April 11, 2008
Network Congestion according to Steve Gibson
We’re big fans of Steve Gibson’s weekly security net cast. It’s good to see one of the most popular tech shows on the net take on Third Pipe subject matter. In the program Steve discussed the issues of net neutrality, congestion and more. Our own expert, Dr. Dog, has already chimed in on the subject matter. We welcome Steve’s unique perspective to this uniquely Third Pipe discussion.
Filed under Net Neutrality, traffic shaping by admin
Comments on Network Congestion according to Steve Gibson »
Wow, how similar! Of course there are solutions.
1) Akami as a store and forward vendor should be encouraged to expand. That way a lot of popular content would be store forwarded to the network edge so less traffic has to traverse the backbone. That helps out the ISP and Level 1&2 transport providers. But to make that effective Akami needs to drop their prices so more ISP’s will adopt the technology.
2) Short of Akami, independent ISP’s could deploy their own FOSS caching servers and deploy Lucerne for searches of content of a local nature. Fact I decry the lack of localization with the net. Why it is not more popular I have not a clue. But 80% of all consumer spending is local in nature. Major disconnect.
3) Cable providers implement a 90/10 strategy for bandwidth utilization. First the CableCo burns a channel for open burst traffic. You hire the DDWRT guys to implement code that will recognize that burst traffic and route the traffic onto the alternate channel. If there are 6 people all downloading the latest linux distro, those six are competing for bandwidth on the alternate channel. All the casual users on the main channel are left unaffected. As a user of that alternate channel you pay a fixed price per Gb of use but your main link is flat rate.
4) Those last 3 are all stop gap solutions that could be implemented within a year. The preferred solution is bandwidth growth. There are already technologies coming out of the labs that can push 100mbs over copper and 5gbs over wireless and 1Tb over fiber. The problem is politics, laziness and greed.
This is going to sound unfair but my prescription would have been for the 700mhz auction to be bid on only by new entrants. Legacy could not bid. Or maybe as a sop Americans let them bid on the ‘D’ block that ended up being a disaster. New players would have shaken up the landscape some and got new blood in the game.