Richi Jennings: Thoughts on Network Neutrality & The Monash Report: The Two Internets
There’s an interesting look at network neutrality and network performance. The Monash Report proposes the idea of two separate Internets – one “Jeffersonian,” dumb and neutral, designed to provide the same level of service to all publishers and companies big and small, with legislation to protect it, and the other, “Edisonian,” tiered and optimized for high-bandwidth, low-latency apps such as streaming media and VoIP. Curt Monash seems to prefer a system called Tarriff Rebate Passthrough to solve the Network Neutrality problem – which is worth a look, though I’m not sure if it’s practical or desirable to “meter” services.
This introductory article, however, is a good rundown of the issues involved in the Net Neutrality debate.
Net neutrality is both necessary and workable for what I call Jeffersonet, which comprises the “classical”, bandwidth-light parts of the Internet. Thus, it includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and just about every website created in the first 13 or so years of the Web. Jeffersonet is the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide. Any censorship of Jeffersonet – even if just of the self-interested large-enterprise commercial kind – would be a terrible loss. Net neutrality is workable for Jeffersonet because – well, because it’s already working just fine. Jeffersonet doesn’t need anything beyond current levels of bandwidth and reliability. So there’s no reason to mess with what’s working, other than simple profit-hungry greed.
Network neutrality opponents, however, point to evolving and future technologies, technically more demanding than what the current Internet can well support. Their uses are centered on what I call Edisonet – communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings of all kinds. Reliable, tiered service is needed for these applications, and somebody has to pay for it.
I found that article through Richi Jennings, who takes issue with this summary, however, and brings up an important point: Network services may be better served by locality rather than QoS policy.
I’m not 100% in either camp, but my gut tells me that today’s IP routing technology is holding up well. It’s the lack of investment in sufficient peering bandwidth and router horsepower that’s letting the side down.…
Here’s the thing… Those of us that live the other side of the Atlantic live with 250ms latency every day, when we connect to services hosted in North America. I dare say the same is true for those on the other side of the Pacific. There’s not much getting around the speed of light.
At least, not yet.
NewScientist.com: Take a leap into hyperspace
If the experiment gets the go-ahead and works, it could reveal new interactions between the fundamental forces of nature that would change the future of space travel. Forget spending six months or more holed up in a rocket on the way to Mars, a round trip on the hyperdrive could take as little as 5 hours. All our worries about astronauts’ muscles wasting away or their DNA being irreparably damaged by cosmic radiation would disappear overnight. What’s more the device would put travel to the stars within reach for the first time. But can the hyperdrive really get off the ground?
Dröscher is hazy about the details, but he suggests that a spacecraft fitted with a coil and ring could be propelled into a multidimensional hyperspace. Here the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light could be several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say.
So maybe I was a bit hasty to suggest last Tuesday that Vint Cerf’s Space Internet wasn’t necessary.
Besides the inherent coolness of the prospect of “hyperdrive in our lifetime,” this may indeed be the holy grail to finally reduce the irreducible propagation delay.
But right now, 299,792,458 m/s isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. That said, it’s amazing what we can do within the law.
San Francisco Chronicle: Researchers break Internet Speed Records
A group of researchers led by the University of Tokyo has broken Internet speed records – twice in two days. Operators of the high-speed Internet2 network announced Tuesday that the researchers on Dec. 30 sent data at 7.67 gigabits per second, using standard communications protocols.
The next day, using modified protocols, the team broke the record again by sending data over the same 20,000-mile path at 9.08 Gbps.
That likely represents the current network’s final record because rules require a 10 percent improvement for recognition, a percentage that would bring the next record right at the Internet2′s current theoretical limit of 10 Gbps.
Want to hook up your Quake server to that? Not so fast – remember, bandwidth and latency are two different things. You could send data at 10Gbps but have poor latency because each bit takes a long time to travel down the wire. This is one of the reasons that throwing bandwidth at a latency problem doesn’t always work.
Norwich Bulletin: Amero case gets longer look.
An update on the Julie Amero case. The sentencing has been postponed a third time to May 18, this time at the request of the prosecution.
Defense attorney John Cocheo had already promised an appeal. With sentencing originally scheduled to take place March 2, Cocheo requested the first postponement due to addition of several attorneys to the case. New Haven attorney William Dow and sentencing consultant Clinton Roberts are involved.
Others see the state’s move as a step toward exoneration.
“By taking this action, the Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice has indicated it clearly understands that its mission is ‘justice’ and not simply to achieve convictions,” said Nancy Willard, with the Center for Safe and Responsible Use of the Internet.
Willard penned “The Julie Amero Tragedy,” an evaluation and commentary on the Amero case.
The Monash Report is very interesting. Thank you for sharing. Maybe today’s technology is holding up well but the fantastic new technologies are coming to fruition quickly and net neutrality regulations will impact their ability to thrive.
Have you seen this short video on net neutrality? I like it because it presents the issue, cut and dry.
http://www.openmarket.org/2007/04/26/more-on-the-neutrality-battle/
HandsOffPlease
Hands Off the Internet Coalition
[Ed. Note: Hands Off the Internet is an organization with support from a number of telecommunications companies that opposes congressional net neutrality legislation.]