Broadband - Bandwidth Explained
Stagg Newman
Chief Technologist, FCC National Broadband Plan team
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009
From: Stagg Newman
Chief Technologist, FCC National Broadband Plan team
Subject: Re: Request for input on the definition of Broadband
To: Educational CyberPlayGround
Cc: Rob Curtis at fcc.gov>, Tom Brown at fcc.gov>
Karen,
First see the attached FCC Digital-Handshake-peering "white paper" that is a good description of how peering and transit works in the Internet.
Note that even a company like Google "pays" for transporting the information to a peering and transit point or point of Interconnect with ISPs. Companies either pay directly by purchasing transport (e.g. lease lines) or pay indirectly in the sense the have acquired their own transport as a capital expenditure (e.g. dark fiber plus the optoelectronics to light the dark fiber as in Google's case) and the on-going opex to operate their own transport network.
As the article notes above the terms and conditions for exchanging traffic among ISPs and even between ISPs and edge service providers are set through business negotiations. What has changed since the article was written is a smaller per cent of the total traffic (but a larger total amount) goes through the "backbone Internet Providers" because more of the large content and service providers have direct connections to the large access Internet Service Providers.
Hope this helps.
Stagg Newman
--- On Thu, 10/22/09, K.E. <admin@edu-cyberpg.com> wrote:
From: Educational CyberPlayGround
Subject: Request for input on the definition of Broadband
To: "Stagg Newman" <lsnewmanjr@yahoo.com>
Cc: "Rob Curtis" fcc.gov>, "Tom Brown" cc.gov>
Date: Thursday, October 22, 2009, 5:02 AM
Karen Ellis asked: Is this essentially how it works?
Summary
According to Arbor network says close to 10% of all net traffic is google traffic? Google pays 0 for bandwidth basically cause they bought dark fiber back in the day. All bandwidth is free because of peering relationships.
Jay Addelson explained: Most companies pay nothing for bandwidth.
heard here http://twit.tv/twig12
Example: You are a big ISP and you get a peering relationsip.
AOL consumes lots of content - i - so they set up a Peering relationship (essentially a direct connection) with Youtube. They have a direct line between each other, so they both agree to send each other the same amount of bandwidth and send as much as as they get. It's an even steven swap. It's a wash - they pay nothing for bandwidth.
They need to make an equal amount of bandwidth in both directions.
youtube and comcast have a direct connection and they write it off as a 0 cost transaction.
Essentially it is a tie line / direct pipe / to make sure its fair you send as much as you recieve.
1999 IPO $ went into infrastructure so after the bust we lost the companies but the good news we got all this dark fiber connectivity.
thanks,
Karen Ellis
<snip>
Definition of Broadband
by Karen Ellis
submitted to the FCC.
Broadband is critical infrastructure for America the same as the highway system. Broadband is a connection that is always on, always connected, and allows the largest amount of data to travel through it at the same time. Voice, video, audio, and all applications used for communication and creativity are delivered at the highest possible quality and speed, that equals the best available in any country on earth.
</snip>
keep up the good work, good luck, and thanks for asking :-)
all my best,
Karen Ellis Educational CyberPlayGround www.edu-cyberpg.com
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"1) First, an old rule of thumb in systems design: accountants care about throughput, users care about response time.
2) Second, something we thought about in the Gigabit Testbed effort quite explicitly (e.g., in John Shaffer's PhD thesis) was the relationship between these two things, which is roughly that the response time (to get an object) is propagation time + (object size) / throughput.
3) Third, the object sizes, due to both Moore's Law (memory sizes are typically the fastest-rising exponential) and consumer demand (e.g., Mpixels on digital cameras), are increasing rapidly. The speedups we achieved with the testbed program achieved usability.
The takeaway from the response time relationship however, is that an increase in throughput commensurate with increases in memory and object sizes will be necessary to maintain the present state of affairs, and a trajectory of even greater throughput improvements will be necessary for increased usability." [jargon / buzzword bingo]