NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] How a few inches become 500 miles.
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As Craig notes “Unfortunately,
traffic from your local city hall meeting may well travel halfway across the
country and back before it gets to you.” Thus we should replace the requirement
of "community access TV" with the requirement of local peering. But
why not just get rid of the whole warped system? Today there is a real
problem. I have both Comcast and Verizon. To get from a Comcast port to my
small FTP server six inches away but connected to FiOS my connection travels
through NY or NJ and loses 90% of the performance. A very long six inches. If a city selects Comcast
Transport as its connectivity provider you can be sure that you'll get strong
local connectivity and peering with nearby communities. CT would be a
contractor maintaining the community’s common facilities and would bid
against others for that contract. I doesn’t make sense to cede rights of
way to a myriad of silos. That’s just like laying a separate track for
each trolley company along each street. At least tracks would be visible and
create outrage at the waste of space and money. Distance doesn’t matter
to the protocols but it does matter for performance and, far worse, it matters
if the only reason for the complexity and overhead is a dysfunctional market
model embodied in physical hardware. Forcing bits to travel long
distances is due to having Comcast Transport and Comcast Content fused into the
a silo and doing the same for Verizon FiOS (and RCN and Verizon copper and ATT
Cellular and T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless and Sprint and the MVNOs …). You
have to transit within a silo to some distant land where they agree to exchange
bits held hostage at a high price in money and in performance thus destroying
value for no reason other than sustaining a market architecture that would not
exist were it not protected from the threat of abundance (again – http://www.frankston.com/?name=AssuringScarcity). We see this with the again
and again. Put two cellular phones one inch apart – the voice/SMS bits
cannot get between them unless the signals can reach distant towers. Actually
for some bits it’s just the opposite! You have to put two phones near
each other to exchange information using IR or Bluetooth – strange when
you have radios that can provide connectivity without regard to distance. It’s
as if someone picked up an obfuscated C book and assumed it was guide to best
practices. I’ve got Vonage and ATT
VoIP as line 1 and line 2 on one phone. Again – the bits travel the long
way for no reason other than to create a billable event (or justify a very high
flat rate). It’s all about billable events and nothing but billable
events. The current Internet
protocols aid and abet this by being path-dependent rather than end-to-end. I
get an IP identifier from a provider’s silo rather than generating my own
(except for local-only addresses from my NAT which again give me different
kinds of bits). Forcing the identifier to also act as a path-address reminds me
of the 1960’s when we’d put disk addresses in database records “for
efficiency” or use octal disk addresses as user names (as on the PDP-10).
As our financial system
suffers why are we trying so hard to assure profligate waste and costly hurdles
by insisting on a horribly inefficient system that prevents us from creating
our own solutions and takes what is already paid for and assures we can never
get the benefits of local control and ownership. Why do we want frustrate the
creation of new value? Telecom – the real
financial debacle. It’s like a mortgage that is 100% interest and at a
variable rate that can never ever be paid off. Yet I’m told there is
no political will for change? Is madness our due? -----Original Message----- ... One question is
whether the cap will apply to local connectivity as well as distance. Is
there a limit to how long I can watch a broadcasts of local city hall
meetings? I presume the answer is "yes" and that it is a policy question. ... Unfortunately, traffic from
your local city hall meeting may well travel halfway across the
country and back before it gets to you. Not a problem if you live in
a major interconnect point (bay area, Chicago, New York). A
big problem if you live in <somewhere>, Nebraska. This brings it around to the
public policy side as well: depending upon where the encoders are,
the cable company may also bring the video traffic along the same
path. Craig |