One of the things holding back the rollout of new applications (like VoIP, Video, and Unified Communications) is the fear that the new applications will cause network performance problems; according to Network World’s Denise Dubie, citing a survey from Apparent Networks.

Nearly 61% said that they had delayed a VoIP implementation due to network performance concerns. Some 35% postponed a video rollout for the same reasons and 26% put a unified communications project on hold. The survey also showed that network managers can’t always validate their service-level agreements (SLA) with external service providers. More than one-quarter of respondents don’t have the capability to validate SLAs.

It would be instructive to know if decision makers are “concerned” that new apps will reduce their performance because they have baselined performance and know that the network cannot handle new application rollouts… or if they’re concerned because they have no idea whether the network can handle it or not.

It’s the difference between being stopped by practicality and being paralyzed by fear.

And if you’re being paralyzed by fear, it’s costing you money.

For example, Cisco decided to “eat it’s own dogfood” and estimated that they saved $277M from bringing in their own virtual office telecommuting technology – a new application (based on their “Cisco Virtual Office”) for the network that leads to cost savings. If Cisco didn’t know that their network was capable of supporting the CVO application, they would have been out $277M.

Of course, the reason you don’t roll out an application that might save you millions when you don’t know whether those applications will negatively affect network performance is that poor network performance can cost more than whatever you’d save by the rollout.

You can know, or you can be paralyzed by fear of the unknown. I know which I’d rather be.

While the world looks at Iranians getting past official government censorship via Twitter, in another part of the world, Internet filters imposed by the government are also causing problems.  We’re talking, once again, about Australia.

Australian Senator Conroy, who tried to bully a network engineer who pointed out that a mandatory Internet filtering scheme would be ineffective and create massive network performance problems, is now going after, of all things, World of Warcraft. 

A bit of background on this: In most industrialized nations, video games have ratings systems.  The United States uses the ESRB rating system, the U.K. uses the British Board of Film Classification, Europe uses PEGI, and Australia…

Well, Australia is a strange duck.  While in the United States we have the “M” rating for mature games, and PEGI and BBFC have 18/18+ ratings for games,  Austraila’s Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) has no problem with the “R18+” rating for films – similar to our “R” rating, but it offers no “R” rating for video games – classification stops at MA15+ - or content suitable for 15 year olds. 

The effect of this has been that in Australia, retail sales of video games have been limited only to those that the ratings board feels are suitable for 15 year olds.  Never mind that the age of the average gamer in Australia is 28.  So in order to get a retail release in Australia, often violent games, such as Prototype, have to be censored and re-edited – or they cannot be sold in Australia’s retail stores.

Games requiring editing before they could be released in Australia include: “50 Cent: Bulletproof,” “Fallout 3,” and “Grand Theft Auto IV.”  In the case of Fallout 3, the only change was to rename an in-game drug from “morphine” to “Med-X.”

Anyway, Australian gamers could order these games internationally, or download them through the Internet, but the filtering scheme proposed by the government is set to be expanded to block any video games that do not receive a rating from the OFLC – and since the OFLC does not give an 18+ rating, the effect is to ban all game content not suitable for 15 year olds.

But this will affect one game in particular: “World of Warcraft.”  As Escapist Magazine writes:

MMOGs like World of Warcraft have so far been exempt from classification in Australia but could also be impacted by the scheme. "That exemption is the only reason why multi-player games with user-generated environments are possible in this country," said Mark Newton, an engineer and critic of the filtering plan. "Without it, it'd only take one game user anywhere in the world to produce objectionable content in the game environment to make the Australian Government ban the game for everyone."

It won’t work, of course.  But the reason why it won’t work is particularly important for network performance reasons – that is, the solution around most Internet censorships is through the use of proxies.  It’s how tweets are coming out of Iran, it’s how people access facebook at work.  With mandatory Internet filtering, however, Australian gamers are going to start using proxies in nearby countries – Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, etc., to bypass Australian censorship filters. 

And as much as this may seem like the punchline to a baudy geek joke, people spend way more time playing World of Warcraft than downloading Internet porn.   The information on how to set up a proxy overseas will spread very quickly.  This will cause a major change in traffic patterns in the entire Oceania/SE Asian region. 

So if your company has business interests in either region, it might be a good idea to make sure that you’re monitoring your network for changes in traffic densities in overseas lines – and make sure that no one’s desktop-computer WoW proxy impacts performance for the enterprise.

We’ve produced a follow-up to our earlier “The Network Company” video, this time looking at LAN vs. WAN application coding, TCP Slow Start, and WAN Optimization. Instead of giving you a detailed run-down, I’m just going to go ahead and embed it right here.

I love any day when I get to smash citrus with a large blunt object at work...

Part 3: Killing Your Financial Performance… and your company’s performance.

Time Warner can bring out the argument that, under data-capped plans you only pay “extra” for data “over the cap.” The problem is that every single one of Time Warner's plans require you to “buy” that cap of data with your monthly fee.

Since every single monthly fee that Time Warner has come out with (so far) costs around the same $1 per gigabyte for under-the-cap gigs. For some plans, (such as the $30 ten-gig plan, or $15 one-gig plan) it’s much more. For the “60 gigs for $55” plan, it’s slightly less. But for every gig you download, you pay, whether you go over the cap or you don't. How much will that cost?

Well, to simplify things, let’s take a look at the overage rate of $1/GB – only the top tier, at $0.91/gig , is cheaper, and even then, you’re saving maybe 5 dollars for the month over a flat $1/GB rate.

• Idling for One Month: $2.04
  
  Yep, I actually checked, when I had the computer running there, with nothing else going on, no AIM, no Skype, nothing coming in or out of my LAN other than the statistics my router was sending me, I was still using up 485kB over 10 minutes. Extrapolating this out, I get 2.04 GB. I can assume that I'm being bombarded by all sorts of neat little packets containing all sorts of things I don't want. All of which, I'd have to pay for under Time Warner's plan.
  Keep in mind, Time Warner's lowest plan is 1GB, with a $2/GB overage rate. I’m not even sure I can avoid this “usage” by turning off the cable modem when I wasn't using it, because Time Warner measures the traffic at their end.
  
  
• Downloading “Twilight” (HD) from the AppleTV store: $3.80
  
  (I thought that it was pretty appropriate to use a vampire movie to illustrate my point about Time Warner's new pricing plan.)
  
  It should be noted that renting HD version of the movie itself only costs $4.99. At a total cost of $8.79, you might spend $2 on gas getting to Blockbuster and still come out ahead.
  
  Which brings me to an interesting point – Apple’s major overhead cost for the iTunes store is bandwidth. I can't imagine that Apple is paying anywhere near $3.80 in data transfer fees, as that would leave them with only $1.19 in profit before splitting it with the content distributors.
  
  
• Downloading Season 1 of Friday Night Lights (A source of Austin Pride): $30.86
  
  It should be noted that Friday Night Lights is a source of much of Austin's creative community's income and future career positioning – Austin Mayoral Candidata Brewster McCracken specifically mentioned Friday Night Lights in his statement on the data caps. The HD season costs $65.78 – this would add $30.86 to that bill.
  
  
• Watching “Young Frankenstein” on Netflix Instant: $1.26
  
  This would absolutely be one of the competitive, promising services killed off, as the cost of mailing the DVD out is certainly less than the cost of downloading it would be. Netflix Instant is free to Netflix subscribers.
  
  
• Watching an episode of “The Daily Show” from ComedyCentral.com: $0.20
  
  
• Watching an episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com: $0.49
  
  This includes the cost of the commercials that they were running, which included, ironically enough, commercials about watching March Madness Online at the Office.
  
  
• Watching a March Madness Game: $0.28
  
  Yep, it's online now. Oddly enough, the video quality for March Madness was lower than that of Survivor... but as I don't watch sports anyway, who cares.
  
  
• Downloading “Where the Wild Things Are” Trailer: $0.15
  
  Not much, but who goes to Apple's trailer site to watch ONE trailer? And if it's something cool, like “Star Trek” (2009) aren’t you going to see it more than once?
  
  
• YouTube High Definition Video (7m11s): $0.11
  
  Again, YouTube is providing a great way for people to become active creators instead of passive consumers. When a third party charges for something the first party created and the second party wants, it limits the audience and stifles growth.
  
  
• Downloading the back catalogue of a video podcast (Comedy Central's Stand Up Podcast): $1.13
  
  These video podcasts are free to download, though they serve a purpose – the idea is that you watch the podcast, want more, and tune in to Comedy Central’s programming.  Under a data cap, it severely alters the new media marketing plan of just about every company.
  
  If everyone had to pay a surcharge for the data as well as bandwidth, there wouldn’t be any demand for “new media communications specialists” because we’ll all be forced back into using the old media – the old media that we “loved” so much that we abandoned it en masse the instant a better alternative became available.  


• Watching Live Breaking News (Obama's DNC Speech used as example): $1.11
  
  
• Downloading Service Pack 1 for Vista: $0.45
  
  Hobson's choice: Skip an update and risk infection, or leave Windows updates on, and pay more for it? Oh, and if you think you’re immune to infection because you run Linux…
  
  
• BitTorrenting Ubuntu: $0.65 + ($.065 x your share ratio)
  
  A 1:1 share ratio would cost $1.30 – still cheaper than Windows, but not “free.”
  
  
• Gaming:
  
  
  
  • Downloading the latest nVidia graphics card drivers: $0.07 
  • Downloading Half Life 2 from Steam: $0.94
    
  • Patching Battlefield 2: $0.55 
  • One Hour of Team Fortress 2 gaming online w/Voice: $0.09
    
  
  
• Sending an 8GB SD card worth of digital photos to Grandma: $8.00
  
  “Yes, Mom, I'd love to send you photos of your grandson... but... it's so expensive...”
  
  
• Getting Rickrolled: $0.01…
  
  …per rickroll.
  
  Rick Astley only clocks in at 10MB... but Rick's been out there over 19 million times. It adds up. 
  
  
• Video calling my sister via Skype: $0.88
  
  I had a great 2 hour conversation with my sister on Saturday when I was sick. She showed me her fan-translations of Japanese comics and we talked about what she's going to do when she gets her certificate, her plans for her future, it was a great time. She also made fun of me gargling Chloraseptic when I had forgot to mute my headphones, and made fun of me gargling Chloraseptic when I did mute my headphones but still had the webcam on. Ah, great times.

You know, I think it's absolutely ironic that Time Warner didn't learn any lessons from the fact that they were able to storm into the telephone business because they eliminated the exorbitant fees for long distance telephone calling with “cable phone service.” Of course, that may be the idea – there's nothing technologically separating Time Warner's cable telephone service from a service like Vonage, except that you would have to pay for every gigabyte on that Vonage phone – while Time Warner's phone wouldn't have any charges associated with it.

All of a sudden, this thorny “pricing” issue becomes a thorny “Net Neutrality” issue...

Maybe some of these sub-dollar prices look reasonable to you… except that you previously got them for free.  And when people have to pay for what they previously got for free, they’ll find a way around that.

So instead of waiting until they get home to watch that March Madness game, or that YouTube clip, or that Daily Show episode, they’ll do it at work, instead.  And unlike on a Time Warner connection, there really is congestion difficulty on corporate networks. 

You think recreational traffic is bad now…

But ultimately, I think this is a case where Time Warner simply has not learned from history.  We already looked at how the last major service to charge based on usage is a shadow of its former self and eventually abandoned that business model, and how an “@aol.com” e-mail address on a business card went, in the early 90s, from being seen as a go-getting trendsetter to being a laughingstock.  And we saw how Time Warner and other cable companies were able to battle entrenched phone service monopolies by eliminating rated service for long-distance calling for a flat rate. 

But there’s more to it.  When you put a third party price on it, a “Time Warner Tax,” if you will, the thought of doing some of these things – things that have been changing our lives, our economy, and our culture, from one of passive consumers to creators and producers, well... it reminds me of a specific point in history. 

That is, there was once a time in America where every official communication, every official piece of business, every record – required that an onerous surcharge be applied, a tax levied by a distant, monolithic monopoly with no concern for those affected. It negatively affected merchants, manufacturers, printers, lawyers and anyone who needed to work with legal documents. The justifications were also similar to the arguments by Time Warner today – that is, that the tax was “the most easy and least objectionable” way of raising the money, and that alternatives were considered but rejected.

This was the “Stamp Act of 1765.” Opposition to it was so widespread and heartfelt that, well, one thing lead to another, and eventually we waved bye-bye to King George III.

And that's what it comes down to. The move by Time Warner to attempt to use this pricing scheme flies in the face of history. Anybody who legitimately needs broadband service and has the ability to switch to a different provider will do so when they get that first bill.  In short, Time Warner is getting out of the broadband business. 

They’re just doing it in the most money-draining way possible. 

There have been some updates on Time Warner’s data caps since we started covering them.

First, Wired’s Epicenter blog took a look at some of the justifications for the caps. In Ryan Singel’s “Time Warner Cable Earnings Refute Bandwidth Cap Economics,” Wired breaks down Time Warner’s economic justifications for the data caps – and call them “fuzzy math.”

A close look at Time Warner Cable's books shows no significant link between its high-speed data costs and network usage.

For 2008, the most recent period available, Time Warner Cable reported that its high-speed data costs actually declined by 12 percent to $146 million. Meanwhile subscribers increased by more than 10 percent to 8.4 million, and high-speed data revenues climbed to more than $4 billion….

In previous public statements, TWC has said that flat-rate plans are unfair to its customers and that those who just check their e-mail pay the same amount as those who watch streaming video and download movies and that the company needs the extra cash to make the network faster.

These claims, however, do not appear to stand up under scrutiny….

"The conspiracy theorists are saying it’s because they want to keep their customers captive to their video services," says Vince Vittore, a principal analyst at The Yankee Group. "I tend to fall towards the side that they are trying to keep people captive."

In addition to Singel’s article, Saul Hansell at the New York Times interviewed Landel Hobbs, COO of Time Warner Cable, and Hobbs was put into the uncomfortable position of convincing its investors what it doesn’t want to admit to its customers.

Mr. Hobbs tried to strike a balance, saying that while the company is concerned about the cost to maintain its broadband network, investors should not be worried. He said it was “absolutely not” true that Time Warner’s profits were being squeezed by the cost of heavy broadband users…

“[Average Revenue Per User] continues to grow,” [Hobbs] said. “Broadband data is such a great product. I think there will be some customers who don’t use much that will select the lower tier. But over time, they will use more and move up to the higher price plans.”

Additionally, Hansell also brings up the biggest elephant in the room – why make customers pay variable costs for data when Time Warner pays fixed costs?

I tried to explore the marginal costs with Mr. Hobbs. When someone decides to spend a day doing nothing but downloading every Jerry Lewis movie from BitTorrent, Time Warner doesn’t have to write a bigger check to anyone. Rather, as best as I can figure it, the costs are all about building the network equipment and buying long-haul bandwidth for peak capacity.

If that is true, the question of what is “fair” is somewhat more abstract than just saying someone who uses more should pay more. After all, people who watch more hours of cable television don’t pay more than those who don’t.

Mr. Hobbs declined to react to my hypothesis about how costs are almost all fixed costs. He did invite me to meet with an engineer to go over the details, an offer I want to take him up on.

What may be most frustrating is that, according to Nate Anderson at Ars Technica, in “The Price-Gouging Premiums of Time Warner Cable’s data caps,” is that those fixed costs – even to upgrade the network – are quite low.

TWC claims that the caps are needed to "make improvements to infrastructure" that are necessary for higher speed access, but it's hard to see how. Comcast is aggressively rolling out DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades across its service area. In Chicago, it already sells a 50Mbps plan for $139.95—only 56¢ per GB. [Comcast has a 250GB cap across all tiers of service. –ed]

Besides, the dirty secret of these DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts is that they're cheap. Cable companies need to upgrade hardware at the head-end and may need to send out a new cable modem, but this is hardly expensive. A New York Times piece last week quoted industry insiders who said the job could be done for between $20 and $100 (the latter figure includes a new cable modem).

Landel Hobbs also issued a statement online, talking more about the specifics of the plan for Austin and the other test areas. [We had calculated our numbers in Thursday’s article based on the Beaumont plan, however the new numbers do not change the overall results much – 60GB is not that much more than 40 when you average it over 31hrs/wk. --ed] After yesterday’s deadline, we were aware of a statement by Hobbs with more specifics.

Some recent press reports about our four consumption based billing trials planned for later this year were premature and did not tell the full story. With that said, we realize our communication to customers about these trials has been inadequate and we apologize for any frustration we caused. We’ve heard the passionate feedback and we’ve taken action to address our customers’ concerns.

To be perfectly candid, Time Warner certainly had tons of opportunities to set the record straight – including with us, when we interviewed Alex Dudley, their VP of PR, before then. Either the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing over there, or this is a bit of “slight of hand” where Time Warner seems to be changing their plans based on the backlash without admitting that they're changing the plans based on the backlash.

This is a common problem that all network providers are experiencing and must address. Several other providers have instituted consumption based billing, including all major network providers in Canada and others in the U.K., New Zealand and elsewhere.

This is true, but it ignores the fact that in Canada, major network providers, such as Bell Canada, are legally required to resell the Internet connections to smaller network providers, all of which set their own rules for usage. These small network providers, such as TekSavvy have thrived because customers flee Bell Canada for the uncapped services (TekSavvy offers 5Mbps/800kbps unlimited service for $39.95CAD/mo). Bell tried to cap wholesalers' customers as well, but failed.

Additionally, services in New Zealand (where Kiwis pay an obscene $20NZD/GB) are... complex. First, unlike the U.S., the companies there have a legitimate excuse for charging more for bandwidth; as New Zealand is two islands out in the middle of nowhere, connected only through undersea cables which New Zealand's companies have mostly had to finance. (Additionally, there are political considerations, as Telecom New Zealand, which is New Zealand's largest company, has close relationships with the conservative elements of New Zealand politics. Nothing untoward or unethical, but certainly a great deal of lobbying power.)

Internet demand is rising at a rate that could outpace capacity within a few years. According to industry analysts, the infrastructure may not be able to accommodate the explosion of online content by 2012. This could result in Internet brownouts. It will take a lot of money to fix the problem.

The most famous of these studies came out at the time the Net Neutrality debate was just beginning, and it turned out to be connected to the “Internet Innovation Alliance” which essentially was a front organization for telecommunications companies.

Rather than raising prices on all customers or limiting usage, we think the fairest approach is to move to a tiered model in which users pay more if they use more.

The problem, of course, is that this does, in fact, raise prices on all customers and limit usage. Usage limiting may be de facto – via a person's ability and willingness to pay – rather than de jure, like the Comcast cap, but it is still a limit. Or more accurately, a disincentive. As for raising prices on all customers, this is the big one – the caps proposed for the higher usage customers are too low, obviously, but the caps proposed for low usage customers are also way, way too low. Customers who were doing fine on a 728kbps line but using more than 5GB/mo will find that they have to upgrade to a higher tier of service – paying more for something they don't need – in order to get to a more reasonable cap.

This is a price hike that Time Warner desperately does not want to look like a price hike.

To accommodate lighter Internet users and those who need a lower priced option, we are introducing a 1 GB per month tier offering speeds of 768 KB/128 KB for $15 per month. Overage charges will be $2 per GB per month. Our usage data show that about 30% of our customers use less than 1 GB per month.

When the bandwidth caps were announced, I used Tomato Firmware to track 10 minutes of idling – nothing except for standard windows services – no updating software, no instant messengers, no web browsing – nothing – to see how much bandwidth was consumed idling. It came out to around 2GB a month. Simply idling. I think Time Warner's “usage data” for “30%” of their customers is incorrect. We go more into this in part 3 of the series on Monday.

We are increasing the bandwidth tier sizes included in all existing packages in the trial markets to 10, 20, 40 and 60 GB for Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages, respectively. Package prices will remain the same. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

We will introduce a 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package for $75 per month (offering speeds of 10 MB/1 MB). Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

Again, price hikes without calling them price hikes. At the very least, they're “shrinking the size of the candy bar.”

Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.

Again, we currently get that now – at $60/mo. That's really what it comes down to – for someone paying $60/mo, $150/mo for the exact same service will simply never seem reasonable.

There really are two issues here – the first is the cultural issue of bandwidth caps stunting Internet usage and development, combined with issues of making people pay twice for online content, and what can be seen as anti-competitive maneuvers against competitors of Time Warner's cable TV and VoIP offerings.

The second issue is – will people put up with being, quite frankly, price-gouged by a monopoly? We conclude with how much these data caps will end up costing you – and costing your enterprise network in terms of performance – in the conclusion to our 3-part series on Monday.

Part One: Killing Economic Performance.

Last Thursday, we published an interview with the VP of PR for Time Warner Cable about plans to roll out data caps in the city of Austin and three other cities – Austin the most high-tech focused of the three.

In this three-part post, we’ll take a look at how at how data caps affect performance – economic performance, overall network performance, and the impact they have on your company’s network performance.

First, let's talk broadly about the economic aspects of it – Austin is a high-tech community. It is not the /only/ high tech community in America. Small businesses will end up paying more for broadband, large businesses will have trouble recruiting talent to live in Austin when they could be soaking up the bits in San Francisco, Seattle, or New York.

Austin also has a great number of game development companies, a large number of film and television interests, and we even host SXSW.

This is such a big issue in Austin, that two of the three mayoral candidates have come out with statements addressing the caps. Lee Leffingwell said:

“Right now, we need to be encouraging, rather than stifling economic recovery and growth in Austin. This plan moves us in the wrong direction. It potentially puts Austin at a disadvantage as we compete against other communities to attract, retrain, and grow prosperous businesses... The usage caps proposed in [TWC's] new plan are neither realistic nor reasonable... It’s easy to see how the costs associated with the ongoing, high volumes of Internet use that many businesses require be could be astronomical. ”

And Brewster McCracken said:

“By placing a tariff on the flow of information, Time Warner is also undermining the Internet’s fundamental values of openness and equality. More than virtually any city, Austin is a center of innovation and creativity. That innovation and creativity increasingly is taking place through digital media, video games, independent film and social media... When the city funded the upgrades to Austin Studios recently, we funded installation of terabytes of digital media bandwidth.... Time Warner’s approach could make it so prohibitively expensive to produce films and video games using digital technologies that filmmakers would have to return to celluloid and projectors and video game producers would abandon multiplayer online games.... It is not good for Austin. It is bad for the principle of an open Internet. It undermines the public interest.“

The other candidate, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, is a former Republican, and doesn't have a chance in the left-leaning Austin, so the real race is between Leffingwell and McCracken.

And these caps are getting attention at the federal level as well, with Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) railing against the plan in the U.S. House. 

Now, when a “simple billing change” inspires the politicians to rail against it, most companies should know that they've hit a nerve. Not so, with Time Warner, which continues to use various metaphors to try to explain away the problem. As Omar Gallega at the Austin American Statesman says:

[Quoting a Time Warner Spokesman] “As the amount of usage has dramatically diverged among users, this is becoming inherently unfair and not the way most consumers want to pay for goods they consume. When you go to lunch with a friend, do you split the bill in half if he gets the steak and you have a salad?”

All right, let’s talk about that for a second.

WHAT!?

Rather than trying to compare its pricing and services to the way cell phone companies sell minutes or the way that restaurants price their food, why not stick to comparing apples to apples? Why not talk about Internet pricing trends, the cost that Time Warner Cable pays to build out its network and what wholesale bandwidth costs it has to pass on.

Quite right. So, let's talk about Internet pricing trends. Let's go back to the 1990s, in fact, when it was not uncommon to have a service like AOL, Compuserve, or Prodigy charge you on an hourly basis.

My family signed onto AOL January 2nd , 1996, for the “$10, 10 hour” service. It was when dad was getting $50 bills in the mail for AOL's “$10/mo” service that we did the research and found out about dialup “mom & pop” ISPs that allowed you to use the Internet all you wanted for a $15-20/mo fee. We went with Cybernex, and when they closed down, Cyberwarrior. (They had funny names, but local call exchanges!)

AOL's model simply couldn't compete. It went from 5 hours free to 10 hours free, to 15 hours free... 50 hours free.. 700 hours free... even, at one point, 1000 hours free. (Keen eyes will observe that a 31 day month only has 744 hours.) Eventually, AOL went to an unlimited usage model as well.

This, of course, is because there were competitors.

Time Warner, in certain markets, has no competitors. The only other broadband provider with (large-scale) data caps is Comcast, which caps at 250GB a month, a policy which came out of congestion problems and which was eventually solved through QoS prioritization of low-data customers over high-data customers.

But even then we're dancing around the issue, which is that any time you place a cap on data, you are lowering an effective performance. Sure, even at a 5GB cap, you may get those five gigs pretty quickly with a Time Warner connection. But how much more than your base rate is anyone actually willing to spend before they figure that it would be cheaper and easier to switch to a competitor (if possible) or to move out of the neighborhood (if it's not?)

We'll take a look at that question in part two of this article.

That sound you’re hearing is the screaming of my soul being crushed.

All great journalists can maintain complete objectivity in the most trying of circumstances. I am merely a good journalist.

Well, I’m adequate.

But I think I should disclose my biases here, as this is an issue that affects me personally.

DSLReports.com reported that Time Warner has decided that Austin will be one of four “trial cities” to test out their new “Tiered Bandwidth” plans – which are essentially paying roughly the same amount of money you were before (give or take about $5) plus $1 for each gigabyte of data you transfer, over a set cap. The highest plan will be 100GB. Omar Gallaga over at the Statesman worries that the top plan it might not be enough for him and his family – I know it certainly won’t be enough for me.

The New York Times once estimated the wholesale cost of bandwidth to Time Warner at something like $0.10 per GB. At $1/GB, that’s a markup of 1000%

So I got upset. The Internet isn’t just how I make my day-job livelihood, it’s also what I use to transfer and upload the high definition videos that I put out on the Web for my moonlighting. It’s how I send raw footage to documentary collaborators. Since YouTube is the only affordable outlet for my work at this time, a bandwidth cap will make it cost prohibitive for me to continue as an independent filmmaker.

Best estimate yesterday was that I was I was using 400GB a month, and that my Internet service would increase 650%. Since then, I’ve actually looked at my home traffic data for the past 15 days. I’m happy to report that I’m only using 300GB a month, and at $1/GB, the bill would only go up about 500%.

(I could go for go for business service, which has no caps, but the equivalent of my current “Turbo” service, which provides 15Mbps down and 2Mbps up, would cost $280/mo. There are plans at $120, which is merely a 200% markup, but the $120 business class service provides only 10Mbps down, and 512kbps up.)

But what was even more upsetting was that I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first. I first found out about the story from DSL Reports. Calling up Time Warner customer service, they told me there was no plan for tiered bandwidth in Austin. Chatting with Time Warner tech support, they said it would start this month.

The actual truth is that monitoring end-user bandwidth will begin this month in Austin, but we won’t be charged for bandwidth until a couple months down the road.

But I didn’t know that until I literally had Alex Dudley, VP of Public Relations at Time Warner Cable on the line.

Time Warner is a monopoly in my apartment complex. I have checked – AT&T, Grande, Verizon – none of them offer service to my apartment.

I like my apartment. My apartment is very close to work, it has a nice swimming pool, and there’s a 100% lack of cockroaches. Essentially, I can’t justify staying there if I’m going to be paying $300/mo (or even $120/mo) for Internet service, compared to $60/mo elsewhere. In essence, I’m being kicked out of my home by Time Warner. (If one of your bills shot up 500%, you’d move too.)

I’m just lucky that my lease ends around the same time that TWC will be instituting these caps. It would have been cheaper in the long run to break my lease otherwise.

So journalistic impartiality? Well, I give it my best shot, that’s all you can ask of me in this situation.

One last thing before we get to the interview: We’ve covered bandwidth caps from Time Warner and others before in this publication. I really hope that if you’re interested in this subject, you read “Bandwidth Caps and the Cognitive Surplus.” In short: The Internet has finally given people something better to do than watch “whatever’s on” TV, and it’s creating a more participatory culture. Bandwidth caps are an attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle. There’s more to it, of course, which is why I suggest you take a look at the full article.

A transcript of the interview with Alex Dudley – which at times seemed more like a debate – is below.

[The following transcript is mostly verbatim. A few words have been changed (ums, some interruptions, confused & corrected technical terms such as saying “gigabyte” when meaning “megabyte” and vice versa, etc.) so that the interview reads more clearly. Reporters following up on this story who need to verify the accuracy of the transcript are welcome to contact brian.boyko@netqos.com for details.]

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Brian Boyko, Network Performance Daily: As you know, I'm a customer of Time Warner in Austin. I have the biggest bandwidth plan, I think the Turbo...

Alex Dudley, VP of Public Relations, Time Warner Cable: Turbo, yes. You like it?

NPD: Well that entirely depends on the answers to some of the questions that I'm about to ask you!

Dudley: [Laughter] It always does, it always does.

NPD: It does, you know? We've actually covered a lot of this stuff, like for example, when Beaumont, Texas came out with the 40 gigabyte plan. I actually did a couple of back-of-the-envelope calculations, and - I can't give you an exact number, but I'm pretty sure I would probably go over the largest limit - which was 40 gigabytes - just myself personally. So, I'm wondering - let's just talk about the largest plan, 40 GB - how much after that, per gigabyte does the Beaumont plan cost?

Dudley: A dollar.

NPD: A dollar per gigabyte. Here's one of the big things. I called up Time Warner in Austin, through the [customer service] number - that's the customer service for Austin - everybody I've talked to says there are no plans to do monitored bandwidth, or metered bandwidth, or data caps, or however you want to call it - there's no plan to charge per gigabyte. I called up - or rather, I chatted online with a representative - a technical support representative for Road Runner, and he said that the plan would begin for Austin residents in April. So this is conflicting-- the first question is obviously, what is the story with regards to Austin, Texas, and I assume the other plans in Greensboro, and San Antonio - is it Richmond? Let me check my notes.

Dudley: Rochester, New York. So, the plan is a little bit different in some of those places. In Austin, we are going to begin metering usage in April. But we are - let me back up. The best way to think about this is that we kind of do it in three steps. The first is that we get our technical house in order so that we can actually do this. And we start metering bandwidth. And we give customers a three month grace period, so that they can see what they're consuming, get used to the new plan, figure out the right plan for them without being charged. After which, we begin to mail the first bills. So - we are going to be technically ready to meter usage in Austin in April, and we're going to begin doing so, but we are not going to begin the grace period for a couple more months. Probably early Summer. So the first time that people in Austin see a bill is likely to be Fall. Septemberish.

NPD: I was a little concerned about that - when I heard that metering would begin in April, I thought that you would start charging in April. And - I guess not. And that was exactly what I was hoping that you'd say, actually, and I didn't expect you to say it. Because, I called up, I tried to find out my usage over the past three months exactly. I couldn't do that.

Dudley: Yeah - that's - you know, look, that's one of the keys to this. We understand that this is basically a wholesale change in the way that people talk about the way they use the Internet. We get that, that this is hard. So, what we want to do is make it as clear as possible. So - in addition to the three month grace period, we've also created what we call a gas gauge that will rest on your RoadRunner home page, so you can get instant up-to-the-minute calculation of how we are measuring your usage. And that will launch at the same time that we begin metering.

NPD: The only problem is, and as I've said, these are all back-of-the-envelope calculations - I don't have hard numbers, but personally, I'm not only a journalist, I'm also a filmmaker. I make short documentaries for the Web. And the idea is that-- Essentially, I'm sending 250 megabyte files over and over and over, so one video could take about 2 gigabytes themselves. And I'm downloading stuff like the Prelinger archives - for stuff to use - public domain footage to use in my video, I wouldn't be surprised, if you add in things like Netflix, (I'm a Netflix subscriber,) YouTube, Hulu, things like that - I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up being one of the highest usage customers in Austin. Probably - if I had to guess, maybe 400 Gigabytes - and that would cost around $400 a month - which is about... my rent.

[Ed. Note: I’ve since checked my Internet usage over the past 15 days based on what Vista’s Network connection reported during that time. A more accurate estimate would be 300 GB/mo.]

Dudley: Yeah, I think there's a number of different things that you can do. First and foremost, we are going to introduce a 100 GB plan. Kind of as a response to the folks who feel that the caps are low - we're going to offer that. We haven't finished pricing it yet, so I don't know what it's going to cost. That said, I mean, if you are using, consistently, 400 GB a month, then clearly, you're a target of what's going on here. And basically, what we're saying is - because of consumers that are using amounts like this, what we're seeing is a need for network expansion. Basically what we figure is that the top 25% of users use 100 times more network bandwidth than the bottom 25%.

NPD: Well that's just standard bell curves.

Dudley: I’m sorry?

NPD: Well, when you put any system on a graph like that, I mean, that actually seems a little low because of the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle or whatever it's called. When you put something on the bell curve, of course the top 25 are going to use the most bandwidth because they're the top 25. The lowest 25 are going to use the least amount of bandwidth. It seems like - funny numbers.

Dudley: Let’s use a metaphor then. You live in a small apartment. And, you're on the same electric grid as a very fancy neighborhood with big houses. And the guy in the big house leaves every light in the place blazing all night long - has a bunch of lights outside, spotlights on his beautiful house. And you have to subsidize his electric bill, just because you happen to share the network with him.

NPD: Right... but that doesn't...

Dudley: You conserve energy; you live in a small apartment, that's what we're saying. As we need to make improvements in the network to accommodate the increased demand, we can do one of two things. Either we can just charge everybody more, and we let the smaller user subsidize the top users, or we could create a plan that has a consumption element to it that asks people to pay for what they use.

NPD: Right, but that's kind of a false choice in that-- haven't you considered using -- it's kind of a false choice because what you can do is - first of all, when you talk about something like that, with congestion, the problem with the electric grid - using that as a metaphor - is that there's a finite amount of oil in the world. There's a finite amount of output. With a cable company, what you're really talking about is bandwidth, and bandwidth is simply a measure of how much you can have over time. So when you're charging for the data, basically, to use your metaphor, I think it's particularly unfair to charge more for the person who is using 40 gigabytes after letting a download go off overnight, compared to a guy whose using, maybe, under his cap, but he's doing it the most congested part of the day. And, what I'm thinking might be a solution without caps - and I was wondering if you ever considered this - is simply tracking the high-end users, and when they're downloading a lot and the line is congested, and only when the line is congested, then perhaps, throttling back their service using QoS priorities. Giving them...

Dudley: That’s exactly what Comcast did about a year ago, and it caused a complete outrage and the FCC hauled them before the committee and told them they had to stop doing it.

NPD: Actually, I covered that. That's actually the result that Comcast applied after the FCC asked them to choose a different system. You're talking about the Sandvine stuff that was sending forged RST packets and the issue there was that the RST packets looked like they had come from the sender itself, which was essentially kind of a classic "Man In The Middle" attack. A kind of a fraudulent thing.

Dudley: So here's what I'd say about that, then. What I'd say is that there are a number of ways you can address this problem. And the way that you've mentioned is certainly a possibility. We think this one also has some merit, and we're going to test it. And we'll see what happens.

NPD: Well, I can tell you right now that it probably won't work as far as congestion is concerned, because you're not attacking congestion. You're attacking data, while data is unlimited, while bandwidth is finite. And I'm already paying, as I said, I'm a Turbo customer - I'm already paying more for more bandwidth. If you want to charge me more for that bandwidth, I can go down to a lower tier in order to have it remain affordable. But, one of the things that I really can't do is, I really can't cut back on my consumption, because I do need this for both of my jobs - both this job as a journalist and as a filmmaker.

Dudley: Then it sounds like you should be a commercial customer, then, which is also possible. You know, for $140 bucks a month, you could be a commercial customer. And then there's no cap.

NPD: And can you give commercial customer service to residences?

Dudley: Yes.

NPD: That's good. That's a little bit more reasonable. Here's what I'm wondering. If a bill for a month goes consistently over, 140 GB a month - or rather the bill ends up being more than what it would cost for a commercial customer - let me start over. Basically, will customers be notified when it seems like they're going over and maybe they should upgrade to a bigger plan? Like a lot of the cell phone companies do, if they see you have like $30 worth of overage charges in a month, they'll tell you, "If you're going to keep doing this, you really should upgrade to the higher plan?"

Dudley: In the early parts of the trial, we are going to try to do that - try and alert folks when they're getting close, get them into a proper plan. But look, someone in your scenario, if you're really consuming 400GB a month, then that's not - we'll work with you on ways to curb your consumption, but clearly, if you're dependent upon it for work, you're not going to be happy with any of those discussions. So I think that for someone like yourself, a commercial account is probably the best option.

NPD: What about families that perhaps have multiple users. For me, I understand that I'm a high user, because I do videos. But the thing is, especially with services like Hulu and Netflix, and things like that - a lot of families could end up paying for one account, and everybody thinks that they're fine because they are only downloading 20 gigabytes which is half their cap, but if there's four people in the family, downloading 20 gigabytes - you start to have a problem. Will this negatively impact those larger families that need the Internet more?

Dudley: Well, I think that what you're failing to account for is that even in Beaumont, where the trial is active, 86% of our customers are unaffected.

NPD: Right, but 14% are!

Dudley: And by customers, I mean households, I don't mean individual people. So, the assumption is that the family may need more, but we haven't found that. Basically, we're targeting the highest end-users, to pay their share. So, I think that what we found is that for the majority of customers - for the overwhelming majority of customers, it's not even an issue.

NPD: Right, but 14% is a significant minority, and, I mean, my publication's called "Network Performance Daily," Chances are that my readers fall into that 14 percent. A great deal - and as time goes on, more users use the Internet for different services, and people get more Internet savvy, that 14% is just going to keep on growing. I mean, to me...

Dudley: But there's nothing to say that the plan couldn't grow with it, either.

NPD: Well, can I get your promise on that? That the plan will grow over time as Internet consumption increases overall?

Dudley: [long pause] That's a tricky spot for me. No. You can't. I don't make that decision. But what I'm saying is that there's nothing inherent in the capped levels that prevents us from doing that from an engineering perspective.

NPD: Alright. I just have to ask this stuff, and I'm sorry for putting you on the spot like that, but you know...

Dudley: Nah, this is okay. This is what I do. I'm happy to have a debate, so, it's not - no big deal.

NPD: Well, there is another aspect to this, and that is - Time Warner is a cable company that not only sells Internet service but also sells cable service - and I've mentioned services like Hulu, YouTube, AppleTV - those services - couldn't this be seen as anti-competitive? That all of a sudden it costs - you not only have to pay a dollar for a movie rental, but you also have to pay Time Warner a dollar and a half on top of that, for the extra bandwidth to make the movie rental - can't that be seen as anticompetitive?

Dudley: [pause] Only as much as it's anticompetitive for ExxonMobil to charge you the gas to drive down to Blockbuster to rent your video.

NPD: Right, but if you walk to Blockbuster, you're fine. I mean...

Dudley: That’s right, and if you stay under your cap, you're fine.

NPD: I - well you're still, if you stay under your cap, you're still charging per gigabyte - it's like... if you

Dudley: No we're not. We're charging for an allotment of gigabytes. We're charging for a monthly plan.

NPD: Right, but what I'm trying to say is...

Dudley: It has a limit. Much like you're - look, I don't know why this is such - why this is foreign to folks. You know, you're either paying for consumption... I mean, the concept of paying for what you consume is not a foreign one. I understand that it's different from the way we've charged for the Internet in the past, and we admit that. But the concept that you pay for what you use is how you buy just about everything.

NPD: Yeah, what I'm trying to say is that there's a way to pay for what you use and tackle consumption, without a data cap which has all these other side-effects.

Dudley: It's not a cap - you're thinking about it wrong. I mean we're calling it a cap, but it's not a cap. We don't stop you from consuming after you go over that cap, we just charge you differently. It's the same thing with a cell phone plan.

NPD: Yes, but it's effectively - it's a de facto cap. The argument is entirely that you are doing this entirely to get users to change their behavior. And what I'm--

Dudley: No we're not. We don't care - use as much as you want. All we're asking is that you pay for what you use. We're happy when you use - I mean, if you want to use 400 GB a month, and pay for it, we love you.

NPD: So this isn't a congestion solving problem?

Dudley: It is in -- it's a congestion solving problem in one of two ways. Either it will provide us with the revenue stream needed to beef up the network, or folks will change their consumption habits, which is entirely possible. But - it's not - that's not to say that-- it's completely content and protocol agnostic. We don't care what you download from where.

NPD: And that's great. I love that.

Dudley: I'm sorry?

NPD: I love protocol agnostic solutions - I think they're great - I just think that there are other protocol agnostic solutions that, perhaps, would be better than what you're doing.

Dudley: And if there are, and we will certainly look at all of them, then we will naturally be incorporated into this. And again, this is just a trial, so... I understand that as a heavy user, you're concerned - and your readership maybe heavy users too, and they're concerned about their personal skin in this game, and that's understandable. But I think that basically, it would be hard for anyone who consumes 400 GB a month to say that that doesn't cost us as your network provider a lot to service you. And it doesn't impact the levels of service on those with whom you share your bandwidth.

NPD: Right, but the point that I'm trying to say is that I'm perfectly fine for you charging me more, but charge me more based on the bandwidth I use, not on the data I download. You can use QoS policies - because I can't filter how congested the lines are on my end. You guys have to do that on your end. I'm just - what I'm trying to say is - yes, I'm a heavy user, but the heavy user isn't making problems for his neighbors if he's doing it when none of his neighbors are using the Internet.

Dudley: Hmm - and I don't disagree with that point, that that doesn't impact... I mean, you can't impact service on someone who is not online. And I don't disagree with that. But it still costs us money - the increased usage still costs us money to make the network able to accommodate that. And that's just a fact of business.

NPD: But you've already charged me more for my Turbo plan... You've already established, that "if you want this level of service, if you want this level of bandwidth, you're charging me for that Turbo plan." Now you're also saying, "In addition to that, you're going to also charge me for consumption?"

Dudley: That's exactly what we're saying.

NPD: Alright. No disagreement here. I know. I'm being rough. I don't like to be rough.

Dudley: No, it's okay. Look, I understand. This is a very passionate issue. It's very close to people like yourself that are heavy users. I get it. It's fine.

NPD: This corporate plan that you're talking about, how is it different from a personal plan? So, let's say that I do decide to go to the $140 a month plan.

Dudley: Just call us and ask for a business class account. And basically we come and hook up a corporate connection. It's a different customer service queue too. There are other advantages for you.

NPD: This is interesting - can we resell that? I know that residential services, you are not allowed to resell that, there was an article about someone who was trying to pull a fast one and resell 35 cable modems - with business class, am I restricted? Because I'm thinking - if it's going to be like $140 a month - that's still a pretty penny, and if I can get my neighbor to go with me on it, if he's got a Wi-Fi - if we can work out some sort of sharing deal, I have the landline so I'll maybe pay a little bit more - sort of like, "Internet Roomies."

Dudley: I don't know if that's possible or not. I'm not familiar with the service agreement on that. But they'll - just give us a call and the people that sell that service can answer that question. I mean, look, we're not interested in folks reselling our services, so I think that's what we're trying to prevent, but whether you guys could link as one business account, I don't know. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility, but I could be wrong.

NPD: Well, thank you very much for talking - I know that I talked a lot - is there anything else you'd like to add?

Dudley: No, I think - for your readers it's different, but for the vast majority of our customers, they won't even notice a difference, and I think that - and I know that's probably not music to your ears, but at the same time, what we're doing is trying to ensure that we're maintaining a level of service that folks are happy to pay for, and if we don't make some sort of investment in this, or if we don't at least acknowledge that there's an issue here that needs to be addressed, then by the time we need to do it, it'll be too late. So this is an experiment. One of the things we're going to measure is customer reaction, so, you know, it's an important part of the process and we're happy to listen to our customers. But, you know, so far, the reaction has been what we've expected, fairly even across the board. So we'll see what happens and we'll make decisions based on what we see.

NPD: Alright, well again, thank you for your time.

Network World recently published an article, “U.S. isn’t falling behind in broadband,” in its news section of its LANs & WANs page. The article is written by James Lakely of the Heartland Institute, a conservative public policy think tank based in Chicago.

In it, Lakely argues that spending on improving the nation’s telecommunication infrastructure – specifically the spending in

Obama’s stimulus package – isn’t necessary because, contrary to popular belief, America is not falling behind in broadband.

Lakely attacks the methodology used in the OECD’s [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] broadband penetration numbers, and in this he has a point. The U.S. ranked 15^th in the world in “broadband penetration” measured by a per capita rate of people who subscribe to broadband services. I too have a problem with using that measurement; broadband subscription rates are not the same as broadband availability rates, and other countries’ cultures might place more emphasis on the value of being online.

My mother still refuses to use the Internet for anything other than basic e-mail, and even then it’s pulling teeth.

Lakely, however, criticizes the OECD study due to the old argument that the countries with better broadband have higher population densities. That is the only argument he brings forward which speaks to his thesis rather than tangential information.

And it’s faulty logic – while the U.S. population density (31/km²) compares unfavorably to France’s (113/km²), the population of certain states, like, for example, California, comes closer to France. If the population density theory is true, California’s broadband should rival France, and the technology in New York City should rival that of Tokyo or Seoul. Or perhaps most telling, Finland, at #3 on the list, has a population density of only 16/km².

As for that tangential information, he points out that the United States has the most consumers of high-speed Internet when talking raw numbers. (We also have a population eight times that of South Korea, six times that of France, and twice that of Japan – in fact, the only countries that have more people are China and India.)

He also mentions new technologies, such as Verizon’s FIOS:

A new study by consulting firm RVA Market Research pegs the annual growth rate of "fiber to the home" networks — the latest, fastest and most competitive broadband technology — at 76% on this side of the pond.

Of course, since we’re just now getting the fiber-optic connections that our counterparts in Japan have had for months or years, our growth rate is bound to be higher.

And finally, Lakely offers this tidbit of “information”:

If worry-warts want to get their hard drives heated up over comparisons between the United States and other countries, they can try this one on for size: A survey released this month by the German broadband association Bitkom found 84% of respondents there between the ages of 19 and 29 would rather ditch their spouses than their broadband connections.

Now that's a troubling study. "Catching up" with the rest of the world isn't always such a good idea.

Is Lakely seriously arguing that America’s broadband stagnation leads to healthier marriages? Even so, Lakely’s got his facts wrong: Germany has a divorce rate of 2.3 per 1000 population, the United States has a divorce rate of 3.6 per 1,000 population.

Of course, all of this is completely irrelevant to the real issue – that is, that we shouldn’t be concerned so much with broadband adoption at this point but at broadband performance. We are moving beyond streaming video applications to live video applications – cloud computing has come to gaming, for crying out loud – and this gives technological advantage to those countries who can leverage the technologies behind virtualization and cloud computing because they’ve laid groundwork with infrastructure.

In short, we need not worry about what percentage of Americans have broadband speeds, but rather, how good and how fast is the broadband when they get it? South Korea has an average speed of 15Mbps compared to 3.9Mbps in the U.S. Japan’s fastest broadband service is 150Mbps – for $60 a month.

What irks me about the Heartland Institute making these claims in Network World is not that it’s in any way a reasoned critique of the Obama stimulus infrastructure spending. In other words, this is not an argument that “the free market can solve the problem better than government intervention can.” This is an argument that “there is no problem.”

That’s frustrating to me because recognizing a problem is the first step to dealing with it. Even free market solutions mean that someone has to be aware that there is a problem in order to capitalize on fixing it.

The Heartland Institute has been involved in other, similar campaigns where they argue that problems that are publically perceived as problems are not, in fact, problems at all. Before 2005, the Heartland Institute had a number of funding organizations which may have resulted in a conflict of interest, as of 2005, the Heartland Institute insists on secrecy for funding sources.

Today was a frustrating day. I was hoping to have a video to show you but the best laid plans…

Essentially, I was thwarted because part of the video would have involved using one of the company’s projectors, and it seemed that the computers I had administrative access to didn’t have sound, and the computers that had sound didn’t grant me administrative access – access I would need to install Macromedia Flash.

(I’m appalled. I mean, why don’t I have root access to all the company’s computers? I mean, I’m the company blogger, for crying out loud. Without me, the company wouldn’t have a blog, and without the blog the company would… uh… erm… maybe have a Google Pagerank of 5 instead of 6? Anyway, the point is, I provide a highly demented demanded service for the company…)

Anyway, we’ll have to reschedule that video. But it does make me realize the relationship between network performance and network security – and that is, that if the application your end-user needs will not run, you’re essentially looking at an effective network performance of zero percent for that application. While there are tons of monitoring solutions for determining up/down status, and one really groovy monitoring solution for application performance, not being able to use the application in the first place is a frustration that probably won’t show up in the NOC, but is there nonetheless.

It also makes me think about the “cry wolf” scenario with security. Look at the dreaded UAC for Windows Vista. I have a Vista box. First thing I did was disable UAC. (Second was install Firefox.) Too often when people interact with computer security, it is preventing them from doing something useful, rather than protecting them from something harmful.

So any time that you can take security away from the forefront and put it in the server, the less people have to interact with it, the less they get pissed off and the less likely they are to ignore warnings when something bad does happen. This, of course, requires keen insight into the behavior of the network and ways to detect anomalous behavior in real-time.

As for my personal problem with computer security – it’s not really that bad. I consider myself lucky that that’s the worst I have to deal with. I’ll just send in an IT request to set up the audio on the projector next week.

Network World’s Jim Duffy’s latest article, “WAN critical to virtualization’s payoff” has me in knots. 

It’s well known that by virtualizing servers, you can consolidate them more easily in a single data center; but in order to maintain performance, you need high performing, low-latency WAN connections.  We’ve written about this before, and it’s only more relevant with VMWare announcing on Feb. 3^rd that they are providing an Open Source Virtual Desktop client.

But Duffy’s article seems to be focusing on the idea of virtualizing the desktop on backend servers, rather than virtualizing backend servers.  The rest of the article denotes all the challenges of doing so.

Now, there are benefits to virtualizing desktops – key among them the idea that software problems can simply be solved by replacing a user’s virtual desktop with a separate virtual desktop – instead of dispatching someone from IT down to the user’s physical location.  This is a laudable goal.

However, virtual desktops are prone to poor performance over the WAN, because, like video or VoIP, it’s an interactive, latency-sensitive service.  Specifically, let’s look at mouse input.

When you operate the mouse on your computer – feel free to do so right now, (unless you’re reading this on an iPhone, in which case, carry on being smug) -  it may seem like an instantaneous reaction.  You move and the mouse moves with you.  This is not true.  It is an illusion. The output, however, comes so quickly after the input that the human body can’t tell the difference.  This is because the input has to go from the mouse to the computer’s IO port (usually USB), get processed by the CPU, and painted on the screen by the GPU out to the monitor. 

However, in a virtualized desktop, the input goes through the user’s IO port, gets processed by the CPU, and then pumped out to the Ethernet connection to the WAN, is processed by the CPU on the server, is output back over the WAN, which is then processed by the CPU of the user and painted onto the screen via the GPU. 

Point is, you’re adding an entire round trip across the WAN to the process.  So even if there’s no congestion, if the round-trip latency due to distance between the user and the data center is 100ms, you’re adding a tenth-of-a-second delay.  That will probably be noticeable.  And there are other sources of delay on the WAN.

This does not even take into consideration the data involved in pushing video data out to the remote desktop.  Long story short, virtualized desktops are probably a good idea on the low-latency connections that you’d find on the LAN, but trying to operate them over the WAN probably won’t work that well.  Is the benefit of virtualizing the desktop (or of consolidating virtual desktops) so great that you’re willing to suffer through poor end-user experience?

Which means that the premise of the entire article frustrates me.  Yes, it’s obvious that you need to have low-latency performance with your WAN to provide for virtualization – and good performance is a good thing; but at some point you are going to hit the law of diminishing returns.  If you’ve been monitoring your network performance and have the capacity to try to serve remote users virtual desktops in under 150ms, feel free to give it a try, but ultimately, will virtualizing the desktop over the WAN provide the best benefits as a whole? 

What may bear more fruit is to have applications virtualized and sent over the WAN onto existing, local desktops, much like XWindows apps back-in-the-day.