Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Net Neutrality–The Video Parody

I made a parody of Woody Guthrie’s famous song “This Land Is Our Land”, with Net Neutrality as the subject. I remixed video footage from the fantastic Elephants Dream animated movie short, a Blender Foundation project that was released under a Creative Commons license. You MUST see the original movie to understand how amazing the graphics, animation, music, and sound effects are in this animation. Visit their site and buy the DVD, which has a high definition version of the movie. That version is better than Pixar and I love Pixar! Note: The quality of even the “decent” version of my parody is absolutely no match for the breathtaking quality of the original, let alone that of the high definition movie.

Coyote Gulch . . . Robert Cringely:

“But all packets aren’t created equal. TCP packets over longer distance connections, for example, are effectively at a disadvantage, because they are more likely to have data loss and require retransmissions, thus expanding their appetites for bandwidth. By the same token, packets of all types that originate on the ISP side of its primary Internet connection have the advantage of functioning in an environment with far greater bandwidth and far fewer hops. Perhaps the best example of this disparity: packets that pass through private peering arrangements, versus those traveling from one backbone provider to another through one of the many NAPs, with their relatively high packet loss.

“This ‘to NAP or not to NAP’ issue has been with us for a long time. Smaller and poorer ISPs that can’t attract peering deals with their larger brethren are stuck with communicating through the NAPs, which requires more time and bandwidth to transfer the same number of data packets successfully. This has long been a marketing point for bigger and richer ISPs. But beyond marketing, this disparity hasn’t received much public notice. There are many ISPs that have both private peering and inter-NAP connections, yet whether they send a packet through the NAP or not hasn’t been a huge public issue. Perhaps it should be. It has certainly been possible for ISPs to pretty easily put a hurt on packets, and they probably have been doing so, though most pundits assume that we are still living in the good old days.

The funny thing about scale — Kafka’s numbers are wrong [via Ken Camp ]

In a telephony online article in early May, BellSouth’s Chief Architect Henry Kafka was quoted as saying:

The average IPTV user will likely consume about 224 gigabytes per month, he added, at a monthly cost to carriers of $112, a giant leap from the less than $5 attributed to Internet use. If that content were high-definition video, the average user would be consuming more than 1 terabyte per month at a cost to carriers of $560 per month.

“Clearly that’s not what the average user is going to pay per month for their video service,” Kafka said. “That’s why we need help.” . . .

Kafka’s numbers are wrong because the cost of bandwidth is not linear as volume increases. Scale creates economies that result in a lower cost per Mps (or Gigabyte downloaded). I have personally noticed in my own studies that the cost doubles in order to quadruple bandwidth, although this is not confirmed by my colleagues (or any other sources for that matter).

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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