Network World reports on a survey by security software vendor Symantec which talks about data center staffing. Specifically, half of the respondents said that their data centers were either extremely or somewhat understaffed.

And of course, there’s always the usual suspect to trot out – the economy – forcing IT workers to do more with less, with cutbacks and layoffs hitting IT hard. But there’s also another factor – that it’s not just that the IT staffing budgets are decreasing but also that the job of the network engineer is becoming complex, thus increasing the overall workload.

This is especially true in mid-sized enterprises where new technologies which can save money but which are extremely complex, like virtualization, WAN optimization, and cloud computing are being implemented at a faster rate than either smaller enterprises or larger ones.

Well, if you don’t have enough manpower in your data center, there are three solutions I can think of off the top of my head. The first is to hire more people. This may not be feasible given current budgets.

The second is to decrease workload. In short, taking the approach that instead of trying to do “more with less,” that it’s okay to do “less with less.” Five nines of uptime give way to three nines, and applications previously handled in-house are outsourced to a cloud services provider. There are some disadvantages to doing things this way, of course.

The third is to find a way to decrease the complexity of your network – perhaps by using management tools that provide a broad overview of the network and how the applications are performing. The only downside there is that if you don’t use these tools correctly, instead of making the job easier, an additional manager could just end up increasing the complexity of the network that much more.

All three of these solutions have the possibility of being disruptive – at least in the short term – and monitoring your network for those disruptions is the quickest way to get to the root cause of them.

Though CA Technologies and CA|NetQoS are vendors of aforementioned management and monitoring tools, I’m pretty comfortable suggesting that if you can hire more people, that it might be a good idea to do that first, if you’re making decisions about where to spend the budget money. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, no diagnostic, monitoring, or management tool can replace a network engineer with a good head on his or her shoulders. All a tool can show you is where the problem lies; the engineer has to come up with the solution.

Second, if you have engineers who know what they’re doing, they’ll be the ones to suggest the tools that they need, rather than buying tools first and then trying to train engineers on the proper use of the tools chosen on their behalf. A good engineer with a mediocre management tool is better than a mediocre engineer with the best stuff in the world, after all.

(Not that we don’t want you to buy the best stuff in the world - which, if you haven’t guessed our particular bias, is our stuff…)

Harwell Thrasher, author of “Boiling the IT Frog: How to make your business information technology wildly successful without having to learn anything technical,” has a blog post out talking about how, during the current economic situation, which has gone beyond “depression” and towards “the pit of despair,” companies are making dangerous cuts to IT staff.

He compares it to an ice hockey tactic called “pulling the goalie,” in which a team is down by a goal in an important game, and they will swap out the goalie for a sixth offensive player in a desperate effort to score.  Doing so is within the rules but leaves the goal undefended.  For example, an IT department that cancels offsite backup recovery solutions, stopped updating virus prevention software, and laid off the only guy in the company who really understands how to maintain and support custom systems all lead to the possibility of a grave disaster that threatens to seriously harm the company.

But the metaphor is flawed.  Pulling the goalie in hockey may reduce defenses but it gives hockey teams a better shot of playing on the offense.  A lot of IT cuts seem to be not pulling the goalie – most companies at least know to keep their anti-virus software up to date – but they might not take network performance as seriously as they once did, and make reductions in IT without realizing that it can be a false savings.

That is, it is difficult – but not impossible – to determine the costs of letting a particular application, like, say PeopleSoft, experience a “brownout” – still technically “up,” but performing poorly.  Losing money in lost productivity or sales or customer satisfaction.  At that point, it’s a simple equation: did the money saved from the IT cost cover the productivity, lost revenue, or irritated customer? If the answer is “no,” then it’s clearly a case of false economy.

This is especially important considering that companies are starting to reconsider the “do more with less” mentality and are now thinking about “doing less with less.”  And indeed, this can be a viable tactic – if you can save money by going for three nines of uptime instead of five nines of uptime, it can be worth it if you only need three nines of uptime. 

Network performance requirements can be cut in the same way, sort of.  I mean, while it actually hurts me, emotionally, to suggest this, “the best” network performance isn’t always the most cost effective network performance.  So, for example, if you can save money by allowing some periods of congestion on the WAN, so long as that congestion never gets over an acceptable amount, then it might work.

The problem is finding out what’s “acceptable.”  This means baselining performance and understanding what kind of performance your business applications need.  It’s for this reason that cuts in IT should not include the network engineers that make those determinations, nor the (self-interest alert!) network monitoring solutions they depend on.  IT without the former is “pulling the goalie,” while IT without the latter is putting the goalie out there without a stick, protective gear, or skates. 

As Halloween approaches, I’ve got a bit of a horror story to keep you up at night. 

There’s an interesting quote that’s somewhat appropriate now.  Well – song lyrics anyway.  “Did you feel you were tricked / by the future you picked?” Which, I’m told, are part of a Peter Gabriel tune for a Pixar movie, but which I only came across when reading speculative fiction about quantum AI computers running 419 scams.

The thing about the future is that by the time it gets here, it’s already the present. Wait, I’m sounding like Criswell there… what I mean to say is that only a couple years ago, the big story in technology was how IT departments were becoming centralized due to advances in virtualization technology that cut down on hardware requirements and power consumption.  Now the next level is cloud computing; an idea, fundamentally, that you can centralize data centers even further by centralizing them with the data centers for other companies via a third-party provider. 

Taken to an extreme, it’s easy to think of a day when even these cloud computing centers become even further consolidated – perhaps one on each inhabited continent.  “A world market for maybe five computers” indeed…

Except, it’s not quite that easy.  The transition from in-house architecture to cloud computing resources is just about as difficult as the transition from real servers to consolidated virtual ones, and the big problem is ensuring network performance – that data gets where it needs to go quickly.  

Much as the server consolidation/virtualization problem was helped with better virtualization technologies and advances in WAN optimization, the current rush in IT tool development is in the cloud computing area (not that we still don’t have a-ways to go with virtualization and consolidation).  And some of these cloud-computing tools are starting to appear – for example, self-managing environments…

One of the newest approaches is the concept of the "dynamic infrastructure." Rather than a simple collection of humming boxes or cards designed to push data this way or that, the dynamic infrastructure brings together virtual networking, automation and resource management with tools like application management, security and policy management to create a self-managing environment that can react to changes in workloads and other needs with minimal human interference.

Lori MacVittie, technical marketing management for application services at F5 Networks is one of the prime movers of the concept, which she says will be the inevitable result of the transition to the cloud. 

"When the entire data center is founded on a dynamic infrastructure, the infrastructure can react itself to changing network and application conditions and needs," she says. "When the entire ecosystem is sharing status and information about performance, every component can adjust itself dynamically to what’s needed now to improve performance or maintain availability. And it happens automatically, based on the specific needs of the business and IT."

Virtualization has underscored the need for performance management; back when everything was run on actual servers, you could almost always fix a problem by finding out where the bottleneck lied and increasing the amount of stuff.  Not always, but almost always.  But with virtualization, you’re essentially managing an interconnected ecosystem of stuff and… well, stuff that’s not stuff.  “Unstuff,” to borrow a bit of NewSpeak. 

And this management is so complex that it has increased the demand for network engineers, yes, but it’s also increased the demand for software to come along and replace the more tedious tasks of network engineers, automating the processes where possible.

But what if there is no upper limit?  What if self-managed cloud computing software is exactly that – with computers calculating exactly what needs to be done to preserve performance and then automatically fix it? 

And that network monitoring software…. WAS ME THE WHOLE TIME!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!! 

by Ben Erwin

NetFlow or NetFlow-esque technology (Jflow, Cflowd, NetStream, IPFIX, etc.) has been around the network management world for quite some time.  Thousands of IT shops worldwide leverage its capabilities to analyze traffic flowing across the network. 

Recently, some vendors have recently made somewhat misleading statements about NetFlow’s capabilities.  There are very good reasons why NetFlow is a de facto standard (and through IPFIX, soon to be an IETF standard).  Here are some quick reminders on why NetFlow is still the king:

• 100% visibility across all network links.   A common misconception about NetFlow is that it samples traffic.  Netflow exports every transaction it sees, and provides a full picture of what traffic is flowing across the network.  Now, it is true that sFlow samples traffic for flow export, but NetFlow exports every transaction it sees.


• Enabling at network aggregation points.   Instead of enabling NetFlow on every router, most NetFlow aficionados are able to enable NetFlow only on those aggregation routers that see the majority of network traffic.  This way, network managers can visualize their network traffic while not having to go overboard with router configuration. 


• Granularity versus TCO.  It’s true that NetFlow does not provide Application Layer (Layer 7) information.  But even so, remains the best bang for the buck for network visibility – yes, you could deploy probes all over the network to gain Layer 7 visibility – but there’s a significant opportunity cost in time and manpower for deployment, configuration, and ongoing monitoring, and the total cost of ownership for a probe solution for Layer 7 visibility simply isn’t worth it.  Many IT shops have dumped probes altogether and gone with NetFlow despite this limitation. 


• Free (if you use Cisco).  NetFlow is free on all Cisco routers.  All you have to do is enable it.  This makes it a very cost-effective solution compared to alternatives. 

These are all reasons why NetFlow will continue to be top dog for network visibility.  And while there are improvements to be made, certainly (there is no such thing as a “perfect” machine,) right now some of the best solutions for network visibility take advantage of the capabilities that NetFlow provides. 

In this video (part one of two), Jim Metzler looks back at some prediction he made at the beginning of the year, and how they're shaping up to reality in this retrospective interview with Jordan Weiss.

In May of this year, Nemertes Research president Johna Till Johnson wrote in Network World that “The Internet Sky Really Is Falling.”

The next day, we came out with a story about that column, in our much more irreverent style, entitled “That’s great, it starts with an earthquake: Is the Internet dying?”

In that article, we questioned the conclusions that they drew from evidence. To sum up, those conclusions were:

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  Nemertes believed that YouTube restricting high definition video to developing countries was a sign of the Internet outstripping backbone demand. We pointed out that such restrictions were due to local traffic problems and the lack of profitable business models in many developing markets.

  
  
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  Nemertes also pointed out that many cable carriers were instituting bandwidth caps and pay-per-byte pricing. We pointed out that we did an entire series on why usage caps don’t help with traffic congestion, and that ISPs that roll them out typically do so in generally non-competitive markets where they have other business interests (like cable TV and phone service) that compete with Internet access, and that there were plenty of counter-examples of companies (like Verizon and Cablevision) offering more bandwidth without caps.

  
  
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  And Nemertes pointed out the IPv4 shortage, for which there was already a solution, IPv6. (Though adoption rates have been slow, it does not mean the Internet will halt – simply that IPv6 changeovers will be more expensive the longer the delay.)

But the one thing we didn’t question was claim by Nemertes claims that Internet traffic will grow “exponentially” while Internet backbone will grow “linearly,” leading Nemertes to the conclusion that there will come a day when there will be Internet “brownouts.”

Recently, Johna Till Johnson published another column – this time in ComputerWorld, outright claiming that net neutrality legislation would mean the end of the Internet. That’s not hyperbole on my part – the headline is literally: “Hello net neutrality, goodbye Internet.”

And Ars Technica, a Conde Nast publication, decided to take another look at Nemertes’ evidence.

Essentially, Nemertes now claims (in the October article) that Internet growth creates a strain on last-mile access lines (Cable/DSL/FiOS) that makes it “excruciatingly expensive to upgrade,” that network neutrality would mean that you can’t charge different rates for different traffic, so backbone providers and carriers would start charging by the bit – or at least capping and charging for overages. Since bandwidth providers would now charge each other for the traffic on their networks, they would either raise subscriber rates dramatically or disconnect from the Internet entirely, literally killing the Internet as the entire thing breaks down into walled tiers like early 1990s Compuserve, AOL, & Prodigy.

Ars Technica, on the other hand, points out that the “excruciatingly expensive to upgrade” last-mile bandwidth isn’t exactly excruciatingly expensive compared to the profits that Internet service providers already generate with net neutrality and in most cases, without caps. Verizon, for example, is paying $18 billion for FiOS upgrades, but that’s the most expensive upgrade in the market, and Verizon finds it financially feasible to do so in a net-neutral market. For most ISPs, DOCSIS 3.0 (for Cable) and FTTN (for DSL) are very cheap solutions to increasing last-mile bandwidth.

As for the idea of the Internet fracturing, Ars Technica pointed out that ISP networks all exchange roughly the same amount of bandwidth; and an even trade is an even trade no matter how much it costs. There are many ways to recoup costs – but raising the rates on a competitor who can then turn around and raise rates on you doesn’t make any sense at all.

Or as Sevcik and Wetzel put it in Network World:

“Backbone ISPs and access ISPs must play nicely with each other to satisfy their customers' needs. Why for heaven's sake would they hurt their customers and themselves by balkanizing?”

What’s most worrying however, is that Ars Technica wrote that Nemertes idea of Internet growth outstripping capacity may be flawed.

According to the University of Minnesota MINTS project, the year-over-year growth of Internet traffic is not “50-100%” as Nemertes claimed in the ComputerWorld article, but “50-60%.” (Technically, “50-60%” is within the range of “50-100%” but it’s like estimating that a man that could be 5to 6 feet tall is “between 5 to 10 ft. tall.”) In Canada, where ISPs have to reveal traffic numbers due to network neutrality research by the Canadian government, they find that growth is slowing, year over year. 53% growth in 2006, but 32% growth in 2008.

We’ve found that when it comes to enterprise networks and IT in general, Nemertes Research is a valuable research organization. But in 2007, Nemertes made a prediction – a reasonable one, given the evidence at the time - about the Internet that did not come to pass. Instead of re-examining that prediction, they continue to insist – on openly contested arguments – that they were indeed right all along, even as, less than 3 months away from the ominous “2010” date, the Internet has managed to keep up with the demand of high-bandwidth YouTube HD files, NetFlix streaming, Skype Video-calling, video game downloads, and other high-throughput applications.

I think that what is actually happening, rather than demand for bandwidth outstripping supply, is that the supply of bandwidth creates its own demand, and that the new demand comes primarily from new applications. That is, HD video on the net is only in demand now that the networks have been shown to be able to handle that kind of capacity. YouTube didn’t start until there was enough capacity on the Internet to make SD video distribution feasible. Only later, when capacity grew, did YouTube roll out high quality video, and still later (after Vimeo proved it was feasible) did YouTube roll out 720p video content. When the network capacity can handle streaming 1080p video, then that will be the new standard. But no one is going to roll out 1080p video until the network can handle it.

This is not to be confused with the issues faced by enterprises when trying to allocate resources to business critical traffic over recreational traffic – where supply of recreational network traffic can be artificially restricted through QoS policies and traffic shaping in order to, presumably, lower the strain that recreational traffic puts on the network. Even so, most smart companies engage in capacity planning, making sure they have the bandwidth available to use new applications before those applications are rolled out. Teleconferencing, for example, is a business application that requires a great deal of bandwidth – but it’s of no use to an organization – and therefore not demanded – if the company network can’t support it. Or in other words, if the money saved from teleconferencing isn’t equal to or greater than the increase in network costs, smart companies are not likely to invest in teleconferencing.

In short, the sky is not falling. But keep an eye on your patch of it, anyway.

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.

The Bilderberg Group, an annual invitation-only conference of 130 high-influence politicians and businessmen is currently meeting in Athens, Greece.

Quite a lot of secrecy surrounds the Bilderberg Group – quite a lot of security goes into making sure that photos and recordings of the meetings do not get widely distributed, and combined with the high-profile nature of the attendees, keeping a low profile requires massive effort.

Unsurprisingly, the Bilderberg Group is the subject of many, many, conspiracy theories. It’s human nature; if you don’t have information about something that’s scary, you tend to assume the worst. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the human mind abhors ignorance, and will gladly make up something – anything – that sounds like it’ll fit. This is probably how Greco-Roman gods got started.

This has implications for IT – specifically, underlining the importance of having the right information to make the right decisions – but allow me to go forward a bit with the Bilderberg group.

Now, don’t get me wrong – the conspiratorial view of history is, in some cases, the right one. For example, The Butler Affair, Operation Valkyrie, Operation Ajax, MKULTRA, Guy Fawkes, and, of course, “Votefortheworst.com.” Does the Bilderberg group qualify?

Probably not. In 2001, an article in the Guardian, in part, gives Bilderberg’s side of the story, explaining that Bilderberg members prefer secrecy so that it’s members can speak more freely; that it is a high-powered meeting of the minds but has no more influence on world affairs than any other think tank like the CATO Institute, Brookings Institution, or Tellus Institute (though to be fair, that’s still considerable influence on world affairs.)

The best a shadowy evil mastermind could hope for is to make a persuasive argument explaining what he feels are the best governmental policies would be, and hope that world leaders find the ideas compelling.

“While furiously denying that they secretly ruled the world, my Bilderberg interviewees did admit to me that international affairs had, from time to time, been influenced by these sessions.

I asked for examples, and I was given one: ‘During the Falklands war, the British government's request for international sanctions against Argentina fell on stony ground. But at a Bilderberg meeting in, I think, Denmark, David Owen stood up and gave the most fiery speech in favour of imposing them. Well, the speech changed a lot of minds. I'm sure that various foreign ministers went back to their respective countries and told their leaders what David Owen had said. And you know what? Sanctions were imposed.’”

But the difference between Bilderberg and CATO, Brookings, and Tellus is that while other think tanks actually publish their findings, the levels of secrecy approaching the Bilderberg group border on Kafkaesque. The meetings are, indeed, secret, and the Guardian’s reporter for this year’s Bilderberg conference, Charlie Skelton, started out reporting on the Group in a light, humorous style, talking about how he managed to check into the wrong hotel (“this is who Bilderberg are up against,” he writes,) but over the course of a few days, is no longer making jokes.

Yesterday, he started writing on being harassed for taking photographs, and being questioned who “Sylvester McCoy” was by Greek police whose behavior was uncannily like Daleks (or perhaps, Cybermen.)

“All around me: "Delete! Delete photos!" followed by a lame tug of war for the camera with no great self-belief on either side, which I won. Camera back in pocket.

Then it became: "Get in the car!" Get in the car!" I wasn't about to get in the car. I remember saying: "One of you has a machine gun, you're shouting at me, I don't understand why, I took one photograph, this all seems a bit strange. What's going on here?"”

Today, he reports on being followed.

“But before I begin, please believe me when I say: I haven't gone nuts. I really haven't. Nine times seven is 63 and the capital of Italy is Rome. I know what I know. And I know that I'm being followed. I know because I've just been chatting to the plainclothes policemen I caught following me. As absurd as it sounds, I've just "made my tail".

They're watching me now. REALLY. They're sitting on the wall outside the cafe Oceania or whatever this is called, watching me type this sentence. I asked them in for a coffee but they declined. They laughed sheepishly when I called them Starsky and Hutch.”

And later,

I feel a bit like I've driven down the wrong alley and suddenly don't recognise anything, and people are staring at me and not simply to admire my hair. I'm jumpy. I think someone has been in my room and moved my laptop. I know this sounds bonkers, I know it does, but I took a photo of it before I left the room and it wasn't where I left it.

Listen to me. I sound like a fruitcake. Three days and I've been turned into a suspect, a troublemaker, unwanted, ill at ease, tired and a bit afraid.

So, is it any wonder that the Bilderberg group is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories?

In order to understand the world; whether the world of high finance and high politics, or the world of the Enterprise network, it is important that you have information, otherwise, you’re blindly groping in the dark for things that sound right. This is the familiar cause of “the network always getting blamed” for anything that causes a slowdown, whether it be network, server, or application.

As mentioned above, if we don’t have information about something important, we often make up something that sounds right. This is not a bad thing; the first step in scientific experiment is to make a hypothesis that fits the observable evidence. The second step is testing the hypothesis. Anything that stops at the first step isn’t science, and isn’t particularly useful. As such, being able to gather the evidence and test to see what effect changes on the network don’t just help you solve network and application problems faster – they are the only real method you have for solving the problems in the first place. Sunlight is the best disinfectant; the electric light the best policeman.

After being followed, detained, and with his room ransacked, Charlie Skelton had this observation about Bilderberg and the very, very high levels of secrecy around the organization:

I don't care whether the Bilderberg Group is planning to save the world or shove it in a blender and drink the juice, I don't think politics should be done like this.

Worse than not bothering to gather information is intentionally keeping people in the dark. And we see this in IT in some semi-rare cases, where those in IT consciously choose not to provide information about network performance to managers and executives, the theory being that IT personnel have more value to the company if they’re perceived as the only people in the organization who know what’s going on.

This theory, however, doesn’t hold water. If you provide network information to decision-makers in a format that they can understand, you end up proving your value to the organization. If you do not provide information to decision-makers, they’re going to end up, well, assuming the worst…

Alex Dudley, VP of PR at Time Warner, mentioned something interesting in our interview with him:

“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”.

It is, you know. Paying for data usage is a very simple concept. Anyone can understand it. The problem is that it’s an oversimplification of the concept. That is – consumption based billing may be how you buy gasoline and bread, but it really doesn’t accurately reflect the way that networks and communications services actually work.

Trying to explain these complex concepts without oversimplifying is one of the reasons we’ve spent – what, six posts now? – on TWC’s data caps.

For example, I’m not sure I accept at face value Time Warner’s claim that there are (or will be) congestion problems in the future. I tend to subscribe to the idea that these data caps ultimately have nothing to do with preserving Internet performance for Time Warner’s customers, but everything to do with trying to preserve the market for cable television while exploiting the existing monopoly Time Warner has in certain markets for a quick burst of short-term revenue.

Time Warner earlier used the metaphor of “going dutch on a Salad/Steak lunch” to show the relationship between light and heavy users. Ars Technica responded to it this way:

“TWC's steak/salad analogy breaks down when it's crafted more accurately. The real question is whether you would even have lunch with a friend at a restaurant that charged $45 for a salad and $200 for a steak. Certainly, in a free market, most people would go elsewhere.”

So, I’m skeptical. Time Warner charges $1/GB for something that costs them $0.10/GB, they’re only doing this in markets where they have clear monopolies and competitors do not have strong footholds, and they’re doing so despite the fact that the profitability and capacity of broadband has actually outpaced demand. In short, there’s no actual “problem” that the “solution” is going to solve.

But even so, one needs to be a devil’s advocate sometimes. We’ve constantly argued that data is not the limited resource, bandwidth is. It’s an argument which ultimately boils down to: “It’s not too much data that causes congestion, it’s too much data at once.” Therefore, prices should continue to be based on bandwidth, not data consumption.

The only flaw in this argument is that, if you cram enough data down the pipe, it will lead to congestion eventually. Multiple people would have to be hitting close to the maximum of their data capacity nearly all the time during peak hours, but it is plausible.

So, if you were to assume, despite the evidence, that congestion on Time Warner’s cable service is a problem and that data overuse will lead to congestion, does that necessarily mean that Time Warner’s plan is an acceptable one?

No. There are other and better ways to handle congestion.

In fact, we can think of five separate plans that would be more effective at managing congestion, both in the near and short terms. Some of them are non-trivial, some of them non-neutral, but they would all manage congestion problems better than trying to change user behavior using exorbitant fees for consumption as a stick.

The fact that Time Warner isn’t using any of these plans – and chose to use the data cap plans – implies to me that they were either unable or unwilling to come up with better alternatives.

Plan 1: QoS-based packet prioritization for light users over heavy users.

Time Warner could, if it want to, deploy new hardware and software close to regional network routers to flip a user from the highest QoS levels to a lower one if they’ve been saturating the connection for a period of time. Comcast uses a similar system, flipping users who use more than 70% of their allotted bandwidth over a 15 minute period to a lower QoS priority over the next 15 minutes when the line is congested.

There’s no change to packet priority when the line is not congested, the system is identifying users who are using the most bandwidth at the time of congestion, and it immediately improves the relative performance of the light user while neither blocking or charging extra for the data for any user.

Tracking QoS policies on an individual IP address basis rather than by protocol would be a large rollout, perhaps even requiring new modems at the client-side to get the best results. But Time Warner was going to have to do that anyway with the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 technology to enable faster speeds, and it was going to have to track usage anyway in order to bill for it. If congestion really is a problem, this is a practical solution considering the unique opportunity provided by the DOCSIS 3.0 rollout.

[Full disclosure: Network Performance Daily is the company blog of NetQoS, which is a enterprise network monitoring solutions vendor, many of which monitor the impact of QoS policies. On the other hand, we’ve got four more ideas below that don’t need quite as much network monitoring, and Time Warner’s welcome to use these as well.]

Plan 2: Graduated Decline of Bandwidth during Peak Hours based on usage

If the idea to manage individual QoS policies based on usage is too complex or too expensive, a less accurate but more effective solution would simply be to track data usage and slow down heavy users during peak hours.

Rather than a data cap, or billing based on data consumption, this plan would track data consumption and use it as a sort of a loose rule of thumb as to how much bandwidth the user is using, and during peak times, throttle the bandwidth down to slower, but reasonable, broadband speeds.

For example, a user on a 15Mbit down, 2Mbit up connection would always have that speed during off-peak times. But he only gets that 15Mbits during peak times if he’s downloaded less than, say, 15 gigabytes during peak hours for that billing period – or, if measuring consumption only during peak times is too difficult, say, about 50 gigabytes overall.

At that point, during times of congestion, his speed is knocked to 7Mbits. Consuming more data would knock it down to 3Mbits during congestion, and even more would knock it down to 1.5 Mbits during congestion. Again, however, off-peak times – the times without congestion problems – still retain the normal speeds.

A sudden drop in speed can be frustrating; and this plan may cut user speed far more aggressively than is actually needed. But it can be implemented rather quickly and easily compared to a QoS policy solution, while having much of the same effect.

Plan 3: Charging for extra consumption, rather than all consumption.

This plan turns the broadband consumption assumption on its head. The major problem most people have with the broadband cap is that there’s no way around it – all plans have some sort of cap. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why the (probably true) conspiracy theory around Time Warner trying to protect their Cable TV interests keeps coming up.

But, instead of offering 15Mbit “Turbo” plans, and then complaining about “heavy users,” why not give “heavy users” a chance to pay more for extra speed instead of charging them for the data they used to get for free?

For example, you could bring everyone down to a standard 5Mbit plan, with unlimited data for a reasonable monthly rate.

However, if users require more bandwidth, they would then pay extra for a certain number of gigabytes at that higher bandwidth.

So, assuming that you charge $45 for the 5Mbit unlimited access, a Turbo plan could charge, say $65 for 15Mbit access with 60GB at that speed. When the 60GB cap is maxed, users can choose to continue along at the standard 5Mbit access until the next billing cycle, or perhaps they can buy another pack of “high-speed gigs” at a reasonable rate (say, $20 for another 60GB). Unused gigs would roll over to the next billing cycle.

This achieves exactly what Time Warner argues it is trying to achieve – making the heaviest users pay more compared to the lightest users – but doing so in a way that no one has to worry about Internet service suddenly costing more than they expected. Friday Night Lights Season 1 won’t cost $31 to download anymore, if you’re willing to wait 14&1/2 hours to get it, compared to 5 hours.

Plan 4: Lower QoS during Peak Hours based on protocol
I don’t like this plan. I thought of this plan and I don’t like it.

It’s simple and it’s brutal. During peak hours, decline the protocol associated with the highest data consumption and with the most saturation – BitTorrent. During all other times, leave it alone.

As a tool, I love BitTorrent. BitTorrent actually helps you take advantage of the capacity of the network, instead of limiting you to the slowest link along the route from server to client. It is one of the wonders of the Internet, and despite the stigma it has as a “pirate’s tool,” BitTorrent is extremely useful for any application where you have to get large amounts of data to multiple users.

This is a stupid plan, and I don’t endorse it. It opens thorny neutrality issues, creates problems for people wanting to use the torrent protocol in other applications (World of Warcraft, for example), and is unfairly scapegoating one set of Internet users.

As bad as this plan is, it’s still better than caps.

Plan 5: Reselling service and letting the free market hash it out.

It could be argued that the broadband infrastructure in this country is a natural monopoly, like many utilities. However, they are certainly not regulated like utilities.

What might be an option would be going the Canadian route – letting Time Warner handle the backbone and parcel out bits of bandwidth to the highest competing bidders, who then compete with each other. One company might differentiate itself by offering lower prices with a cap, the other, higher prices without a cap. Another company might advertise fast speeds, another low speeds, another good tech support – and if customers are unhappy with one service, it would be much easier to switch to another service.

This might require regulation, as it did in the Canadian market, but if we can’t run DSL and Cable and Fiber to every home, perhaps this is the best way to preserve the best prices for the consumer.

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.