More bandwidth no cure for network management -- Japan experience shows
Despite Japan having some of the fastest and cheapest broadband in the world, they still have to worry about network congestion and need to manage their networks and shape traffic, according to Adam Peake, a fellow at the International University of Japan who spoke yesterday at the Freedom to Connect Conference.
The takeaway here is that many in the net neutrality movement maintain that there is no need to manage the network if providers would just add more capacity.
- The Japan experience is powerful evidence of the fallacy of that argument.
- Experience shows that usage can often fill whatever capacity is made available.
Peake also explained that there is a pernicious p-2-p program called Winny, which is a major culprit in the network congestion and which is near universally reviled because it is one of those pernicious p-2-p programs that give all p-2-p a bad name because the protocol routinely makes the private content on users' hard drives available for identity theives and fraudsters.
on the contrary, more bandwidth essential
Scott, Hi.
Sorry if my presentation wasn't clear. Yes, there is network congestion in Japan and it's largely the result of P2P traffic. But as I thought I also said, a fundamental principle of the draft packet shaping guidelines now being debated is ISPs should increase network capacity in line with increases in network traffic: packet shaping should only be allowed in exceptional situations. I may not have mentioned that P2P while known to be a serious problem is also considered likely to be the the best solution for efficient traffic management in the future.
About network neutrality, I am pretty sure I said Japan has adopted a set of network neutrality principles. Similar to the FCC's four principles, the main difference being that in Japan they are official policy, have been so since last November. Again those polices are:
* IP networks should be accessible to users and easy to use, allowing ready access to content and application layers
* IP based networks should be accessible and available to any terminal that meets relevant technical standards and should support terminal-to-terminal (or "end-to-end") communication.
* Users should be provided with equality of access to telecommunications and platform layers at a reasonable price.
("users" refers to end users and content providers and other companies conducting business using IP networks.)
Some slide packs with great detail about Japanese broadband policy online at http://www.too-much.tv/2008/03/japan-broadband.html
Adam