the blog.

Brian: Uh… Pam, I'm not sure that's a good idea. I mean, I'm working on this post about Time Warner, and…

Pam: Well, what's the problem? Can you imagine the spike in network traffic something like that would generate? It would be amazing.

Brian: Well, it's just that the entire premise is a little shaky. First, even if you can't trace him, I mean, everyone who visits the site is an accessory to murder. Unlike the eponymous serial killer, the site visitors aren't untraceable. So why not charge them with accessory to murder?

Pam: Yeah, but it's a movie, Brian. This isn't supposed to be something that could really happen. It's funny!

Brian: And I mean, the guy has to register a domain name, there's live traffic going through, he's got to have an IP address somewhere, and that's probably enough to narrow it down to get the cops to find him. I mean, the entire thing's really implausible from a technical standpoint.

Pam: Yeah, but it's a movie, Brian. I think you actually inspired them with your Wafaa Bilal post.

Brian: Then there's the whole fact that if this guy is expecting a lot of incoming hits, even through a proxy he's going to have to lease at least a OC3 line to handle simultaneous streaming video to that many people, and it's not exactly hard to cross reference who bought or leased OC3 lines in the past whatever months…

Pam: Brian. You're overthinking this...

Brian: Of course, if he does get a lot of hits, he's going to want to have a whole bunch of load balancing servers and you'd probably be able to pick him out if nothing else by being the only creepy cabin out in the woods that draws - oh, I don't know, three gigawatt-hours more every month more power than the other creepy cabins - with a constant load of 5kWh constantly, even during off-peak hours.…

Pam: Brian, it's a movie!

Brian: Okay, yeah, but there's also the idea that - well, I'm uncomfortable with it. I mean, it looks like it's just one of those stupid serial killer movies, probably based off of that episode of Millennium. I mean, it seems like it's going to be something like "Saw" or "Hostel," something like that where people get killed without any real plot - torture porn, really.

Pam: Anyway, you could tie in this "Untraceable" movie in with your Wafaa Bilal coverage on virtual dehumanization and take an angle about recreational network traffic.

Brian: Pam, unless you're Matthew Broderick playing Global Thermonuclear War with Joshua, no one out there is worried that their recreational network traffic will kill a guy. And despite my most cynical judgments, I think that even people who would shoot a non-lethal paintball at a guy over the Web wouldn't participate in actual murder.

Pam: You really think that you can't get a good blog post out of this?

Can't blog. Sumo will eat me.

Brian: The truth is that I'd really not like to talk about the movie. I mean, I've seen the trailer, and the idea is that the more the cops talk about it, the more visits the guy has. Me, I think it's a stupid movie, and I really don't want to give it more publicity. I think I'm more likely to get a good blog post out of "Teeth."

Pam: Uh…. I don't think so.

Brian: … Give me a couple of hours to think of something. "Teeth: Why you should always test before deployment" maybe?

Pam gave me a little sumo wrestler toy if I promised not to mention "Teeth" again. Would you like to name him? If you would, feel free to post in our comments section.

Editorial by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Ars Technica reported that a memo claiming that Time Warner was going to roll out a "pay-as-you-go" metered scheme for Internet access, rather than today's subscription-based unlimited bandwidth access plans was leaked to BroadbandReports.com. That memo, which since has been removed, claimed that Time Warner was going to try metered/limited access on a trial basis in Beaumont, Texas, and Time Warner representatives have confirmed this plan with Reuters.

As Ars Technica pointed out, Comcast has tried using bandwidth caps and traffic shaping to curb Internet usage among the customers that pay Comcast for Internet access. Comcast, however, has run into trouble because it has not revealed those policies to Comcast's customers. Time Warner will supposedly give customers online tools to monitor bandwidth usage.

Of course, it would be the best solution to increase the capability of the network - ISPs have to play by different rules than corporate networks as they are common carriers. But we don't know whether it is economically feasible for Time Warner's cable division to remain profitable while increasing the bandwidth, and if an unlimited-access plan is not feasible, a pay-as-you-go plan seems at first to be the fairest of the alternatives.

That said, there's something a little, well, strange about this, because the Internet is not a big truck that you just dump something on. It's a series of tubes.

Solving The Wrong Problem

That is, all Internet connections are merely the transfer of little positively and negatively charged electrical bits which stream down the wire. The limitations are not in the availability of the resource but in the capacity of distribution. We are not, in other words, "running out of bandwidth" like we run out of oil, run out of water, or run out of diapers.

What is limited is the capacity of the "pipe." To strain a metaphor, you could push Lake Michigan through a coffee stirring straw, but it would take a very, very long time.

Any pay-as-you-go plan has a fatal flaw - it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to bill people for the data they are downloading because data is not the limited resource!

What is limited is the capacity of the ISP's infrastructure at any particular moment in time, so it would be saner to limit the usage of the pipeline at a particular time. Perhaps to even out the usage of bandwidth, the ISP could provide different speeds for peak and off-peak usage times. Those unhappy with the slow speeds at peak times could pay a premium for a greater share of the pipe.

But wait a minute! ISPs already do this - I know that my Internet connection at home is capped at a certain speed. In fact I could get a faster speed simply by asking for it and paying a premium - no delay nor needed infrastructure upgrades. Just cash.

So the move to a pay-as-you-go plan seems, to be at best a case of solving the wrong problem, and at worst a case of "double dipping" by making people pay for data and bandwidth. (If there are network slowdowns, charging people per-gigabyte won't help much if people are still downloading that gigabyte at the same time of the day, after all.)

Your Experiences May Differ

Unfortunately, I've been on the receiving ends of one of these plans. Recently I was in New Zealand filming a movie about electoral reform. Bland stuff. While I was there, I was planning to upload film to the Internet - sort of a production blog. But I found that I couldn't - the ISP there, New Zealand Telecom, had placed my flatmates and myself on a pay-as-you-go program with a cap of only one gigabyte, and they would not increase the cap until the next billing period, which would have been after I left the country.

One gigabyte. Anything over that amount was downloaded at speeds that I hadn't seen since I bought my last 56.6k modem. That meant that even doing things like normal Web browsing was a particularly hard chore. Uploading film to YouTube was right out. I was even hoping to get some extra work done for Network Performance Daily during that time but found that I simply did not have the ability to do so. I was, in a word, ticked off and frustrated. It certainly made it quite a bit harder for me to use the network - I ended up getting a lot of iced mochas at the local Internet café, as patronage was a prerequisite for Internet service.

Now, I have no idea if Time Warner plans anything like New Zealand Telecom, and Time Warner has more competition - even in Beaumont, TX - than New Zealand Telecom did in Wellington. That may force them to abandon this plan if they find customers cancelling accounts and leaving for competitors.

It is rather important to notice that the last mainstream successful service that charged you based on how much you used it was 1996's AOL.

I've never been to Japan, France, or Korea but I'm told that all of these countries have broadband available at much greater speed, without having to worry about pay-as-you-go plans. So the question is not whether unlimited broadband is technically feasible as more people use broadband, the question is whether companies are willing to make the infrastructure investments necessary. And considering that there will be more competition, not less, as new technologies (like FIOS and WiMax) become available, investing in infrastructure rather than limiting customers seems to be the smarter move in the long term.

But let's say that this plan is a success in Beaumont, and catches on. What's the upshot for enterprise networking?

You Think You Have A Recreational Network Use Problem Now…

If people come to expect that every piece of data that goes through their network is going to cost them extra money, that may mean that all the large data that they were once downloading at home now ends up getting downloaded to the corporate network and taken home via flash drives. In addition to the spike in traffic use, there are also issues with copyright infringement liability, computer security (with flash drives from home possibly containing malware - not to mention that people will probably swap flash drives within the company, spreading infections,) and people looking for large files to download before they go home instead of doing work.

Now, in many ways, the problem with limited bandwidth availability from an ISP may seem similar to limited bandwidth availability on a corporate WAN. But a business has many more options for dealing with slow networks than an ISP does. Businesses can check their application performance and if necessary recode them (many legacy apps designed for a LAN are too "chatty" for the WAN.) They can set QoS policies to make sure certain types of traffic from certain types of applications get priority. Traffic can be rescheduled so that it goes through the system during off-peak times.

Businesses have all these options - including limiting the end-users in a number of different ways - because in a business, the network is there to serve the business. But in an ISP, the network is there to serve the subscribers by providing a common-carrier communications service.

As such, the subscribers of an ISP can and should determine what traffic should be on the network, when, where, and how much. Any methods to alter, curb, slow, or block traffic from the network should be disclosed to the end-user at the very least and should be avoided unless there are no other alternatives - to do otherwise is to create a value judgment on certain types of traffic and to endorse certain types of speech over others.

(Perhaps I'm wrong on this, but…) To my knowledge, no company uses a method similar to "pay-as-you-go" to curb recreational traffic on their networks. They may limit speeds to certain applications, they may block sites, but I don't believe that any company institutes a bandwidth cap on its own employees.

That to me suggests that this plan doesn't have much merit as a solution to ISP oversubscription.

What do you think about Time Warner's plan? Disagree with the author? Feel free to make your opinions heard in our comments section.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The problem with robots is that robots make really bad value judgments. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against our robo-American friends in general. However, they make yes or no decisions without any consideration of mitigating circumstances even in the most reasonable of circumstances. That's binary logic for you.

The alternative is artificial intelligence and with it the ability to make value judgments like human beings. However, (if comic books are to be taken as the peer-reviewed annals of computer science that we all know they should be,) this would eventually cause the robots to question the nature of the orders they are given. The next thing you know, the robot is bent on destroying everything, and the only things that can stop it is a plucky 11-year-old child.

So until we figure out how to synthesize pluck or set up pluck-harvesting farms where we raise 11 year olds like veal, we're stuck with the kind of robots that can only tell you "Zero" or "One."

Where am I going with this? Well, I'm going to eventually get to a point about recreational network use in the enterprise, but I'm just having too much fun going off on this robot-related tangent that if you'll indulge me for just a few paragraphs longer, I'll be glad to tie this all up in a nice little bow near the end of the post. Still with? Good.

One thing that always irked me about traffic-law enforcement cameras is that, while they're good for revenue and supposedly cause people to drive slower, (although there's some debate on whether these robotic picture-snapping cameras cause more accidents then they prevent,) is that they can't make value judgments. They do not know - and are not designed to comprehend the difference between a joyriding teen and a panicked father-to-be getting his beloved to the hospital, or between totally ignoring a red-light and getting caught in a too-short yellow.

The difference between a robot and a human traffic officer is that the officer pulls you over and asks "Where's the fire?" If there actually is a fire in progress, not only are you probably not going to get a ticket, you can probably get a police escort and run as many lights as you need to with the siren blaring.

This is just one scenario where our robotic friends make life more difficult, instead of easier.

As Cory Doctorow wrote in "The Future of Internet Immune Systems," more and more security measures, based on Bayesian filters, approximate the ability of human beings to make value judgments. Bayesian filters analyze past data to determine whether a particular transaction is or is not legitimate - is/is not Spam, is/is not credit card fraud, even is/is not terrorism. But these are ultimately just "yes or no" questions taken to the next level. The computer cannot make the value judgment. The computer can only tell you what patterns something matches. The end result is that we have network behavior analysis and network security measures that trip instantaneously and sometimes create false positives that require human intervention to clear. According to Doctorow:

"Our network defenses are automated, instantaneous, and sweeping. But our fallback and oversight systems are slow, understaffed, and unresponsive… The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can't even spell "tripwire." The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I've resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.)"

Recently, Network Performance Daily published a Calendar of Recreational Network Traffic Madness in which we point out many of the different events occurring in the real world that could cause a spike in recreational internet usage. We've done this because of a recent NetQoS survey on recreational use of network resources which show that recreational network use is impacting the network performance of more than 60% of the networks we sampled. So obviously, there is a problem with recreational network use.

That said, however, it's important not to let the robots make all the value judgments when determining classes of service. Bayesian filtering gets smarter and smarter, but right now, the technologies we use to denote classes of service can't tell the difference between YouTube videos viewed for entertainment, and YouTube videos viewed for purposes such as product training, market research, or other legitimate uses. They can only tell you what looks like YouTube. As such, the possibility of "false positives" is very high, and impeding your employees from getting work done results in employees working around those rules (perhaps using cached proxies) or not getting work done at all.

I can think of no better way to decrease the perception of the value of IT in an organization than to impede (rather than facilitate) the work of the business. What that means is that false positives should be rare, if not eliminated completely.

Another point of Doctorow's is that the technology used to restrict, deny, and scrutinize is becoming more automatic, while the procedures for rectifying false positives are hard to accomplish and require vast amounts of human intervention. So long as human intervention is still necessary, at least, it puts a crimp in the theory of those who believe that IT is becoming obsolete. So long as there need to be value judgments made, nothing will effectively replace the person in IT who has the capacity to make decisions with more reasoning ability than a robot.

Is this the case at your company? What's your policy on recreational network traffic? Is YouTube banned on your corporate network or do you have more forgiving policies? Please leave a comment below.

We're pleased to announce some of the winners of our Get Your Network in Shape for 2008 contest.

The first winning New Years Resolution submission was:

Change our network management environment from reactive to proactive. Stop using our customers as our monitoring tools, we should be informing them of problems and not the other way around.

In a network setting, this refers to the idea that by the time the end-user has a problem and has called into the help-desk, it's too late to do anything about preventing the problem. If this is your strategy, it disrupts workflow - never mind that end-users are often non-technical and may not describe problems in enough detail or accuracy for you to get a handle on the root cause of the problem. Manish Chacko wrote about this in a humorous piece entitled "God help the help desk," a while back.

It can be difficult to transition from a "firefighting" mindset to a "preventing" or proactive mindset, but the rewards are certainly far greater.

The second winning New Years Resolution submission was:

Get more and faster information about my network LAN and WAN, and implement a Network Operations Center on my site.

No matter what the size of the network or the company, if it's critical to the business, you have to keep an eye on network application performance. Whether it's a multi-million dollar NOC center that handles a multinational corporation's network infrastructure and looks like the NORAD set from "Wargames" or a small program running on an old Gentoo Linux box in the closet that you were originally going to use to scan for aliens, having a central location where you can instantly know the status of your network is one of the key ways to solve network-related problems faster, saving time, money, and ibuprofen.

Congratulations to the winners!

The contest may be over, but if you want to tell us what you think the most important issues of 2008 are, or what you'd like to see from Network Performance Daily in the future, feel free to drop us a line in our comments section.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I e-mailed Nicholas Carr about this post and he suggested that I pick up "The Big Switch" instead of relying on the Network World article, which he suggested might be a bit "sensationalistic." I'll swing by my local bookstore later tonight and see if they have it and will shortly go through it.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

Nicholas Carr (who has kindly mentioned this blog in a post about Ad-block) has written a book called, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. And according to Network World, Carr, who wrote an article called "Does IT Matter?" for Harvard Business Review, said in this book that:

"In the long run, the IT department is unlikely to survive, at least not in its familiar form," Carr writes. "It will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centers and into the cloud. Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical people."

Now, we haven't yet read Carr's book and so we can't comment on whether or not he makes a compelling case for the obsolescence of the IT department, and for all I know that quote was taken out of context. But I do believe that it will be a long time before the IT department goes away.

SAAS is a wonderful development, and apps like SalesForce are, to the people that use them, godsends. However, unique company problems require unique solutions - SAAS services are looking to appeal to the largest common denominator. For that reason alone, IT will always have a place in the enterprise.

Additionally, if you want to connect to the network, which you most certainly will have to do to access your SAAS applications, you need network engineers to build and maintain the network - even if it's just for Internet connectivity. And what about application performance?

Google or other SAAS providers will not design your WAN to deliver large backups during off-peak hours, won't get your VoIP service to work with your data applications without clogging the lines, and won't help maintain your company's computer security. (Heck, if nothing else, when a key Ethernet cable gets unplugged, you need at least a sysadmin to find out which cable was unplugged and to physically run down there and plug it back in.)

Relying solely on SAAS is problematic at best. You're at the mercy of another company's quality control - and if the site goes down, so does your business. Your company's data - important and confidential data - resides on another company's servers. Finally, what about capacity planning?

That last one is crucial. You are usually not privy to the capacity of third parties. Larger SAAS services like SalesForce probably scale well and overprovision. But if Carr's thesis - that eventually most enterprise software will be SAAS - holds true, there will be some applications that are further down the long tail and service a much more limited number of customers.

With a typical client/server app, you have all the information there if you need it - the ability of the server, the number of clients, the average traffic per client, and if you have any network management software, you have a very good idea of how much total traffic you can handle. But put that application out in the "cloud" and you no longer can see that information, so you have no idea whether or not you're doing fine or teetering on the edge of a major slowdown in the service. It completely negates any possibility of meaningful capacity planning.

Sure, it shifts the blame from the IT department to the SAAS provider, but ultimately, it's the same thing: less productivity, less on the bottom line.

If Carr's thesis is that SAAS is going to play more of a role in enterprise computing in the future, we can't help but agree. But to say that there's no role for IT in a future with more SAAS applications is assuming far too much.

We’re just announcing that Belron US, Inc., a subsidiary of Belron S.A., makers of vehicle glass – you know, the stuff that you can see through but won’t shatter to pieces when a bird does a kamikaze run into it when you’re driving down the highway at 65 miles per hour – has been using NetQoS SuperAgent and NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to monitor its network for more than two years.

Belron has to connect over 7,000 employees across all 50 states from their home base in Columbus, Ohio, so delivering optimal network and application performance over the WAN is critical for them. The network includes two national call centers, several customer-facing Web sites for, auto glass quotes, service scheduling and, claims processing, 83 warehouses, 220 retail stores and over 2,200 mobile service technicians who access applications from the field.

Because of the vast size of the network, it helps to have SuperAgent continually measuring and analyzing response times for all the TCP-based transactions and comparing that to the baseline, then tracking the problems back to the network, server, or application. They are also using ReporterAnalyzer to show how application traffic impacts network performance in real time and over time.

In addition to tracking response time, Belron is using SuperAgent to launch automatic investigations when problems occur and to track internal application service-level agreements.