[LINK] "compelling content" wrecking broadband (was: Volume Charges/interconnection/peering)

[Robin Whittle]

In the past on Link I have offered an evolutionary explanation of
marketers' fascination with masses of consumers gobbling up, and happily
paying for, centrally distributed "content".  

I think there are hunting and herding instincts at work - its an
instinctual fantasy to build a network and attach millions of consumers
who happily pay continually for stuff which one simply needs to put in
one plug-hole and let the network replicate and drip-feed without
incremental cost.  The idea of the captive audience of monthly fee
paying customers, all multiplied out over the years, which gives such a
big thrill, as the marketers try to figure out reliable ways of
generating the millions and billions for their companies, which in
reality - or more likely in the prospect of - they will *lever* (I hate
the recent over-use of "leverage") to argue for the raise they need to
buy the house, send the kids to a higher status school, buy the new
up-market car etc.   Thus, I see direct links between basic instincts on
survival, mate attraction and partner/family support and all sorts of
behaviours.  In this case, I see these instincts linking with other
instincts for automating the food production system - mass approaches to
hunting, fishing etc. which would also have developed into instincts
about maintaining herds of cattle and goats etc. - transforming into
fantasies about millions of customers being kept happy by a single
centralised stream of "content".

I believe that this, and the evident success of TV, biased the technical
standards for HFC cable modems and for ADSL into a highly asymmetrical
balance between downstream and upstream bandwidth.

In HFC's case, due to the shared nature of the local cable, there are
also fundamental technical reasons why the upstream capacity is less
Megabits per second per Megahertz of radio frequency spectrum than the
downstream.  This is to do with multiple amplifiers from multiple
branches of the local cable all adding noise in series and in parallel,
reducing the signal to noise ratio for the upstream signals. 
Consequently, the upstream data density rates are about 1 bit per second
per Hertz, while downstream is typically 4 times this.

HFC also suffered by the upstream frequency allocation being at the
bottom end of the spectrum (it has to be either at the very top or the
very bottom, since analogue filters must enable amplifiers to work in
both directions on the one cable in two different directions for two
ranges of frequencies) and the lower limit being about 30 MHz due to a
plethora of interfering sources in existing equipment, and the upper
limit being very unfortunately set by the lowest VHF analogue TV
channel, which was either carried on the cable, or perhaps interfering
from the outside anyway.   Consequently, HFC cable systems in the USA
have a usable upstream frequency range of about 30 to 45 MHz (if I
remember correctly).  Here it is 30 to 65 MHz.  The nature of the
filters in the amplifiers in the streets means that there is reduced
gain as the upstream/downstream split point is approached, so the signal
strength gets lower as one approaches this.   

However, if the people who designed the tech standards and the
cable/amplifier systems wanted to provide much higher upstream
bandwidths, they would have simply made the split-point 200 MHz or so. 
The systems go to 750 MHz or 1GHz, so there's plenty of room for
downstream.   

Another factor was the desire to make HFC cable systems run over old
cable TV systems in the USA, with lousier cables, retrofitted or low
split-point amplifiers.   At least in Australia, with fresh cable
systems, we got another 20 MHz of upstream spectrum.

ADSL has no such problems - but the prevailing view of marketers and
perhaps tech people was that customers would be sucking content, so
again we have a low split point and lousy upstream rates.   I don't
recall the upstream path being necessarily less bit/Hz efficient, as it
is in HFC cable.   My articles in April / May  1994 Australian
Communications magazine (now Richard's Comms World) have lots of tech
stuff and diagrams on how ADSL works.  These will be in good libraries. 
These and my articles on HFC are listed at:

  http://www.firstpr.com.au/telco/articles/index.html

To a certain extent it can be expected that people in homes and
businesses will receive less data than they send, even with no
restrictions on upstream capacity.  This is because a substantial
fraction of what they want to access comes from the centralised servers
of companies and web-sites operated by individuals.  It is more robust
and cost-effective to locate those servers somewhere other than the
homes and businesses of the web-site owners, and connect the servers to
gigabit and beyond fibre in massive data centres, such as:

   http://www.rackshack.net
 
This is where my sites are.  It is a big server farm where you can hire
a Linux machine for USD$100 a month and get 400 Gigs of upstream
bandwidth, typically to serve web sites, but in fact to do almost
anything at all, other than spam, warez etc. (BTW, I am keen to hire one
of these - does anyone want to join me and put their site there?  I am
sick of the hosting companies who I have been using, who hire these
servers and sub-let capacity on them - for instance for USD$30 for 25
Gigabytes of traffic and lousy management.)

In this case, a big ISP with lots of big Texan content-sucking customers
has fat pipes and lots of upstream bandwidth to spare.  So they stuff a
large room with PCs and rent them and their upstream bandwidth to all
comers.

I think a significant contributor to the demand for high bandwidth
material such as graphics and I guess video recordings or live video is
the adult industry - erotica/pornography depending on your viewpoint.  I
figure those lusty Texans are big on this and contribute to the need for
those fat fibres used by the parent ISP of Rackshack: 
http://www.ev1.net .  It is fitting then that many of the sites on the
Rackshack servers are for adult material.  (I walked through the
numerically named Ensim admin addresses for the multiple virtual servers
on successive IP addresses, such as http://216.40.233.221/~admin8/
http://216.40.233.221/~admin9/ etc. My sites are 6 and 7 on this
server.)  

Rackshack one of the larger places for hosting such material, and this,
I imagine, would suit EV1 very nicely in terms of marginally reducing
the bandwidth they need to serve their ISP customers.  However, live
web-cam erotica and cyberdildonics (remote user control of sex toys in a
two-way voice and perhaps video link) does not typically follow this
model.  Home-based video pay-per-view-and-interaction erotica/porn is a
safe, potentially highly independent, way for women and men to earn
money and hopefully have some fun from home.  They hit the problem of
the lousy upstream bandwidth of ADSL / HFC, and so the damn marketers'
instinctual centralised fantasy has a dampening effect on this
flourishing home-based, decentralised, potentially ethnically diverse,
low-capital investment, highly valued service industry.   The marketers
imagined their servers pumping out pre-recorded stuff, probably
including "adult" movies.  But while a demand for this exists, its the
personalised two-way communication, just like the telephone and
face-to-face meeting, which many people are much keener about.  But the
marketers were not cluey enough to fantasise about selling bandwidth to
those home owner-operators - they only foresaw the simpler nirvana of
the network operators personally owning, and therefore receiving all the
revenue from, centralised, low or zero labour requirement, "content".

But getting back to the the genuine reasons for centrally located
servers . . .  In terms of cost, reliability and perhaps security, it
makes sense that a lot of the stuff people want to bring into their
computer from the outside world will come from servers which are
centrally located, rather than at homes or offices via HFC and ADSL.

But still, I think the fervent marketing fantasy for consumers happily
sucking centrally located "content" has skewed the technical standards
and therefore the equipment and actual services of ADSL and HFC cable
modems towards a situation where upstream bandwidth is unnecessarily
restricted.   

This is very sad.

In general, one does not see the telephone network, the postal system or
the road network being seen as primarily a system for users to access
centrally located resources.   Sure, some of what they do is central,
but most of it is home to home, office to office, and browsing.   

My previous Link messages on my evol-psych theories about this
"broadband content" fantasy can be found by Googling for my name and the
words:

   hunting  herding


There is a lively discussion list on evolutionary psyschology:
  
   http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology

This is related to The Human Nature Daily Review:

   http://human-nature.com/nibbs/


     - Robin


    http://www.firstpr.com.au   http://fondlyandfirmly.com