Nice graphic on transoceanic internet cables... [Archive]

Tundro Walker

June 28th, 2008, 09:11 PM

That detail can actually get scaled down and used as the "backbone vs. last mile" chart, too.

There's still quite a bit of data capacity on the telecom backbones for the most part. It's just the traffic jams that occur getting it from the backbone to the user.

It's like having these really awesome freeways, but the neighborhood roads are so un-kept or underdeveloped that traffic piles up in the neighborhoods while trying to get to the freeways. So, you end up with these under-utilized freeways, and crammed neighborhoods.

All the end-user really notices, though, is that their connection is slow.

However, building out huge-capacity backbones and such is easy, which is why it's been in place for so long. The hard part is building out or revamping all the little capillaries in that "last mile".

Since ISP's, telecoms, cable companies, etc all utilize those "last miles", they've been trying to use packet management to help ease traffic jams at the bottleneck. And, that's when P2P traffic gets zinged, since it's a majority of the traffic.

I think current ideas are to press forward with making P2P packets second class citizens on the net, but maybe not as strict as some ISP's or telecoms were pushing for. Instead, make P2P be more of a constant, passive flow in the background, perhaps allowing it to utilize a max of 20-30% capacity at all times (and more if there's untapped capacity.) That way active content (streaming videos, web-surfing, etc) could be more responsive. From this sense, I'm not too opposed to packet prioritization. It's just that when some companies are allowed to do it, they start expanding that idea in ways customers usually don't like. (EG: "let's cap video content download speed! Let's cap certain web-site content download speed (like porn or mp3), since it's obviously not as important as real, business-needs content!" etc, etc).

With power comes responsibility. In the meantime, they're building out the local fiber in that "last mile"...but I think demand is increasing faster than supply can keep up.