[clug] [OT] Broadband clangers

[Alex Satrapa]

On 11/08/2010, at 14:08 , Robert Edwards wrote:

> One piece of information often missing is how much does the increase
> in speed cost? It the 300baud actually cost $5/month and the 1200
> actually cose $50/month, would you still want it? What does "want it"
> mean in this context?

[snip]

> The question Conroy was asked and his answer were about speed, ie. why
> we need 100Mbps instead of the Oppositions minimum 12Mbps (peak).

[snip]

> The standards that are relevant are IPv[4,6] and UDP and TCP (layers 3
> and 4). Layer 1 is irrelevant.

> Layer 1 also needs to be technology-agile, in my opinion. People are
> going to still want to use their 3G/4G/5G device or Wifi-hotspot to
> access the same net-enabled services.

Standards
=========

Did you know that when you move house, you can take your existing phone with you and plug it in and it'll work just like normal? This is because there is a mechanical and electrical standard covering phone connectors (ie: "Layer 1" is defined as part of the national telephone network).

Did you know that when you move house, you can take your existing electrical appliances with you and plug them in, and they'll work just like normal? That is to say that "Layer 1" is defined as part of the national electricity standard (I'm pretty sure the east and west coast are on different grids, so there's really no need for the standards to be the same, is there?)

Did you know that when you move house, you CAN NOT take your existing Internet equipment with you and just plug it in and expect it to work like normal? This is because there is no Layer 1 standard that applies to all Internet connections in the country. In addition, it's normal practise for an ADSL connection to be de-provisioned very shortly after the last customer's subscription runs out, so you first have to get the telephone line, and then have the ADSL provisioned on top of it. Even ULLs have this problem - you can't just adjust account details and have a customer connect, you have to ask permission from Telstra to attach ADSL equipment to that line.

The NBN isn't so much about speed as much as having consistent last-mile technology. FTTH or FTTP are both ways of ensuring consistent technology to the end-users. IMHO having something like "100baseT Ethernet, RJ45 socket in the wall, PPPoE (or perhaps 802.1x instead?) to connect to the ISP" as the national standard would be a great place to start, regardless of what technology is between the wall and the backbone network (ADSL with a modem in bridged mode, Canopy network, fibre to the home, or whatever).  The key being that if I take my equipment to a new place and plug it into the wall, it will just work because the PPPoE settings don't need to change.

Bandwidth
=========

Of course when it comes to bandwidth, it's important to remember that 100Mbps isn't just about shifting 100 million bits of data per second, it's also about shifting that 800-byte packet ten times faster than you can on a 10Mbps network. Voice and video both require high speed, low latency networks.

Apple's FaceTime will probably require 700-2000kbps of bandwidth for one-on-one calls. Adding extra parties to a video call will inevitably require more bandwidth. Anyone who has experience provisioning IP networks will know that there is a limit of about 70% utilisation above which your traffic will start getting too much jitter (ie: variation in RTT between packets in a sequence), compromising voice and video quality.

So if we were to plan for a future where people are having two- or three-party video calls limited to current technology (iPhone 4 screen size, H.264 encoding), we need at least 6Mbps just for video calls, assuming each household will only be taking part in one small-screen video call.

Now add video-on-demand to the mix, and you have the requirement for an extra 12Mbps for SD video (Video on Demand content suppliers are still using that ancient MPEG2 technology), which means that you'd want a minimum of 20Mbps to deliver that video-on-demand in order to reduce jitter. Remember that dropping a single UDP packet will cause breakage of many frames of a highly compressed video feed, so you don't want to provision the Internet connection too close to that 12Mbps limit.

The NBN proposed by the Liberals will not allow video. 12Mbps will be enough to give a good quality FaceTime call, but will be insufficient to support SD video-on-demand or HD "free-as-in-beer"-to-air video.

100Mbps allows for multiple video feeds, eg: someone watching Super-HD TV while someone else is video chatting with five friends, while someone else is in the kitchen practising some techniques from this week's episode of "Master Chef", while someone else is playing World of Cowclicker and enjoying the rich positional sound supporting full immersion in a 50-player cowclicking adventure.

If you can't see the future need for 100Mbps in the future, I suggest you've been drinking the Liberal's Kool-Aid.

Alex