Manage updates with the Download AppJuly 27, 2006 3:49 AM PDT
Senator open to 'Daily Show' chat about Net 'tubes'
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Ted Stevens says he'll appear on Jon Stewart's show after comedian mocks him for "series of tubes" comment.
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The argument made about what happens when your ISP gets to
decide what packets get priority (made by Hodgeman) is quite
accurate.
The notion that Google, or Yahoo or anyone else is "getting a
free ride" is a delusion fed by pure greed. The folks wanting a
two-tier system are only looking for ways to charge twice or
thrice what has already been paid for once (Google pays for their
bandwidth).
We already pay twice as much as other developed nations
(France, Korea, Japan) for a FRACTION of the bandwidth they get.
I need to send an internet to Senator Stevens to explain to him
that it is time to retire so someone that has an inkling of
understanding about technology could have a chance to make
decisions that affect TECHNOLOGY.
By internet I presume he meant email, but the "series of tubes" is not the reason it took 10 hours. It is likely that the mail platofrm(s) is/are to blame for the delay.
This is a bit like saying your city MUST do something about traffic congestion becase you wanted to go to McDonalds and it took you an hour to leave your house and you waited in line at McDonalds for 3 more hours. *** does that have to do with city traffic??
He is also backwards saying streaming video is impacting his email needs. A connection problem with streaming voice/video, chat, VoIP etc. is noticed by the user, but a few second delay in email is less likely to be noticed.
Stewart is a comedian and he knows more about the internet than this guy does, and that is just sad.
America: Freedom To Fascism
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comments about the Internet and the effects of ever increasing
traffic and file sizes. The TWIT guys, for example, just could not
stop laughing at his expense, and a mash up played on The
Daily Source Code made great fun of his comments about
"tubes".
I thought that old Ted did a pretty fair job of concisely
describing a complex issue about a complicated system using
words that had a chance of being understood by most of the
people he was talking to. Unlike most of the people who have
been commenting back and forth, the man has made his living
for many years by trying to fit complex thoughts into sound
bites or short speeches. He is, after all, an elected official.
The Internet is a network with as much variation in traffic
capacities and flow as the road network. There are portions that
are the equivalent of cow paths, dirt roads, city streets full of
traffic lights, parking lots with improperly designed entrances
and exits, and wide open freeways in Montana or West Virginia.
There are intersections, security gateways, and "mixing bowls".
The volume of traffic on each of these portions is also variable
by location, time of day and major events.
Stevens might very well have had difficult with receiving email in
a timely fashion - his office is, after all, probably served by a
network with tightly controlled firewalls, insufficient capacity (I
am a government employee and understand how poorly
designed some of our networks are and how slow they are to be
upgraded) and probably multiple layers of routers and switches
trying to add more drops or backbone wiring.
That network could also very well be one that has been slowed
by having inconsiderate users who are trying to listen to
streaming audio or watch streaming video at their desks. After
all, government networks have a large number of government
workers on them, some of whom are a bit lazy and know little
about their effects on shared infrastructure.
Google does not "pay for its bandwidth" as some techies keep
insisting. It, like most current users of the Internet, pays for
connections to the internet and it has probably chosen its
connection locations as carefully as FedEx or UPS have chosen
some of their major locations. Like the trucks operated by those
companies, once Google traffic is onto the network, it goes all
over the place without additional entry fees.
Unlike trucks, however, that purchase gasoline with its
embedded federal road tax, the packets sent and received by
Google do not pay for the distance travelled even thought they
place significant demands on the "pipes" or "tubes" that take
them to and from the hundreds of millions of servers that they
are indexing on a regular basis.
On the Internet, the original concept was that most of the
services were about equal and placed about equal demands on
each other. If email went from one place to another, for
example, about an equal amount went back. In order to simplify
operations and billing, the large players developed "peering"
arrangements. What has been happening recently, however, is
that the balance is no longer there.
Services like Google, (BTW, I use AdSense on my web sites, have
Google search boxes, and do personal Google searches tens to
hundreds of times per day so I am definitely not anti Google),
Yahoo, YouTube, and countless others place huge demands on
carriers that have to support their traffic world wide. People
think of Google in terms of the relatively bandwidth light search
experience, but they neglect the effect of Googlebots that are
regularly reading and indexing all of the sites that they make
available for quick searches.
Anyway, I am not sure what the answer is to ensure that there is
sufficient revenue to keep the backbone builders busily making
new pathways and adding capacity, but I am pretty sure that "net
neutrality" is not the answer. Having the government step in and
add rules to make us all equal makes me think back to Orwell
and Lenin.
BTW, I studied literature and creative writing as an
undergraduate and networks as a graduate student. I sent my
first Internet email in 1985 and have been pretty busy on the net
as a user, webmaster, and system guy ever since.
I think Stevens is closer to being right than those idiots that
think that they are ever "connected" to a web site since a basic
premise of the internet is that it is a best effort, packet switched,
connectionless network. (Each of those terms happens to be a
technical description used in describing the TCP/IP protocol.)
What is CNET coming to?
The problem with Steven's comments was not his bad analogies, because a tubes description is accurate, but the entire rest of his speech was so inaccurate, that is was hard to take any of it serious. He sounded and came across like someone who has only had a five minute description of the internet, yet, he is the one in charge of regulating it. That is wholly absurd. If you are supposed to regulate it, you should have a deep enough understanding of it, that when you speak of it publically, you don't sound like a noob.