An Anchor cut Flag Falcon between Dubai and Oman

There are a million conspiracy theories around about the submarine fibre cuts in the Mediterranean an Middle East. Flag Networks has a status update on the repairs on their website. The status update for the Falcon cable between Oman and UAE shows a picture of the 5-6 tonnes anchor that cut the cable. No pictures of Navy Seals, dark submarines, Osama bin Laden or Ninja's. It all may just be bad luck and stupidity.

Both cables will be repaired by Sunday!

What I don't get about Google

Google is one of my favorite webcompanies. And why not, they make brilliant products. Yes privacy is a concern, but they have proven to be true to their motto of don't be evil. However there are several things I don't get about them.

- Why have Blogger, Google Analytics, Adsense, Adwords and Feedburner and not integrate them into one convenient package? Why do I have to configure different things at different locations. Integrate and make it easy, so that uptake is high etc. --> why can't I see which pages/topics yield the most money in Adsense? (Though in my case the Agpo Nev 124 is still very popular and I will not write about it again)

- Why is it so hard for Google to understand that I search and read in two languages: English and Dutch. Fix it so that I can get a mix of Dutch and English results in search and especially News, mixed with really high ranking other language results... At the moment either the first ten are English or Dutch and that means I have to do two searches instead of one.

- Why don't all Blogger posts have automagic trackback links or something of the kind. Google knows who links to my blog, please fix that

- Why doesn't Google integrate its feedreader with a Delicious like system. I share items already and that should be enough... (tagging and starring is not for me)

- Why hasn't Jotspot come back unto the market? You bought it... now give it back, it was a great wiki system.. though Socialtext and Confluence are excellent too!

- Why hasn't Google become the default yellow pages yet... They have the technology, but searching for businesses on Google Maps still yields funky results. (at least here in .nl)

- Why do several Google products feel rough around the edges? they are brilliant, but just need hat extra 20% to be finished. (sounds like some of my papers and ideas, I know its not fun to do the last 20 percent, but it does make it better for the user)

- Why doesn't Google build more office productivity applications... Please help the workplace to move forward. There is so much data in an organisation. A couple of Google boxes with cheap apps that help us organize could make a real difference.

- Why haven't the implemented my idea for Google Adsense for Charities yet?

- What is the status on my last wish list for Google?

- Why are there no blogs/forums/trackers where we can freely dump our feature requests and see status updates?

What do you miss?

Any points I have forgotten?

KPN, 3 and Play drop data roaming charges. It's cheaper to use VOIP

KPN, 3 and Play have dropped the data roaming charges between their networks to 25 cents/Megabyte. That's great for their customers roaming in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Poland etc. So how many seconds of VoIP does this buy you? A VoIP stream is between 10 kilobit per second and 90Kb/s. This translates to between 90 and 800 seconds. Given that the price of a roaming call on the mobile network has been set at 49 cents per 60 seconds and receiving at 24 cents/minute, it seems that it is now officially cheaper to use VoIP for mobile roaming!

Put differently: any (VoIP like) stream of 266 Kbit/s or 133 Kbit/s is now cheaper than a GSM call of 9600 bit/s.

There must be a catch here. Telco's are never this afraid of mrs. Reding and this is not a competitive market yet!

Submarine fibre cables and public policy

Three cable breaks in submarine cables in one region in one week. It's enough to get the conspiracy theorists going. For me it's the trigger to write down some ideas I've been having on submarine fibre optic cables. I'm going to argue that nations need more/different connectivity than the market can provide, that therefore it will need to be treated as a public good and the pricing will have to be set accordingly.

In an information society fibre optic cables are the nerves that keep the country moving. You need them in your country to every extremity (house), but you also need them from the country to the rest of the world. No fibre, no information society. The flow of information enables the flow of goods, money, people. For a significant part of the world this flow of information is a Single Point of Failure (SPoF). Most countries have only one cable coming into the country. The only backup is satellite, which is due to latency and a limited bandwidth is so 1970. If your country is not connected to the world via fibre, you're still living in the seventies.

The dependency on a handful of fibres for international connectivity (and trade) should make fibre as important as oil and gas lines or airports. So how many do you need. Given the risks involved one would want at least 3 different lines on different routes coming in and out of the country. The routes should be undersea, because these tend to be less prone to damage than the ones over land. There are more idiots with backhoes than boats. (Yet another reason not to want to be a landlocked country) And that is where the first problem lies: How do you get three international routes of the more expensive kind to almost every country in the world Currently most lines are Trans North Atlantic or Trans North Pacific. They run from rich country to rich country, poor country to the north and never south-south. A redundant network would look much more like a web, instead of a like spoke and hub system it now is. Unfortunately fibre follows money. South America is connected to the world via the US. Africa via Europe. Asia- Europe mostly goes via the US. In an ideal situation South America would have multiple direct links with Europe, Africa and Asia via both the Atlantic and the Pacific. And Asia and the Middle East wouldn't send all their traffic over the US or the Suez Canal.

The trouble is money. Long distance undersea fibre is expensive: hundreds of millions and even billions for the fibre, but only a couple of million a year for operational expenditure. But making money when multiple submarine fibres compete is almost impossible. A submarine fibre has the capacity to carry 7 terabits/s these days and more is becoming possible. So you've got an instant oversupply of capacity. Multiple competing lines lead to competition on marginal costs and mutually assured destruction. This has happened on the Trans Atlantic route where there were several new entrants in a few years, while one fibre was more than able to carry (almost) all Europe-US traffic. The price of traffic dropped to whatever sales could get per mbit/s instead of how much they needed to pay the banks. Bankruptcy was assured. Bankrupt networks were bought for almost nothing and kept prices low, which killed the business for the initial winner, which led to the winner becoming a loser too. Mutually assured destruction it is.

The high investment in northern routes has made the US, Europe and South East Asia the natural hubs for traffic to less connected regions. A telephone call to Europe from South America is cheaper when it runs from South America to the US and then towards Europe. A more direct connection might be logical and redundant, but the low prices on the north Atlantic route are a cheaper alternative than going direct. At the moment there is only one direct connection from Brazil to Europe. If you look at the fibre map: a lack of fibre is clear in South America, the Indian Ocean and Africa.

When it doesn't make economic sense to have fibre going southern routes, because its cheaper to route it over existing northern routes, there might be a reason for the government to step in. Security in the supply of connectivity can be regarded as a public value. The trouble is: how do you price it. If one fibre route can substitute others, the result might be that all traffic will flow over the cheapest one, leaving the others empty. Another problem may be that governments (and their monopolist telco's) tend to collect monopolist rents from international connectivity. Africa's lack of connectivity is as much the result of the general poverty as it is of its monopolist telco's, who keep international connectivity expensive to finance corruption and inefficiency. The price per mbit/s stays much the same in many countries, but demand increases every year, leading to ever increasing profits and a much lower economic growth than would have been possible. It would be preferable that the monopolist is paid a fixed amount for the fibre and every month or every quarter set the price on the basis of the volume in the preceding period. Since traffic is growing at a rate of 50% in most countries, prices would drop with 33% per year accordingly (see graph for price (green) vs volume (red).

There are two solutions to the connectivity problem. One is outright government financing of submarine fibres. Pay for them the way you do with bridges and roads and write it off in one year. (If necessary work together with neighboring countries) The cost of connectivity would then only be in the costs of operation. Since operational costs are only a small fraction of the total costs, the price of connectivity could be very low. Another option is to use a revolving fund where the income from writing off one line is used to finance a second one. It would then be possible to combine the costs of submarine fibre and to have the more popular routes subsidize the less popular ones by adding the total costs of the fibres and spreading the costs equally over the users of the fibres. Neither is perfect. They may lead to adverse effects like, suboptimal routing, freeriders, bankruptcies in of commercial networks etc, because the price might be below the market price in other regions. The latter one might also suffer from being too expensive at first and therefore stifle growth. All in all it's not an easy problem and I don't have a perfect solution. However from a public policy perspective it can't be a good idea to have your nation dependent upon only one piece of glass with the thickness of a hair.

BTW for nice pictures of a Cable ship see my blog entry of a week ago.

Structural Separation?: CAIW cable bought by Rabo real estate/infra fund and management

Interesting news. The Dutch cable company CAIW has been sold to its management and Bouwfonds Asset Management (Rabobank's real estate division). The commercial part has been sold to the management and the network has been sold to Bouwfonds. This sounds like a structural separation between the network and the commercial part, where the commercial part will rent hte lines from Bouwfonds and Bouwfonds sees this as a long term investment with fixed margins. It's not clear from the press release how the structural separation will be achieved, ie will Bouwfonds just own the passive cables or also part of the active infrastructure and/or will this be only be a legal separation and will the operation remain the exact same.

From what I can gather from the financial documents the sale price was around 190 million Euro for 150k subs or 135000 houses (110 million in net profit for the municipalities, but there was 83 million in long term debt), which would translate to about €1250 per sub. (Not Cheap! with a profit of 4.3 million) Unfortunately it is unclear to me how much was paid for the network and for the commercial part separately.

I still find it very interesting because this is a clear example that there is money in infrastructure and investment firms do like long term investments in network infrastructure. CAIW has also shown itself to be innovative and has already invested in fibre networks for both business and consumers (Naaldwijk)

Fibre optic cable laying vessel Tyco Responder in Curacao

In December I was on Curacao for my wedding. In the city center I got this telecommunications treat: The Tyco Responder floated past us into the harbour of Curacao. This ship lays and repairs fibre optic cable in the Caribbean. These ships have made the internet possible. Imagine if you would still connect to most of the world via satellite..... If you ever want to know about the business of laying cables, read Mother Earth, Motherboard by Neal Stephenson. (Unfortunately the image is a bit blue because of a wrong setting on my camera)

Reding: Blame it on the National Regulators

Ai Frau Reding has the audicity to blame the national regulators that they haven't brought mobile data roaming tariffs down!

Wasn't the problem that national regulators were incapable of bringing down these rates, because the rates were high at the wholesale level and therefore out of their jurisdiction (a foreign mobile operator was the problem). Wasn't it the case that our friends from the Commission therefore had to set the roaming rates? Wasn't it the same Commission that didn't want to regulate data roaming, but saved it for a later date?

Come on Frau Reding, you could have fixed this last year, don't blame it on the national regulators! Or is this all a scheme to get the Euro Uber Regulator (EECMA) in place?
Even better fix mobile roaming by introducing competition. Give all operators including MVNO's the option to offer access to anybody roaming in the country and require that the home operator is only allowed to charge a small percentage for the billing. For this see my previous entry.

European Telecom Market Authority (ETMA aka EECMA) a threat to checks and balances in the EU

The proposed European Telecom Market Authority (aka EECMA or European Electronic Communications Market Authority) is an utter disaster for the democratic functioning of the EU and the balance of powers in the EU. It will:

• not address the fundamental problem of an imbalance in power,
  
• increase the lack of democratic oversight of telecommunications decisions at the EU level,
• seriously devalue the role of national regulators ,
• ruin the quality of rules and regulations and finally,
• there was no demand for it.

I will try to sketch the context and the formal situation first and than explain how it works in practice, then why the new European Telecom Market Authority will have the negative effects that I suspect and lastly what I think needs to be done.

Context
As you may know, the EU proposed changes to the current telecommunications regulatory framework. This framework is the basis for the telecommunication laws in each of the EU member-states. The current framework is quite good, certainly compared to eg. the US telecommunication laws, but a review has been held and some proposals have come from the Commission. Most of it is evolutionary and not revolutionary. There is however one controversial proposal, which is the European Telecom Market Authority.

The proposal
The EC propose to establish an organization of about a 120 people reporting to the European Parliament and tasked with:

• "ensuring that the 27 national regulators work as an efficient team on the basis of common guiding principles;
• delivering opinions and assisting in preparing single market measures of the Commission for the telecoms sector;
• improving the accessibility of telecoms services and equipment for users with disabilities;
• monitoring closely the use of the single European emergency phone number, 112, and identifying remaining obstacles;
• facilitating cross-border EU services in relation to rights-of-use for scarce resources such as spectrum and numbers, and enabling operators wishing to do so to use a single European area code for their services;
• addressing network and information security issues."

The Commission is of the opinion that we need such an organization, since the national regulators (NRA) in the member states haven't all been swift, consistent and effective. This is undeniably the case and some in cases nations have just been downright horrible and wrong, like Poland, where the deputy minister was head of the independent regulator and Germany with its Regulatory Holiday for its poor incumbent Deutsche Telekom, which is building something that uses VDSL2, but is a service instead of a network and therefore according to the German regulator not subject to regulation. However, member states getting it wrong doesn't mean the Commission/ETMA should take over and even less that it would be good at it.

The Current Situation
A longer description can be found here. Currently when a national telecoms regulator issues a ruling it has to notify this with the Commission and the Commission can then raise "Serious Doubts" or even Veto a ruling. The Commission has nothing to say on the actual remedies, though it would love so. Now when serious doubts are raised the NRA will have to consider those and take them into account into its ruling, if the Commission is still not happy, than it can veto the measure. If the NRA is unhappy, it can go the European Court of Justice and wait 4 years for a solution. Also the European Regulators Group (ERG) can be asked for an opinion to advice in a dispute between NRA and Commission.

Reality
Reality has a tendency to be different that what you read in the law. I've taken to game theory quite alot lately and laws are the rules of the game, but they don't explain how the game is played in reality. The current game is unbalanced and completely tilted towards the Commission. What happens is the following:

• The Commission comes asking what your proposed regulations are. It will then informally and verbally tell you what is wrong and that you need to fix it. At that moment civil servants NRA's and ministries internally will have a serious problem already. Directors want something fixed, ministers are wondering what parliament will think.
• The Commission will also want to see the proposed remedies, regardless of the fact that they are not allowed to rule on it. If they don't like the remedies, they will not like the ruling. <\
• If the Commission raises 'Serious Doubts', the press will be informed. There might be an official point of view, but informally it's a spin war. The Commission answers to no one. The NRA and national government will have to fight of the press and parliament. The press figures that the government is wrong from the get go and in parliament the opposition is having a field day. At this point most political figures will buckle and give in to the Commission.
• If the Commission vetoes the governments decision than the government is in big problems. The minister clearly has failed, the NRA is incompetent. This will result in debates in parliament and again politicians will cave in.
• The internal discussions within the Commission on the subject can reflect national and EU-level political discussions to such an extend that it is hard to distinguish between reason and politics.
  
• The ERG can be asked for an opinion, but the Commission is not bound by it and it caries little political weight. It has a tendency to side with the Commission when the Commission is very clearly correct (eg. Germany Regulierungs Ferien) and only sometimes against the Commission, when it is clear the Commission is wrong. In the former case the Commission will cite everywhere that it is right and cite the opinion widely. In the latter case the Commission will brush of those incompetent NRA's.
• A government will not have any place to go until a final ruling by the Commission. When there is a ruling it can stand in line at the European Court of Justice, which is a group of intelligent but very slow judges. It currently takes 4 years to get a ruling.

So there you have it. A NRA can be right, but in order to be acknowledged as right it takes 4 years. At which point the ruling is irrelevant. In the mean time there is a stale mate or worse the country issues the ruling according to the decision of the Commission and just continues the lawsuit out of principle. So should you wonder why NRA's and Commission often agree, there you have it.

The fundamental problem
The fundamental problem of telecoms regulation in the EU is not incompetence at the national regulator as the EC claims, its the inbalance in power, partially caused by the long time it takes to appeal a decision of a nation and the difference in context a NRA operates in compared to the EC. The ETMA will not solve this problem, but only will make it worse.

ETMA will not be under the oversight of the Commission, but will report to Parliament. There is however no mechanism to prevent the Commission meddling heavily into the operations of ETMA. ETMA can now deflect any direct attention away from the Commission, while the Commission can still run it from a distance. This gives the EC more power in a subtle way. It will not improve the position of the nations, because for an appeal they still can go to the ECJ in Luxembourg. So you got a perpetrator, a fall guy and forever to wait for justice.

Increasing Democratic oversight
As said in the previous paragraph, ETMA will deflect attention away from the Commission, giving the Commission more power in a more subtle way.Parliament is toothless vehicle, because it cannot dictate what ETMA will do, just oversee that it is doing something. The European Parliament just isn't equipped to deal with direct intervention of the Commission in ETMA. Normal ways of indirect democratic oversight of the Commission is also out of the question. These ways are normally barterring and bribing, because the Commission needs the Member States on other issues. The Commission is now impervious to barterring and bribing, because it can deflect any just criticism towards ETMA. Now barterring and bribing are already bad, but this doesn't add oversight, just an extra layer of confusion.

Devalue the role of national regulators
The Commission will use ETMA to lay down dictates of how to regulate. It will require each nation to do exactly the same as elsewhere, regardless of the local situation. Yes the EC will tell you differently, but the Commissions actions against The Netherlands on the cable sector will show you differently. The Dutch cable sector is different than anywere else because of having 98% homes passed and 95% of the people subscribed to analogue and/or digital tv. Knowing this, national regulators will be wiser than to "Think Different". They will auto-conform without ever considering a different option.

Injure the quality of rules and regulations
When conformance becomes the rule, regulators will loose the appetite to properly research their national markets and identify proper actions in line with the national situation. This will make both the Commission and the NRA complacent. The Commission will argue that it's always right because everybody follows it, through ETMA of course. The NRA's will go grow complacent by just copying ETMA.

Lack of demand for ETMA
There is no clear demand for establishing an ETMA with 120 people. These people are going to do stuff already done in the Commission and at eg. ENISA at the moment. Chances are that it will be all new people, who will duplicate the Commission's work. 120 people doing nothing will want to do something and that will lead to more meddling, bright ideas, windows dressing, useless reports and infighting.

Solution
A solution is not easy, but would need to consist of these elements:
- Quick dispute resoluton at the ECJ (6 months). This will make the ECJ relevant and remove time as a weapon from the EC.
- Strengthening of the ERG. If a majority of the ERG agrees with the Commission, than the Commission must be right and the other way round. It's hard for any party to broker a deal with 14 nations to get a favorable ERG ruling.
- Strengthening ENISA to tackle security problems, where they are. The problem is not in the network and the cause is not the telco. So establishing a CTO at ETMA will not help.
- Accessibillity and 112 emergency are already done at the Commission. They are not purely problems of the IT sector and could be handled through normal channels of the Commission.
- Cross Border problems should be dealt with by a proposal of the Commission and a decision by the Member states and not by ETMA

In the coming days I will work through the papers more. I hope to have a look at what a provider of electronic communications networks and services is, Net Neutrality and functional separation.

Update November 21st 2007: For a moment I thought I had misjudged the Commission and that ETMA would actually have something real to say. I thought the 27 regulators would have full voting power and that the Commission would be subject to the opinion of the Board of Regulators. But I've read the regulation and it turns out the Board of Regulators can only issue a non-binding opinion, much like the ERG now. So they are toothless fluffy paper tigers, no chance that he Commission might hurt themselves on the Board of Regulators. Oh well, it's good to know the world is still a sphere and pigs don't fly.

Nokia E51 Released yesterday, NO on November 22nd or December 6th?!?!?!

Well, what can I say... I'm sad. November 12th came and went and there has been no official release of the E51 neither in The Netherlands, nor in the UK. It seems however that you can buy it on Ebay and somewhere in Europe. The guy behind e-series.org has his already and blogs about it.The people of Symbian Review have a review up and love it.

German sites, like Conrad, were reporting that they had it in stock, but now they are reporting that it will be available on the 22 of november. Amazon.co.uk has moved the date up to December 6th. My mr. Fix-it, whose got a good reputation of getting the cool stuff when it's still hot, hasn't gotten his hands on it either. He still has it in backorder. I haven't found a Nokia site yet that sais that it is shipping. There are no press releases either. Nokia Europe has moved the phone to its list of available phones and off the list of phones to be released, but Nokia Germany and the Netherlands both have it listed as "available soon". Most Nokia sites do show a nice promo for the phone, but I don't want pretty pictures, I want press releases and shipped models.

Meanwhile it seems that Hungarians can buy the E51 on the black market already... I interpret the Hungarian euphemisms as: A container full of these somehow got lost and ended up in our shop... that's not stealing is it :-)

FTTH, CCTV and a safer society go hand in hand

Brilliant article by The Register: Residents of Shoreditch in the UK got access to the footage of CCTV surveilance camera's through digital TV. The pictures were in a grainy resolution as to not allow people to identify individuals, so privacy was kind of protected. The results were: IT'S MORE POPULAR THAN BIG BROTHER! Better still, people wanted more of it and in a higher resolution. The focus group response was: "Focus group feedback indicates the CCTV is helping address fear of crime and... generating major new community vigilance resource."

Now imagine, FTTH everywhere and grannies are working from their home as CCTV camera operators. We'll get those nice, spiffy AXIS cams installed, that work in the daylight and nighttime and can deliver HDTV quality. You could install it as a scheme where those watching get a bonus for every crime they report, or as a new work from home scheme. Whole groups of inactives could be crowdsourced. Actually you could get two or three people watching the same scene independently. If they don't know the others who are watching it could be a great scheme to keep CCTV camera operators honest. If two are reporting something happening and number three isn't that person not doing his job.

At high def 5mbit/s or more this will require some nice FTTH or VDSL2 type of connections. (ofcourse there are ways of conserving bandwidth until such a moment when the operator feels it necessary to get a good luck) The traffic is therefore best kept locally, but that should be no problem, as locally there should be no lack of bandwidth in a VDSL2 world. (Note to the Brittish: this doesn't include you. BT keeps you at ADSL2+ which just isn't good enough to hook all those camera's up to at HDTV and most of you will not be able to watch it in HDTV, since you live too far from the exchange)

Combine it with Google maps and let people annotate the events. Even better, store all the information readily available and searchable for the public. Let them annotate it and they will make everything even more clear. Pretty soon you'll have a complete record of every car that drove by a road. A description of every person that ever glanced at the cam. Let them combine their own pictures and you'll have a transparant society! What the German Democratic Republic (commies) never achieved, we can achieve by using camera's and grannies!

Now just think of it, the possibilities are endless and the great thing is peoples curiosity/loneliness will bring Big Brother upon us, without as much as a complaint. Onwards to the Transparent Society and Big Brother be dammed. If you've got nothing to hide, you've go nothing against this idea! (/sarcasm)

There is no economic basis for QoS

This was the outline of a paper I planned to write, but for which I just have too little time to get it finished. My main point is that QoS mechanisms in a network are a bad idea (tm) This is generally examined from a technical point of view. The arguments are either generally that we tried it and it didn't work. There is little research on that evaluates the economical side. The little research that there is, generally argues that QoS mechanisms could work if all parties in a communication chain just work together and the reason they don't is because of the lack of incentives. I belief there are several reasons why QoS can't work and why it is a failure of logic.

Introduction

The internet is broken, so we’re told by scientists and standardization bodies. We need a new internet and research at Stanford, Berkeley, Fraunhofer Institute and various European Union programs will fix it. One of the main points of criticism is the internet’s lack of Quality of Service mechanisms to shape and prioritize traffic and to make sure that unimportant traffic doesn’t hurt unimportant traffic. All this in order to give the end-user an optimal Quality of Experience. The ITU has made end-to-end Quality of Service a central element of the design of its specifications for a Next Generation Network.

There is a great deal of attention in academic research on telecommunications networks for Quality of Service mechanisms. It is often stated that without such mechanisms telecommunications networks will not be able to deliver a stable and reliable service. Both from the technical side as from the economical side there is a considerable body of literature on how these mechanisms will work out in the network and in the business models that sustain the network. In order to realize QoS we invest large sums of money in research programs to fix the dreaded problem. Given the amount of scientific papers and research proposals mentioning the absense of QoS as a major problem for the roll-out of all kinds of advanced and mission critical services, how could we not. Everybody says it's important, so it must be important. Except for one minor detail, despite over twenty years of research and various standards and implementations of standards, nobody is using it.

The idea of QoS mechanisms as being essential to the stability and reliability of the network has been at the heart of the Net Neutrality debate. It also rears it head in debates on how to make a sustainable investment in networks and services. The notion of QoS mechanisms has therefore passed the realm of the purely technical and academic and entered policy debates, where policy makers will have to value the various claims.

This paper will examine in a multidisciplinary way the basis for QoS-mechanisms in telecommunications networks from both a network engineering as an economical point of view. Quality of Experience for the end-user is the end-goal of any network architecture and that is where QoS-mechanisms are supposed to deliver. We will show that the use of QoS-mechanisms to deliver QoE is bound to result in failure right from the start, since QoS through shaping and prioritizing is a logically and conceptually flawed concept. It’s a holy grail and a pipedream. These mechanisms cannot work and therefore building either networks, business models or policy on it will result in failure. There is however a simple solution to QoS-problems and that is to over-engineer the network and all the active equipment (servers, routers etc)

What is Quality of Service and Quality of Experience?

Just look it up on the wikipedia. Also look up jitter and lag etc.

What kind of QoS mechanisms are there?

These mechanisms in general take three forms:

- Prioritizing systems, that let packets move ahead of the que based on how high their priority bit is. (like sirens and lights on an ambulance)

- Bandwidth Reservation systems, that guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth over (part of) a link between two points. (like the telephone network that reserved a line between two points)

- QoS enabled routing systems: Routing systems that try to route traffic on knowledge of the state of the network. (like a driver learning of a traffic jam on the route to work and therefore taking another route).

These systems have seen various implementations and all have failed. There are alot of explanations in literature that explain why QoS is not a success. They can be divided into three different classes:

- it's failure of the previous technology, but we will think up a new one that will get it right

- it's failure of economy, bandwidth is too cheap, implementation is too hard (but this will all change, just you wait and see.)

- it's failure of timing, currently we don't need it, because nobody uses the internet for business critical stuff, but the status quo has to change or we cannot do telesurgery etc.

There is very little literature available on whether QoS is actually necessary and whether QoS is actually possible. If all these mechanisms have any chance of working at all.

Many engineers that design the protocols and networks that have build the internet explicitely and implicitely accept that QoS-mechanisms will not work in actual networks. Most sensible engineers don't even want to get into a debate anymore about it.

Actual implementations of Quality of Service Mechanisms

There are currently several QoS mechanisms standardized for use with the Internet protocol.

Diffserv, Intserv, RSVP, MPLS

Categorisering

The conceptual errors that underlie the failure in implementation of Qos mechanisms can be either technical or economical. Technical errors are those errors that make it impossible to design a technical system that answers to all the demands of a QoS-mechanism for it to be technically functional, stable and reliable. Economical errors are those errors that make it impossible to properly implement and operate a network with QoS-mechanisms. The economical errors and technical errors feed into eachother, strengthening each others effects.

Technical errors:

• Scarcity in the network is a layer 1 problem. QoS mechanisms are operating in layer 2 to 7. We’re trying to stuff more bits into a pipe than can properly fit. Like trying to put marbles through a funnel. Or put differently, trying to fix a layer 1 problem in layer two or three, by making assumptions on layer 7 traffic and on the real world making use of it.

• QoS routing is NP hard

• QoS tries to make the pipe more efficient to allow for more traffic. This only works when the pipe is almost full, but not when it’s fully full. In a dynamic system the difference between empty, almost full and fully full is a couple of percentage points. This leaves very little room to manoeuvre

• QoS prioritization works on the switches that are in between the two users. On a modern system the time advantage that can be achieved by prioritizing a packet through a switch is x millionth of a second. This is less than x% of the one way time of a route of 100km. We’re trying to solve the lines problem in the switch.

• Qos only works if the switches can derive an order in which to treat applications. If all streams have top-priority there is no way to determine which ones should get priority over other ones.

• Bandwidth reservation mechanisms are binary. There is capacity that can be reserved, or there is no capacity that can be reserved. This regardless of whether there is capacity available.

• It may be a straw that breaks the camels back, but there is a lot more weight wearing it down. Removing the straw or one other object might save the back, but the camel remains heavily burdened. Same in networks. Both big and small flows can break a network. It’s the total that counts.

Economical errors:

• A QoS system will have to weigh the demands of all users in order to weigh the highest utility for all. This will require an insight into the utility function of each user and an overarching utility function to weigh the utilities of all users against each other.
  

• There is an implicit assumption that both sender and receiver will value a stream equally high. In any communication, there are senders and receivers. Both have a value for that communication and a value for other communications flows on the same connection. When watching a movie online, the company that broadcasts the movie values the QoE of its customer very highly. It doesn't want the customer to receive a jagged and jittery movie. The customer however is not only watching a movie, but might also be expecting an important phone call or communicating otherwise.
  

• QoS works in a static setting (see technical). However the market is dynamic if its healthy. This will reflect itself in the network as one the main platforms over which market forces exert themselves. One cannot assume a static situation for a QoS mechanism if the data flows will follow market dynamics and grow with growth in population and prosperity (when bandwidth usage decreases, there is no need for QoS mechanisms)

• (variation on above) If market is stable (no growth or declining) there is no reason to ration traffic. If traffic is declining the use of QoS mechanisms after a while is unnescessary. if it is growing than after a foreseeable period there is too much traffic for QoS mechanisms to add QoE.
  

• In many business cases surrounding QoS mechanisms there is an assumption that QoS enabled traffic that has been paid for, has a higher value to the user than data that has not been paid for. This sounds logical from an economical point of view if money is an adequate proxy. However it isn’t. Compare a VoIP call that clashes with a pay per view movie. If the VoIP call is about an important subject (birth of child) than it has priority for the receiver, regardless of the QoS level paid for.

Solution
Overengineer the network, so you don't have a situation where QoS mechanisms are appropriate
On end-user connections let the end-user prioritize the traffic to and from him/her. It's the only one that has an accurate view of its utillity function.

Fight VAT-Crime: outsource your billing to the tax man!

The Dutch financial newspaper "Financieel Dagblad" reports on a scheme to fight VAT-fraud. The idea is quite simple. Let's use electronic billing in the EU and send a copy of every bill send in the EU towards the tax-service! This idea by mr. Wilbert Nieuwenhuizen sounds quite simple and with the total value of VAT-fraud exceding €100 billion it will probably be worth every penny that the tax-services invest in it. Electronic Billing in itself will save on average €25 per bill a copy to the tax man is easily made, so why should companies object.

Now as a telecoms and ICT guy, I like technical solutions to hard problems, but this one scares me. This could mean that the taxman pretty soon knows of any and all transactions in the country. On top of knowing whether the VAT paid and declared all matches up, they also know of any and all trades done in the country. Now I know that they can already get access to any and all trades that are on the books, by making a friendly phone call to a CFO, but this goes much further. What little privacy we have would be lost too. I would say instant Big Brother Award nomination!

So I propose the following. If the taxman knows al my transactions, then it should also do my books. Give me a monthly overview of how I am doing and if I run a business, how my business is doing. They know more than the accountant by now, so they can sign of on the books too. It can give me instant deductions on taxes when I qualify for them and give me an automatic extension of my payment term if my cash flow is not adequate. Than they are really useful and I'm willing to relinquish my privacy.

Updated: Release date Nokia E51 is November 12th

I just ordered Nokia's new and unreleased E51, because it gave me a whole lotta goodies for a 300 euro price-tag (through a friend). Unfortunately it was unknown when it would be released, except for Q4 2007, which could be the day after Christmas. But fortunately Amazon UK is now reporting that it will be available November 12th! (The same day as the iPhone is released in Europe (correction: UK only I hear, France on the 29th) Great! I really want to fiddle with the VoIP functionality and Wifi capability. Also it supports almost all e-mail systems right from the get go except it seems for Gmail, which is a pity. Iphone would have been cute too.. but Apples policy makes it hard to get without a subscription.

Update: It's available in Germany! Seems its been available for two weeks there already according to Amazon.de. My Google-powers must have been very week not being able to find it. Though strange thing is that Nokia.de says that it is bald erhaltlich, or in English: Available soon. Great thing this globalisation/e-commerce/weightless economy. Stuff is on the market even before Nokia gets a word of it.

The day the routers died

Well Slashdot doesn't seem to pick it up. But this is just too funny and serious to just leave it unmentioned. So this is what I send them. I should go to RIPE again.

"The RIPE 55 meeting has just concluded. There was much debate on what to do on the imminent depletion of the unallocated IPv4 pool in 2010. We could do nothing or we could create a market place and facilitate transfer of IP-adresses, but it's all a train wreck waiting to happen. This is best shown however by a beautiful song "The day the routers died" also available on Youtube written and performed by Gary Feldman. So please all upgrade to IPv6 soon, or else you will not get 40Gbit/s to your mother."

Update: Using "evil" dataretention for emergency (e911 and 112) services good

At RIPE 55 a presentation was given by Alexander Mayrhofer on internet based emergency calls. One of the main problems they need to deal with is to get location data with IP-adresses. In the traditional telephone world we faked knowing where the caller of 112/911 emergency was, by equating it with the address in the telephone book. For years this was kind of sufficient, except when calling from an outside branch office, than you would notice the firemen arriving at the head office :-) Mobile made the world more difficult, but that is solvable by an antenna register and equipping phones with GPS. VoIP in its nomadic form is a different beast all together. The presentation is quite clear on all the complications.

This problem of tying IP adresses to locations is also faced by law enforcement when hunting down terrorists, child pornographers, serious crime and cyber criminals (the four horseman of the apocalypse). To aid law enforcement in this quest, the EU has written a data retention directive that requires telecommunications networks, to retain who was given what IP-address and at what location. The exact specifics vary between countries and interpretations of the directive. So lets bring these two together, give emergency services access to the up to date data retention databases and presto one of the problems (partially) solved. For ISP's it saves building two systems. For law enforcement it saves accessing two system and gets as an extra bonus that an ISP will be more willing to improve the quality of the database.

Update October 29th, 2007: Continuous improvement picked up on this article. He thinks that getting the information right for e911 will help the data retention people and not the other way round. I do think it is the other way round mostly. Getting data retention right will help in those occasions when someone calls a e911/112 emergency number. With data retention the government wants to know when and where you used your mobile/VoIP. They will need to get this right anyways. A special subsection is 112, so getting access to the special subsection sounds more logical IMHO than the other way round