Monthly Archive for June, 2006

Broadband: Need more speed?

This was being actively discussed in the forums; whether or not should be petition TRAI for revision of definition of Broadband speeds.

Much like the classical “chicken and egg problem”, it is difficult to build up a case for higher speeds than current 256k. The biggest problem is that there is no built up ecosystem that could possibly sustain the need for content; higher speeds are not going to solve any problem.

For the same reason, the latency to access the game servers is horrendous. As I am told, it is timed in hundreds of milliseconds; which only means that local cache or game servers need to be set up within India to host the massive online multi player games.

However, higher speeds have no meaning for the gentle folk whose sole purpose is to check email or talk. Video Chats would be jittery, but those blue button hitting morons (who abound in abundance on the face of this earth) would hardly notice. I have personally seen people signing up for GPRS access just because their mobile supports that! Beyond that, their access is limited to chatting.

What can you do with higher speeds? Watch videos online? Anything else? File sharing? That is akin to shuffing up a chilli laden object up their backsides. Hence, they would only seek to block you actively. VoIP is good enough in 256k.

Hence, there has to be a strong case for MbPs. The demand has to be created by localised content developers. All this boils down to a very small installed computer base which would make it useless to invest money; something that is not guranteed to bring in the revenues in the short/ long term.

We could blame the PR spin and gibberish spouting from the telecom companies when they hold expensive campaigns and press conferences to crow about the ” in thing”. IPTV is an alien concept and has not been tested as yet on a large scale. Or the scale that Reliance has been talking all about.

This brings us to another question. Which is more important? Content or Distribution? Distribution is far more powerful; witness the near monopoly of your local cable operator and you’d know. They cannot be reined in and mafia money is invested heavily. In the tug of war between the content creators and distributors, it is the consumer who is forced to cough up huge sums and pay for the “paid channel” with ads screaming in full glory.

This is the reason why the majors have invested money in distribution. Zee has Dish TV and their Sity Cable; Star has it’s Hathway and to- be- launched DTH. Reliance has invested/ investing in it’s IPTV and DTH- Bluemagic.

Broadband or higher speeds could radically alter the contours of the content. In my opinion, the next progression would be towards the so called triple play. However, the current last mile access hassles means that laying down optic fibre cable would be an expensive proposition.

Unwittingly, we need to depend on BSNL to make any first move. Given it’s sloth that could shame a herniated tortoise, it can’t be expected in the near future.

Hence, I can only foresee being stuck in the 256k gamble with a awful capped upload, to be the order of the day. We could only swallow the insults they heap on whatever little intelligence we have.

A request to readers

Thanks for the comments. I really appreciate it.

However, I have been getting mails complaining to me about your ISP! What the heck can I do? There are enough morons who are posting their details online. It would be assinine to persist with this.

I am NOT affiliated to any organisation, company, portal, publishing house or any other institution. I just blog, along with the other Techwhack guys, and strive to say the things in black and white. I cannot do anything if you face problems with your data cable or your wiring snaps and you wish to inform me duly about the same. If you are facing any hassles or wish to search for solutions, I suggest an excellent resource in the forums.

Your mails are simply marked as spam which makes it hassle free. If you wish to bitch about your ISP on your blog/ website or anywhere else, you are most welcome to do so. Why do you think that I must be informed about the same?

Thanks for NOT persisting with juvenile behaviour.

Broadband: Net Neutrality 2

This is a follow up post to the earlier write up. As usual Robert Cringely has hit on the argument right on head.

He writes:

If you look at the amount of overhead TCP needs it’s exponential to how slow each connection is; the slower (the connection) the more overhead because the window sizes are smaller and more control packets are being used for verification. And you know what? BitTorrent is FAR WORSE. Remember that for each file you download on BitTorrent you connect to dozens, possibly even hundreds of people, and the slower each of those connections is the more the overhead increases.

Further,

So what happens when everyone’s VoIP or other preferred packets get preference over my torrent packets? Since I have no knowledge of the other people’s usage in my aggregate network I can’t adjust well for changes in the network. The BitTorrent traffic that is going will have exponentially increased overhead due to the slow downs, increasing overall Internet packet overhead (with BitTorrent already 30+ percent of all Internet traffic). Which means that allowing the telco’s to subsidize the cost of improving their infrastructure by having preferred packets could exponentially increase the cost accrued by the larger internet and backbone providers just to keep costs down at the aggregate level.

In Robert’s words, to recap:

Giving priority to some traffic puts a hurt on other types of traffic and when that other traffic constitutes more than 30 percent of the Internet, the results can be severe for all of us. On the Internet everything is connected, and you can’t easily ignore the impact of one service on another.

It essentially means that it is in ISP’s interests to shape up the traffic, they way they want to; to be able to control the flow of data in their networks. This does bring up interesting conundrums. What if BSNL decides to shape up the traffic or the way I consume content? It is a public network and essentially, the entire network is that of the people. Does it have any right to control access, the way I deem is right?

Since Bit torrent or p2p traffic tends to choke the networks, ISP’s may set up tiered networks. Which means, a right of way on the information superhighway. In real life, this analogy can be extended on to using a superior road to commute; you pay higher tax/ toll to travel at higher speeds on dedicated corridors. The extent or size of the dedicated corridor could well at the cost of the “free” one. Give or take, it is the classical capitalist knee jerk reaction, that one would obviously favour the dedicated corridor users while others languish.

Net neutrality boils down to this concept. ISP’s would seek to limit the p2p networks away from the tiered services and pushing them to the “public networks” which is worse in terms of packet loss and other hassles. However, at present, this can be circumvented easily by encrypting your torrents. Indeed, most of the clients give you this option. Your ISP would be unable to “snoop” on your data usage patterns.

This means that we are back to the status quo and tiered services would make no sense. Net neutrality arguments again would hold no water. Which means that I am as clueless as others are. Which also means that this is the golden time to leech on the p2p networks and download content.

Personal Milestone

After a long winding hard work, I finally managed to clear my MD entrance examinations. I had cleared a couple of others earlier on, but I wasn’t getting the choice of speciality.

I would be absent for couple of days from blogging and my apologies to all for the same. It would be erratic posts now and then. I still have to figure the way out to sneak time from a busy doctors’ schedule. Blogging has given me a peace of mind (of all the things) and indeed, has become a platform to share my views about something that affects us all.

As usual, check out the RSS feeds. The orange icon would appear in the top right of your browser’s address bar in Opera and Firefox. Firefox, mistakenly calls it as “live bookmarks”, which is stupidity in my opinion. Anything associated with Firefox is stupid in my opinion, again!

Cheers.

At the back of my mind though, I was wondering whether it would be prudent to start off a blog dealing with my residency years. It would be close up personal or related to the speciality where I land in. This is still in the “proposal” stage; but I shall duly inform you about the same here.

Broadband: Net neutrality

Net Neutrality:

This is a term coined by Columbia University Law Professor Tim Wu which orginally identified network bias toward or against particular classes of application or providers of content or services. According to Wu’s analysis, the Internet is not neutral but should strive to be. He points to bias in TCP against real-time applications to support this point.

In simple lay man’s terms it means that as networks proliferate to higher speeds, the content service providers could act as “choke points” to throttle the flow of information. As the mainstream media and the telecom giants converge, often with malicious intent in the name of business interests, the desire to control the flow of ideas would be irresistible.

In effect, this would be, what I call as “Google Effect”; they would seek to lord over the content that you and me seek to inform/ entertain/ consume et al.

This is a far fetched “conspiracy theory” though. I would like to link to two interesting thoughts on the same issue. First one comes from David Sugar, who writes in for Free Software Magazine. He says: (emphasis mine)

In the beginning, the internet was a peering arrangement where all nodes were treated equally, and anyone could interconnect from any one node to another. This was the network of peering built upon public standards that anyone could freely implement…The internet eventually spread to the general population through modem dialup. This changed the internet from being a semi-closed environment connecting just a few hundred or thousand commercial and government institutions into something interconnecting millions. The speeds and bandwidth of analog modem dialup naturally limited what individuals could do over dialup links, but outside of technological limitations, the internet imposed no additional discriminatory practices nor did those ISPs who offered direct internet access through dialup at the time.

With the widespread introduction of broadband, over cable and DSL, came the first real discrimination on the internet. Just when finally there was enough easily deliverable bandwidth to go around to enable the millions of dialup users to more directly participate on the internet, it was closed off from them. At the physical layer, peering was closed by artificial uplink “bandwidth caps”, which restricted their ability to produce and distribute. At the application layer, broadband providers actively discriminate by blocking certain ports and services, particularly in regard to email. At the legal layer, broadband service agreements offered through monopoly telco and cable companies restrict what services and applications people can run.

Can we see a hint of what BSNL does to the “broadband” subscribers?

Robert Cringely has a different take on the net neutrality issue:

Those opposing Net Neutrality have in mind VoIP, and nothing but VoIP. Those in favor of Net Neutrality seem to think it means equal treatment under the Internet, which it doesn’t really….The Net Neutrality issue rests, in part, on the concept of the Internet as a “best effort” network. Best effort, in the minds of the Internet Engineering Task Force, means something slightly different than we are being told in the general press. It means that all packets are treated equally poorly in that no particular efforts are made to ensure delivery. The Net, itself, performs no packet life-support function. This is in keeping with the concept of the Internet as a dumb network. So even in cases of transport protocols that DO attempt to perform reliable transport (protocols like TCP), those recovery measures are negotiated between the server and the client, not by the network that connects them, simple as that.

Robert details about the various issues that determine the transfer of the packets from one node to another; from one server to another. The final nail in the coffin is about VoIP.

Where this Net Neutrality issue will hit home is for Voice over IP telephone service, which becomes pitiful if there is too much latency. That’s what this is all about, folks: VoIP and nothing else. The telcos want to use it to keep out the Vonages, Skypes, and Packet8s, and the cable companies do, too. It is a $1 trillion global business, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the ISPs will do anything to own it.

It all boils down to using the networks to bypass Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) and hurting their revenues via VoIP. No doubt, this is BIG bad news for the telecom operators as far as big paying customers are concerned. For individual subscribers, this has to reach any critical mass before it starts pinching them in any real manner. The way Broadband is spreading (at a slow pace indeed, despite the claims to the contrary), I don’t see any wild fire growth of VoIP in the future. However, point is that this issue of Net Neutrality is relevant to us for the same reason as it is to any other developed nation. VoIP is being embraced by companies across the board to cut down on the operational costs.

Interestingly, there are assinine restrictions in the licensing norms which would make it prohibitively expensive for the likes of Skype to enter Indian market. The exact details elude me though; Skype is restricted to a few thousand (lucky) Indians though.

Opera 9 Released!

Opera is my favourite browser. The beta review appears here courtesy Opera Watch. By and large, fairly in depth to list the major changes from the previous versions.

This version of Opera has innumerable features; notable among them is the content blocker. You can now block ads/ images with the click of button. I dont remain impressed about the Widgets/ thumbnails which are resource hungry and serve no useful purpose. Except perhaps, fuel the fanboy groups across the cyber world against Firefox/ Internet Explorer.

Firefox remains crappy in execution and I wonder why it suffers from such fatal flaws, even though it is open source. It is slow as compared to Opera (very slow indeed); while Opera screams through like a bullet piercing hot molten lead, Firefox moves with leaden boots even while being “optimised” with “extensions”.

Highly recommended to the users here to make the switch. I have been running the weekly builds without any hassle.

I’d suggest that you download it from a US based mirror. By default, Planet Australia loads up and it seems to be crumbling under the heavy load of users. I couldnt find the torrents; bit torrent support is in built in the browser. Still, its a small 5 MB file and shouldn’t hurt anyone.

Here is the update of the event in Seattle.

Think Nest

The purpose of the blog is to engage in conversation, learn and hopefully, in the long run, be a medium of change. This is a long shot and the whole effort is stuck in my biases.

Internet has exposed me to a cross culture of influences and revealed things that I never knew existed. Given the huge amount of information online, it is imperative that some form of editing mechanism exists which could bring forth the best for consumption. However, individual differences vary in opinions and attitudes and agreeing to a broad statement of interests is a tall order indeed.

Ever since I started off this blog, it was a concious decision to keep the mandate limited to broadband/emerging technologies and the pathetic Indian telecom scene. We could do without the institutionalised stupidity that often reveals itself in Government notifications which otherwise is a clear reflection of the electorate that elected them in the first case.

With the said purpose of “delivering the humanity and mankind” of their troubled existence from the mental decadency all around, couple of us bandied and started forums called as Think Nest. We really don’t fancy choked bandwidth/ digg effect trying to access, but clearly wish to have an “engaging” content online. A simple sign up and you could naviate around to get the feel of the place.

I hope to see you all there on the alternative platform; a planned IRC channel is on the cards. The discussion can be taken on to the forums from the blog.