June 4th, 2007

A rational debate on Net Neutrality

Posted by George Ou @ 5:40 am

Categories: Infrastructure, Mobile/Wireless, Net Neutrality, Networking, News, Technology policy

Tags: Google Inc., QoS, Internet, Network, Prioritization, Customer, Net Neutrality, Service, Carrier, George Ou

The subject of Net Neutrality has become so politicized that it’s almost impossible to have a rational debate on the subject. Even the term “Net Neutrality” has become a political slogan that is often deliberately vague to hide its true meaning. Is it even possible to have a rational debate on Net Neutrality? That’s what I’m going to try and do here and this won’t be your typical Net Neutrality article that takes one side or the other because it will slap down the villains on both sides of the debate. I’m going to try and step back and share with you my thousand foot view of the whole war on Net Neutrality.

How the Internet really works:
The Internet is based on users only paying for their on-ramp access and nothing more. This is the way that the Internet has always worked on a “best practice” and contractual basis. The “Internet” also isn’t the single entity that people often perceive it to be; it’s actually an inter-network (hence the name Internet) or a network made up of many private networks that route Internet data amongst each other on a contractual basis. Large carriers who own chunks of the Internet don’t charge other large carriers in exchange for using each other’s infrastructure and this is called settlement-free peering. In other words, you carry my traffic and I’ll carry yours and everyone pays for their share of the Internet infrastructure.

If there’s an imbalance in the amount of traffic that one carrier passes through on behalf of another carrier, the larger carrier carrying more of the data will charge the smaller carrier. On very rare occasions the smaller carrier will balk and refuse to pay and the connection between carriers is severed and customers will get cut off from each other. Ultimately one side or the other blinks and sometimes it’s the bigger carrier quickly caving in because they’re afraid of the legislature stepping in to regulate the unregulated Internet if the stalemate doesn’t get solved in a very high-profile case where customers are cut off. But at no time do carriers ever get to directly charge customers who are attached to other carrier’s networks for their Internet for traversing their network because revenue is already shared when the smaller carrier pays a portion of their revenues to the larger carriers or it’s settlement-free because of mutual sharing.

The myth that the Internet has always been a dumb pipe:
One of the most common arguments I hear is that the Internet has always been and continues to be a dumb pipe and there is no intelligent packet prioritization on the Internet. That simply is false and there have long been contractual agreements QoS (Quality of Service) packet prioritization for business customers. These agreements allow customers to pay a premium to permit a certain percentage of traffic (usually a small percent) to get traffic prioritization across a carrier’s network.

Global Crossing for example has a premium service for its customers which it actually extends to other partnering networks using settlement-free contracts. Some of these partners are in Asia and they prioritize Global Crossing packets in exchange for Global Crossing prioritizes their packets in return. This is identical to the settlement-free connectivity I mentioned earlier only this extends the concept to cover prioritization as well. This is end-to-end QoS service which covers off-ramp QoS service without the customer directly paying the off-ramp remote network.

If we had to pay for access to other networks on the Internet, then we might as well go back to AOL or CompuServe circa 1994 when you had pockets of proprietary networks that no one else could reach and that’s the last thing we want. The minute you start demanding payment from customers of other networks, the Internet becomes fragmented because it’s becomes a metered closed Network. Even if you could afford to pay, it would be a logistical nightmare to keep up with all the various entities you have to pay.

Just like how we don’t directly pay to route and connect to other carriers on the Internet, we wouldn’t directly pay other remote carriers for prioritization services. We pay our own carrier once for connectivity (and premium prioritization service if we choose to do so) just once and let our carrier work out the dirty details with the other carriers on the Internet of whether they need to exchange money or not. This is how an intelligent but fair and open Internet works.

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