John Robb is optimistic that government networks will inadvertantly kill the ILEC

development of parallel communications networks for first responders (which will expand to encompass much of the population in the area):

“Corporate communications monopolies will crumble as cities build their own emergency wireless networks using simple products …”

Unfortunately, he underestimates the powers of greed and the telecom lobby, something that’s playing out in New Orleans even as I type:

After Katrina ravaged the Big Easy six months ago, Greg Meffert, the city’s chief information officer, got downtown businesses back online by opening the city’s wireless mesh network—originally deployed to link surveillance cameras—to anyone who needed it. For free.

“Now it is the lifeblood for so many businesses,” Mr. Meffert told Red Herring. With Internet service still down in more than half the city, he estimates more than 15,000 people use the city’s 512 kbps (kilobits per second) network.

…

Now telecommunication lobbyists are trying to shut down the network, and Mr. Meffert says it looks like the state legislature will agree. State law prohibits cities from providing more than a relatively sluggish 128-kbps network, but New Orleans offered its faster network as an emergency relief effort.

No Emergencies

“The vendors, the BellSouths of this world, are not only going to force us back, making our existing Wi-Fi illegal, but also they want to close a loophole for emergencies so that we would not do this again,” said Mr. Meffert.

Once upon a time, I would have found it hard to believe that even Louisiana’s politicians are truly so hostile to their constituents that they would vote for corporate profiteering at the expense of letting the government provide services that its citizens have already paid for. These days, I’m not so confident.

Of course, Municipal Wireless has been growing in cities across the country precicely because companies like BellSouth are more interested in forcing the services they want to sell down people’s throats than offering the services that people want to buy. POTS is dead, it’s just being kept on life support by the SBC’s, AT&T’s and BellSouths of the world until they figure out how to extend their monopoly rents up the IP stack past the wire. The fact that they’re doing it with an infrastructure funded by monopoly franchises makes this even more disgusting.

That’s the same BellSouth, by the way, whose CEO essentially declared that ending Net Neutrality was their corporate strategy as the value of the network moves into the applications.

POTS is dead?
If there’s a terrorist blowin’ up your ‘hood
Who ya gonna call (POTSbusters)

Well, actually, you won’t call anyone because electricity just went out; large scale WiFi doesn’t work that well in rain, high winds or any other less than perfect conditions; and ham radio is a thing of a past. :-) Did I mention it is also childishly easy to jam it? And that it is on the list of things to turn off first if something unexpected happens? You know the general knee-jerk reaction; cut the common communications carriers so the bad guys can’t talk. :-)

There is a lot modern age network designers can learn from POTS, including how to build reliant, large scale, survivable networks. Using 802.11 Wi-Fi mesh to cover large areas is applying wrong technology to fix a problem that does not exist. But it creates new problems. People will grow reliant on Wi-Fi just as they did on mobile network. Everyone by now should know that mobile (GSM, CDMA) networks aren’t emergency ready. They’re the first thing to become unavailable when any emergency strikes (bombings in London are a recent example that everyone most probably remembers).

POTS is designed to deal with emergencies. That’s one of the reasons why phone wires are live — even if the electricity network is down, you can still make a call if you have one of those old, mechanical telephone sets at home. Unlike Wi-Fi, and other modern communications networks, POTS equipment has to be NEBS-3 certified — we shall work, come fire, earthquake or flood.

I agree with you that ILECs are big, bad corporate monsters that stymie progress in the name of corporate profits and monopoly. But things today aren’t as bad as they were back when ‘Ma Bell’ was broken up. You can buy your phone set from a number of companies; you can decide which long-range carrier you want to use; you can decide against using POTS all together and still stay in touch with the rest of the world.

Net neutrality is the bridge we crossed a long time ago. QoS anyone? MPLS? We already offer a guarranteed quality of service to those that are willing to pay for it. That’s nothing new. What is new is AT&T’s CEO Ed Whitacre saying it loud and clear. His personality, and the company he works for, forms the impression that he’s ultimately evil and whatever he says must be bad. Google says that QoS decision would discriminate against their traffic and people are up in arms for Google, because Google is ultimately a good guy, right? But what if the case was presented in this way:
“Current network doesn’t discriminate between different services; spam takes up as much of your e-mail servers time as that important contract you’re waiting for. Worse, spam supposedly takes more resources than legitimate e-mail traffic does.

Video streaming from Google video is slowed down because some kid down the street is heavily into P2P and is taking up most of the available upstream bandwidth.

The Net radio station you pay to listen to is getting constant few seconds interruptions because someone on your provider’s network is getting DDoSed.

Would you like to get away from this common service? Would you like to get the first class service you paid for?

Vote for QoS!”
Net neutrality advocates are in effect for status quo and against innovation. Is it me or are ‘Net as it is advocates not asking for extra regulation, just to keep things as they are? That is going to hurt the ‘Net more than network providers charging for ‘communications express lanes’. If the network providers only propose additional service, not changes to current services or traffic filtering, they should be allowed to do it.

We all want more bandwidth, but what is the use of 100Mbps line to home if 60% of that is taken up by things I don’t want?

Saso-

As always, excellent points and I agree with with pretty much all of them, so I’ll clarify my thinking a little. I agree that wi-fi/GSM/CDMA/Wi-Max or any other wireless infrastructures are not as disaster-resilient as POTS. The power requirements for any base station-driven network are simply too great to operate for more than a few minutes without a serious (meaning not-cost-effective) generator.

Which brings us back, as you rightly surmise, to some sort of solution involving wires. The fact that copper can provide both signal and power is certainly convenient in that regard. But as soon as those wires hit the Central Office, that’s where it ends. It’s all IP from there, and that’s what I meant when I said that, “POTS is dead.” Perhaps what I should have said was, “POTS doesn’t actually exist beyond the last mile.”

As to the issue of Net Neutrality, I’ll admit that I’m a believer in “All power to the edge!”

I do, however, completely agree that Quality of Service is essential to the long-term growth of voice, video, and other realtime services over the net. I think, however, that it’s essential to let the applications on the endpoints instruct the carrier how they would like their traffic prioritized, rather than letting the carrier decide.

What sort of QoS/MPLS/Traffic Shaping is used should be an implementation issue, but the policy belong to the endpoint. Instead, that decision is currently being made by carriers, regardless of the endpoint’s request, and it’s generally to deliberately de-prioritize traffic which competes with the carrier’s own application.

A more concrete example of this is broadband providers deliberately de-prioritizing VoIP traffic for all VolP providers except themselves. i.e. if I have a cable modem but Vonage VoIP service and my cable provider deliberately downgrades my Vonage traffic, that would be an example of what I consider violating Net Neutrality.

Certainly any edge-based QoS regimen is at risk of the Tragedy of the Commons, but I’d rather assume the risk that enough application developers will respect the appropriate use of QoS flags than cede that power to service providers who publicly state that the only interests they care about are their own.

As an aside, I’ve always thought there was something fundamentally corrupt about the idea that content providers (which could be anyone from Google to Yahoo to some random porn site) should have to pay a premium to utilize the pipes they are already paying for. If AT&T feels that they should get some cut of Google’s revenue because Google buys IP access from Sprint, then that’s an issue to be worked out when AT&T and Sprint review their peering agreement.

But what people like Ed Whitacre seem to really be saying (as I read it) is that they are jealous that some companies are better at turning packets into dollars than the telco’s, so the telco should be granted some rent for providing the services they are paid to provide.

A comparable example would be if ComEd, my local power company, were to decide that my company more effeciently converts kilowatts into revenue than the gas station next door, so they were going to demand that we pay a premium on our electric bill to compensate them.

Sounds pretty absurd to me.

Oh, yeah. For anyone who’s not up on the details of all this, Ed Felten recently wrote some excellent posts about traffic shaping suitable for non-hardcore net.geeks.