Thanks for sharing this. I agree this works for researchers.
I think we're at a different state and economic returns matter too.
I sent the following to our engineers in hopes we can all better
understand what we're all trying to accomplish.
Hi All,
The attached Notice of Inquiry by the FCC shows how much our work
matters to most everyone in our country (and, by inference, worldwide.)
Broadband networks are no longer entertainment or social networks but
they are critical to all regardless of gender, age, race, ethnic group,
etc. People's health, learning, and ability to earn for their families
all depend on us providing world class engineering to our customers who
in turn provide these networks for each and all of us, our friends &
families, our neighbors, and most everyone else.
Early in my career, I worked at Cisco and had the privilege to work on
some of the first BGP routers that enabled the commercial build out of
the internet, and I'm very thankful we did that way ahead of the 2019
pandemic. There was no "pandemic use case" that drove us - we just
wanted to build the best products that engineers could build. A
worldwide pandemic w/o the internet could have been disastrous - so that
work by many in the mid 1990s seems to have paid off well.
I hope you each realize, today, what you've accomplished since then and
continue to be a part of. It's truly significant. It's been a high honor
to work with so many of you over the last 14+ years.
To the FCC report:
We begin this annual inquiry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic during
which time Americans increasingly turned to their broadband connections
to conduct their lives online by using telemedicine to access
healthcare, working from home, attending classes remotely, connecting by
video with out-of-town family and friends, and streaming entertainment.
Our experiences with the pandemic made it clear that broadband is no
longer a luxury but a necessity that will only become more important
with time. Never before has the critical importance of ensuring that all
Americans have access to high-speed, affordable broadband been more
evident.
Also note, we have more work to do. We need to increase resiliency as an
example. Also, the thing I'm most passionate about is low latency. The
FCC is now recognizing the importance of that. People are slowly
learning why latency is becoming equally important to capacity when it
comes to quality of service.
Bob
PS. The rest is TLDR but I thought I post some snippets for those
interested
We believe that in examining household use cases, a simple summation of
required speeds for individual activities may provide a misleading
picture of actual broadband needs for at least three reasons. First, we
believe it is appropriate to take into account at least occasional
downloads of very large files which can be bandwidth-intensive. Second,
it is important to account for larger households; in 2022, approximately
21% of all U.S. households had four or more people, and the number of
families seeking out multigenerational homes to live with additional
relatives rose.57 Households of all sizes must have sufficient bandwidth
to satisfy their needs. In addition, the number of connected devices per
household continues to grow, from 18.6 in the average household in 2021
to 20.2 in the first half of 2022.58 Taking these factors into account
suggests that fixed broadband download/upload needs could easily exceed
100/20 Mbps.
...
Service Quality. We recognize that other factors, besides the speed of a
broadband connection, can affect consumers’ ability to use the services
effectively. Chief among these factors is latency, which is the measure
of the time it takes a packet of data to travel from one point in the
network to another, and which is typically measured by round-trip time
in milliseconds (ms). As a measurement of advanced telecommunications
capability, latency can be critical because it affects a consumer’s
ability to use real-time applications, including voice over Internet
Protocol, video calling, distance learningapplications, and online
gaming. Actual (as opposed to advertised) speed received, consistency of
speed, and data allowances are also important. Such factors are not
simply a matter of service interruptions and consumer satisfaction—they
have a real and significant effect on Americans’ ability to use critical
web-based applications, including those that facilitate telehealth,
telework, and virtual learning.
In the beginning days of the Arpanet, circa early 1970s, ARPA made a
policy decision about use of the Arpanet. First, Arpa Program
Managers, located on the East Coast of the US, were assigned computer
accounts on USC-ISIA, located on the West Coast in LA. Thus to do
their work, exchanging email, editting documents, and such, they had
to *use* the Arpanet to connect their terminals in Washington to the
PDP-10 in California - 3000 miles away.
Second, ARPA began requiring all of their contractors (researchers at
Universities etc.) to interact with Arpa using email and FTP. If
your site was "on the Arpanet", you had to use the Arpanet. If you
wanted your proposal for next year's research to be funded, you had to
submit your proposal using the net.
This policy caused a profound attention, by everyone involved, to
making the Arpanet work and be useful as a collaboration tool.
JCR Licklider (aka Lick) was my advisor at MIT, and then my boss when
I joined the Research Staff. Lick had been at ARPA for a while,
promoting his vision of a "Galactic Network" that resulted in the
Arpanet as a first step. At MIT, Lick still had need for lots of
interactions with others. My assignment was to build and operate the
email system for Lick's group at MIT on our own PDP-10. Lick had a
terminal in his office and was online a lot. If email didn't work, I
heard about it. If the Arpanet didn't work, BBN heard about it.
This pressure was part of Arpa policy. Sometimes it's referred to as
"eating your own dog food" -- i.e., making sure your "dog" will get
the same kind of nutrition you enjoy. IMHO, that pressure policy was
important, perhaps crucial, to the success of the Arpanet.
In the 70s, meetings still occurred, but a lot of progress was made
through the use of the Arpanet. You can only do so much with email
and file interactions. Today, the possibilities for far richer
interactions are much more prevalent. But IMHO they are held back,
possibly because no one is feeling the pressure to "make it work".
Gigabit throughputs are common, but why does my video and audio still
break up...?
It's important to have face-to-face meetings, but perhaps if the IETF
scheduled a future meeting to be online only, whatever needs to happen
to make it work would happen? Perhaps...
Even a "game" might drive progress. At Interop '92, we resurrected
the old "MazeWars" game using computers scattered across the show
exhibit halls. The engineers in the control room above the floor felt
the pressure to make sure the Game continued to run. At the time, the
Internet itself was too slow for enjoyable gameplay at any distance.
Will the Internet 30 years later work?
Or perhaps the IETF, or ISOC, or someone could take on a highly
visible demo involving non-techie end users. An online meeting of
the UN General Assembly? Or some government bodies - US Congress,
British Parliament, etc.
Such an event would surface the issues, both technical and policy, to
the engineers, corporations, policy-makers, and others who might have
the ability and interest to "make it work".
Jack
On 11/14/23 10:10, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
Hi Jack,
On Nov 14, 2023, at 13:02, Jack Haverty via Nnagain
<[email protected]> wrote:
If video conferencing worked well enough, they would not have to
all get together in one place and would instead hold IETF meetings
online ...?
[SM] Turns out that humans are social creatures, and some things
work better face-to-face and in the hallway (and if that is only
building trust and sympathy) than over any remote technology.
Did anyone measure latency? Does anyone measure throughput of
"useful" traffic - e.g., excluding video/audio data that didn't
arrive in time to be actually used on the screen or speaker?
[SM] Utility is in the eye of the beholder, no?
Jack Haverty
On 11/14/23 09:25, Vint Cerf via Nnagain wrote:
if they had not been all together they would have been consuming
tons of video capacity doing video conference calls....
:-))
v
On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 10:46 AM Livingood, Jason via Nnagain
<[email protected]> wrote:
On the subject of how much bandwidth does one household need, here's
a fun stat for you.
At the IETF’s 118th meeting last week (Nov 4 – 10, 2023), there
were over 1,000 engineers in attendance. At peak there were 870
devices connected to the WiFi network. Peak bandwidth usage:
• Downstream peak ~750 Mbps
• Upstream ~250 Mbps
From my pre-meeting Twitter poll
(https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/1720060429311901873):
<image001.png>
_______________________________________________
Nnagain mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
--
Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
Vint Cerf
Google, LLC
1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
Reston, VA 20190
+1 (571) 213 1346
until further notice
_______________________________________________
Nnagain mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
_______________________________________________
Nnagain mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
_______________________________________________
Nnagain mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
_______________________________________________
Nnagain mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
