Subject: Re: Was: "interesting" apps needed for MBone? (long)

From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Feb 1997 12:15:54 +0000

>This also makes use of the "Mbone islands" approach mentioned, in that
 >you just deploy it, say, on a suitably wired college campus. 

i was at a large company site on friday, and ran sdr and saw all
theglobal mbone sessions, and about twice as many again that were
company intranet wide only.....i wonder how widespread this is (there
were about 10 live sessions on their net and it was clearly in everyday
usage.....)
 >target audience is the college demographics, this may be viable
 >technically and commercially. (It seems like most campuses have their
 >dorms wired for Ethernet these days.)
 >
 >Henning
 >-- 
 >Henning Schulzrinne         email: [email-masked]
 >Dept. of Computer Science   phone: +1 212 939-7042
 >Columbia University         fax:   +1 212 666-0140
 >New York, NY 10027          URL:   http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs

 jon

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From: George Michaelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 08:58:24 +1000

We're a 4-locations company with 100 people, distances akin to London-Rome
and all one ISP. We use mbone intensively in-house for ongoing project and
other work. Not 10's of sessions in parallel, but maybe pro-rata scaled.

Even PLU who can't (yet) make commercialized Mbone viable as product use
it in-house.

-George

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From: Subramaniam Vincent <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 1997 16:14:50 -0800 (PST)

Folks,

I am not sure whether this is the right forum to post this *desire for
truth*.  But having seen a lot of discussion here about the
"bandwidthless"ness of the Internet, I have to ask the
community (especially the ISPs/telcos) some questions after this;

I summarized a comment made at a seminar at USC, LA, last week as follows:

"The telephone network was designed to maximize profits. About 10% (or
very little) of the available bandwidth in the US telecom infrastructure
is being used today. Hardware and communications cost is not really the
problem. In other words, bandwidth was/is never THE problem. The Internet
is also running on the same  telecommunication infrastructure. (telcos
basically). There is scarcity because the telcos are  unwilling to use
up more bandwidth, because they (want to?) would have to use telephone
economics to price VBR type integrated services.  The bottom line is
congestion on the internet TODAY, is NOT because of user demands, or poor
resources. There is plenty of raw bandwidth available today. More
realistic pricing/management structures have to come, and more
competition possibly.

The value  of research to resource allocation problems is moot in
celluar networks, where we do have a technical problem" . End summary.

My questions : (are we solving the wrong problems ?)

Q1. What do the telcos have to say about RAW bandwidth cost & availability
today ?

Q2. Still talking of today, do application demands really push available
bandwidth in the infrastructure ?

Q3. Is another reason to keep a good percentage of BW unused, to prevent
rise in the telephone call blocking probabilities ?

Q4. Yes, Pricing for internet services is not yet resolved. But does that
mean we let capacity go idle ? (if answer to Q1 is "yes, plenty")

Vince

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From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Feb 1997 22:44:10 -0500

See 
 http://pobox.com/cook/evolving.html#reflections
for some discussion. (without saying that I agree/disagree). It is worth 
noting (and was pointed out at a DARPA workshop a number of years ago) 
that the cost of wide-area bandwidth has not decreased at nearly the 
rates of, say, computing power or storage. Indeed cost/bit seems to have 
held pretty constant for the last few years. Since capacity can't be 
hoarded like silver, holding back capacity if there's demand seems 
unlikely, particularly given that most major facility-based carriers 
(like Wiltel/MFS/UUnet or Sprint or MCI or AT&T) also operate major 
parts of the Internet infrastructure.

Right now, there's little possibility for a "good" service provider to 
distinguish itself (beyond offering enough modems :-)). Even if a model 
ISP runs at zero packet loss and full access bandwidth for each 
subscriber, its customers won't notice until most everybody else does 
the same. Since customers won't notice, they won't pay more. (I'm 
simplifying here, obviously.)

Henning

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From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 15:05:32 +0000

Vince

interesting questions all...

my take on this is that the price per bps is still high because there
is still significant revenue from the phone service - this causes all
POTS carriers to have a serious problem selling any signifcant
quantity of bandwidth cheap enough for anyone to offer resale voice
calls cheaper.....

someone from BT once drew me a graph of growth in revenue from data
networking, and showed me at what point their shareholders would let
them [irrespective of what the regulatory body wants] offer low enough
prices si that the revenue from line rental
to innterne subscribers at high enough speeds that
a) the ISPs offer good voice interconnect in large numbers
[including legacy connect, like MCI are just starting to offer]
b) the telco doesn't mind the subsequent loss of revenue for toll
quality speech ....

for them, the cross over is still a few years off (but not many)
[clearly, there is hysteresis in the system, or it would change around
the point where the data traffic (which is running flat out anyhow)
exceeds the voice raffic by enough to offset the cost of writing off
the billing systems, and paying redundency money to all the staff
there:-)

anyhow, at that point, we see a phase shift in pricing and accounting
models.....imho,

til then, henning is right.... 

after then, it will be chaotic for at least a while...

 jon

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From: "Carl Malamud [IMS]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 10:57:54 -0500 (EST)

>  >Q1. What do the telcos have to say about RAW bandwidth cost & availability

Interesting data point I learned late last year.  In Japan, there
is now a total of 350 mbps of Internet connectivity to the US.
The total fax/voice bandwidth was estimated by a senior KDD
official to be 300 mbps.

It seems that despite the still-high prices, there is a fairly
strong shift away from traditional telco applications.

Carl

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From: Subramaniam Vincent <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 10:47:52 -0800 (PST)

from the replies and the website Henning gave : (not drawing conclusions,
but.) it seems :

a. we are fast reaching an infrastructural crunch (for various reasons)
b. some *availability* crunches are *artifical* as in any industry.
c. some telcos are taking steps to avoid it (may not be enough), carrier's
   carrier segments are taking off. (talk of planning..)
d. there is the crossover point between telephone revenue and internet revenue
   (theres are lots of issues muddled up here..)

e. the japan - us interconnect case from Carl, seems to be a case in point
   - that international telpehone revenue may have reached the crossover
    point earlier..

Do we have an interesting case for for transatlantic traffic (US-Europe ?)
( i'm inclined to think its the other way around :)) )

vince

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From: Geoff Huston <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 09:26:13 +1100 (EST)

Carl,

There may well be other explanations of the 350Mbps which have not so
much to do with traffic volume and performance and a lot to do with
the high financial stakes involved in undersea fibre at present.

There is not an infinite supply of fibre. Indeed the finite nature of
the current systems is likely to be well and truly visible now in
early 1997. In general when scarcity of a resource is visible the
typical social reaction by those who can afford to do so is hoarding,
with a view to subsequent speculative trading. This of course is in
expectation of a scarcity-induced price premium once resource scarcity
becomes a significant factor.

  Geoff

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From: Petri Helenius <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 04:44:29 +0200 (EET)

> strong shift away from traditional telco applications.
This has been the estimate of many respectable companies for a couple
of years that data traffic will account for more megabits in
1996. Looking at the situation, it seems that this happened in many
places.

However, this did not happen for the monetary side of the same
issue. The telephony network still generates more than three quarters
of revenue.

Pete