Oh, I see, you were quoting Stevens himself!  I remember the "series of tubes" part. 

Is P2P sharing really significant in the available bandwidth compared to the rest of the Internet traffic?

I think I remember emails getting delayed on Hotmail in the '90s, but that was usually because there was something wrong with the address, not because of high-volume traffic.  I didn't used to be able to sign onto Hotmail sometimes because of high traffice.  You'd get a message about an email from last week you forgot you even sent.

I never have that problem with gmail.  It tells me immediately if there was a problem.  It also tracks every word I type.  Sometimes you'll be on gmail and you'll type "plate" or "shrimp" or a "plate o'shrimp" and a plate o'shrimp will appear on the sidebar! 

It's like a cosmic coincidence thing!
:o

Is P2P sharing really significant in the available bandwidth compared to the rest of the Internet traffic?


It's a chunk, but it has nothing to do with whether your email gets from one mail provider to another within three days.  Maybe three seconds.  Any delay past about that point is the fault of the mail provider not adequately provisioning its own resources.  

The internet was named "internet" because it was a network that used common protocols to join networks that were composed of smaller networks.  The Google Network (a bunch of machines hosted by Google) can deliver video to Your Network (the part between your phone jack, cable demarcation point, and the DSL-modem/cable-modem/wireless-hub) that delivers content to the machines (laptop, desktop, gaming console, and increasingly, the television itself) only as long as Google pays its ISP (and you pay your ISP) for connectivity.

That worked just fine when AT&T provided the telephone network, you provided the dial-up modem, and (Netcom, Mindspring, Earthlink, Compu$serve, AOL, etc) provided the bits.  Now that dial-up is dying, and the telcos have realized that even voice communications (be it VOIP, wireless service, etc) are merely data streams over a TCP/IP backbone that take up less bandwidth than the typical YouTube video... they want a piece of the pie beyond the piece they've already gotten.

So yeah, just because AT&T's (Sorry, AT&T.  This applies just as much to Qwest, SBC, Verizon, Comcast, or any telco) taking your $30/month to carry your "gimme some video" requests to GoogTube, and GoogTube's paying $30M/month (I'm guessing) for the really fat pipe it takes to deliver the resulting 20-megabyte stream of video to your web browser... well, that doesn't matter much to AT&T.

AT&T wants to get out of the business of being a dumb hauler-of-bits and into the business of delivering the content itself.  AT&T calls it "U-Verse".  Comcast calls it "Triple Play".  And if you want to start some crazy service where You could control what was on the Tube, well, for some strange reason that's not gonna work at $30M/month.  By a staggering coincicence, we're gonna make sure it doesn't work at any price less than what it would cost you to hire us to deliver those bits...

Network neutrality is important because in a world without network neutrality, the telcos determine what gets to go on "their" network, and they create stuff like Minitel.  Neat technology for its day, but as the local monopoly, they charge a fortune for it, never update it, and wonder inexplicably when nobody uses it.

I don't want an intelligent network.  I want a stupid network.  A stupid network means that the guy with the crazy idea of serving little tiles of satellite imagery can make money if he ties it into something like Google Maps.  Telco executives charging $1.00 per "video message" would never create a network stupid enough to provide millions of people with the piano-playing cat, Tron Guy, or the Dramatic Look Prairie Dog, but a Stupid Network let such a thing exist for long enough - and pick up enough viewers - that someone was willing to  $1.65 billion dollars for it.

AT&T has been saying "our network, our rules" since 1956.  If AT&T had won its lawsuit, we'd be dealing with 1968's rules (also finally overthrown via lawsuit) and using acoustic couplers.  

The humble dialup modem was fought against by the incumbent telcos of the day.  Today's fight for network neutrality is the same damn fight that's been going on for more than 50 years: vendor lock-in is anticompetitive, anticapitalistic, and anti-innovation.  Always has been, always will be, and it doesn't matter whether the guy arguing for the incumbent telecom company's natural lock-in has an (R) or a (D) beside his name.  Because the telco never cared whether he had an (R) or a (D) beside his name, as long as he did what he was told when he got to Congress.


Oh, I see, you were quoting Stevens himself!  I remember the "series of tubes" part.  


http://www.karolinagames.com/horatio/images/be210bbc42c1.jpg

...and the preceding paragraph or so is why this meme accurately encapsulates my real reaction to the news of Ted's untimely demise.  (Untimely, as in, about five years too late for the good of the technology industry, which has innovated despite the wishes of the incumbent telcos, whose only use for technology has been to compress a million $3.00/minute long distance phone calls onto a single land line, and to charge $0.20 for a 140-byte text message.  They transmit it in out-of-band and it quite literally costs then nothing, but they charge more than four times per byte as data from the Hubble telescope when you send an SMS / text message.)

To boil it down even further...today's technology has supplanted yesterday's technology. 

I don't even have a land line anymore.  A cell phone is much cheaper and much more convenient for a single person.  I found that out years ago.  If you have a family, then it's still good to have a land line.  Also, businesses with cell phone only appear sketchy!