May 2008 Archives

Phew, that's an over the top video complete with music from Strauss' Zarathustra, more popularly known as the theme to the movie 2001. (H/T The Register)

It's a long story, but the short of it is:

It will be built near Las Vegas by real estate magnates who want to build a data center alley in the desert, powered by Hoover Dam (and, in the future, perhaps solar energy too?).

The numbers:

• 407,000 square feet of space
• Designed for 1,500 watts per square foot (does that mean it will consume 407,000 feet x 1,500 watts per foot = 610,500 watts? Don't know.)
• 30,000 tons of equipment (including cooling)
• over 7,000 cabinets
• armed security
• opening in 2008

Quite a story! The video doesn't tell you much. The Register's story is here.

Mostly, this blog post is a link to the keynote post in the Tucows Blog, with the title of Noss' speech: Why You and Lowfat Lattes are Google’s Worst Nightmare. Tucows has posted both audio and video. If you carry an MP3 player and have a commute, this would be a good thing to listen to. And if you are able to watch the video (i.e., you're not driving), even better.

In his keynote, Noss identifies key threats to ISPs and also points to opportunities that ISPs are failing to take advantage of.

The biggest opportunity is this: most customers hate their computer, their ISP, and the internet. They know they're not getting everything they could out of it, whether they're a small business or an individual. Provide a service and you can earn serious money for what others provide for free.

The Tucows quotes internet lawyer and ISPCON attendee David Snead, writing for TheWHIR, as saying, "David Snead from TheWHIR has a nice summary of what Elliot talked about today.

Snead writes, “What Elliot talked about, that strikes me as true, based on those of my clients who are successful, is that successful Internet businesses are high touch, and that people will pay to have their problems go away.”

Funny thing is that my dad's a lawyer, and this is how he describes his job: "I'm like a psycologist. People come to me with their problems and I either make their problems go away or show them how to live with their problems."

Problem solving! That's a product that sells.

Complying with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) isn't easy, and like so many government mandates (digital TV transition, for example) it falls hardest on the smallest companies in the industry.

Luckily, there's WISPA. The Wireless ISP Association formed a group to define a standard. As we explained around this time last year, at ISPCON Spring 2007 (see ISPCON Policy Update: Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994), the FBI does not ratify any particular standard as compliant or not.

Instead, the FBI issues guidelines and is asking the industry to create standards. Any standard becomes a safe harbor, meaning that if an ISP complies with it, the FBI cannot sue the ISP, it must fight the standard in court.

The best known standard (ANSI)/TIA J-STD-025- B-2006 -- Lawfully Authorized Electronic Surveillance) is from the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Standards (ATIS). As you'd expect from a telco-dominated group, the standard is big and clunky. And you have to pay money just to see it.

WISPA's CALEA Standards (versions 1 and 2) are freely available at the WCS website.

WISPA is working on an implementation guide that will be free to members and not free to non-members.

I've got much work to do to cover this story completely, but I started during a talk with J.C. Utter, president of Imagestream, the router vendor.

He said that the ATIS standard has two flaws from the point of view of law enforcement:

1) It allows up to 1 percent packet loss.

2) It provides only streaming data.

Utter is pleased to point out that the WISPA standard solves both problems by storing the data at the ISP in Packet Capture (PCap) format. Thus, no packet loss, and no streaming. Instead, a simple data format that law enforcement can actually handle.

The hairpin problem
But there's a problem, and the problem explains why there are two versions of the standard. The problem, as explained in last year's article, linked above, is called "hairpinning."

If you're an ISP and you're recording the communications of a suspected terrorist, you'd like to do it at the core of your network. That's where you've got the rest of your monitoring tools. And capturing the data there works in most cases but not all cases.

It can be possible to communicate with another person without going through the center of the network if both the target and the other person are connected to the same edge device and that device is not CALEA compliant. In such a case, the device might route traffic directly between the two people without going through the core.

Version 1 of the WISPA standard accepts that you, the ISP, cannot do anything about this issue.

Version 2 of the WISPA standard says that you've had enough time to deal with the issue.

Dealing with the problem is not simple. CALEA also says that the target must not be able to detect the monitoring. Shipping in a probe to attach to the wireless access point, and doing maintenance on that access point, might be disqualified if the target knew the maintenance was being performed.

CALEA's complicated, and I've just started learning about the WISPA standard, so this is just my initial report. I will keep learning about it and will tell you more as I learn.

Uodate: This morning, at the conclusion of his ISPCON session, CLEC lawyer Kris Twomey said, "this is one of the coolest things any ISP association has ever done for its members."

DSL Reports notes today that muni fiber project iProvo (as in Provo, Utah) has been bought by FTTP specialist Broadweave Networks for $40 million, which is almost exactly the amount of money the city of Provo owes on the bond it took out to build the network.

(Have you heard of Broadweave? I have not.)

Although the DSL Reports piece initially paints this as a picture of failure, the author changes his mind after a conversation with telecom lawyer and broadband infrastructure evangelist Jim Baller.

Baller points out that at a net cost of close to zero dollars, the city of Provo build a fiber network that's still there and that the fiber network forced the monopolies, phone and cable, to deploy broadband as well.

These may not be the goals of the original project, but municipal projects do make sense in this context: as an enterprise to be built and then sold in order to force the recalcitrant monopolies to deploy.

Independent ISPs face this problem regularly: find a gap in the market and start advertising service there and all of a sudden one of the national monopolies jumps in with cut rate pricing.

That's what GigaOM's Allan Leinwand suggests today in his article, Web 2.0, Please Meet Your Host, the Internet. It has two case studies, one about DoS attacks, the other about poor router configuration. Worth reading!

My colleague Pedro Hernandez did a fascinating e-mail interview with an ISP in Idaho that generates its own power.

Interesting, brief article in the NY Times (h/t BoingBoing) suggests a major shakeup in patent law could occur because a law passed in 1999 was unconstitutional.

The law "changed the way administrative patent judges are appointed, substituting the director of the Patent and Trademark Office for the secretary of commerce."

The law is important because the constitution ensures that elected officials, not appointed ones, have the power to appoint others. That keeps the bureaucracy accountable.

The bottom line is that patent law is out of control and needs significant revision.

Update: Today's patent news: VeriSign owns site redirection.

On the ISP-Bandwidth list in April, I posted some comments from Om Malik on bandwidth pricing (under the headline "Om Malik supports throttling, gets flamed"):

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/22/shocking-new-facts-about-p2p-and-broadband-usage/


On fixed and mobile broadband networks where consumer services are provided
(i.e., NOT interprovider or typical dedicated Internet access for commercial
enterprises):

10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth


This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including
Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his
company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most
of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times.
(Personally, I find that to be a distasteful solution, and I believe that
folks should learn from newer ISPs like Free.fr and better architect their
networks so they can provide more bandwidth for all - without imposing any
penalties.)

 

 

A week later, the replies keep coming in. ISP owners would like to advertise a flat fee with a monthly limit, but fear that consumers don't know that the cablecos and telcos are lying to them when they advertise unlimited bandwidth. Even if the cablecos and telcos were fined by the FTC or FCC for false advertising, the dollar amount of the fine would not change their behavior.

The legal system is structured to punish family businesses and to insulate large corporations from the consequences of their own actions.