AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections "irrelevant"

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html

"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet
capability is 
irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those
speeds," he 
told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that
AT&T's field tests 
have shown "no discernable difference" between
AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and 
Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last
mile but in the 
backbone."



Is this something held generally true in the US, or is it
just pointed 
hair-talk? Sounds like "nobody should need more than
640kb of memory" all 
over again.

I can definately see a difference between 2 meg, 8 meg and
even faster, 
even when web browsing, especially transferring large
pictures when 
running gallery or alike. When I load www.cnn.com with 130ms
latency I get 
over 1 megabit/s and that's transatlantic with a lot of
small objects to 
fetch. Most major newspapers here in Sweden will load at
5-10 megabit/s 
for me, and downloading streaming content (www.youtube.com)
will easily 
download at 10-20 megabit/s if bw is available. flickr.com
around a couple 
of megabits/s. (all measured with task-manager in XP, very
scientific :P)

I can relate to there being a sweetspot around 1.5-3 megs/s
when larger 
speed doesn't really give you a whole lot of more
experience with 
webbrowsing, but the more people will start to use services
like 
youtube.com, the more bw they will need at their local pipe
and of course 
backbone should be non-blocking or close to it...

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmikeswm.pp.se

Google for: telecommunications bill 2006


Eddy
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MA> Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 08:34:36 +0200 (CEST)
MA> From: Mikael Abrahamsson

MA> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html
MA> 
MA> "In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps
Internet capability is

[ snip ]

MA> Is this something held generally true in the US, or
is it just pointed
MA> hair-talk? Sounds like "nobody should need more
than 640kb of memory" all
MA> over again.

I think the Comcast and "cheaper cable plant"
references answer your 
question.  With "new AT&T" adverts,
political lobbying, selling retail 
DSL below loop/backhaul-only, and consolidation costs, how
much money is 
left over for last-mile upgrades?

Call me cynical.  I just seem to recall AT&T ads in US
news magazines 
bragging about backbone size _and_ the large portion of
Internet traffic 
they [supposedly] carry.  (I say "supposedly"
because claims might be 
technically true, but misleading, when traffic passes over
AT&T _lines_ 
via other providers' IP networks.  Shades of UUNet and
Sprint[link] from 
years gone by, anyone?)

So... uh... assuming all three claims -- "backbone is
bottleneck", "we 
have big backbone capacity", and "we carry big
chunks of Internet 
traffic" -- are true... I'm puzzling over what
appears a bit 
paradoxical.

The IPTV reference is also amusing.  Let's assume a channel
can be 
encoded at 1.0 Mbps -- roughly a 1.5 hr show on a CD-ROM.  I
don't see 
two simultaneous programs, Internet traffic, and telephone
fitting on a 
DSL connection.

Perhaps the real question is which regulatory agency, or
shareholders, 
needed to hear what the article said. 


Eddy
--
Everquick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/
A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/
Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network
building
Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national
Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita
____________________________________________________________
____________
DO NOT send mail to the following addresses:
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Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get
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Ditto for broken OOO autoresponders and foolish AV software
backscatter.

On Sat, 1 Apr 2006, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html
>
> "In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps
Internet capability is
> irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at
those speeds," he
> told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that
AT&T's field tests
> have shown "no discernable difference"
between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and
> Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the
last mile but in the
> backbone."

You can listen to Randall Stephenson's presentation at the
BoA conference
at the site:

http://www.veracast.com/webcasts/bas/media06/id981011
55.cfm

This particular topic is in the Q&A towards the end of
the talk.

It was a financial analyst conference, so the technical
language was
probably a bit loose.  AT&T has an OC192+ backbone, so
obviously it
wasn't a technical answer.  At other conferences, other
speakers have
publically said they are also looking at bonding pairs to
get even
greater link speeds (40-100Mbps), not to mention other
dedicated
Internet access products with even faster link speeds. You
have second
phone lines, why not second DSL lines for people who feel
the need for
speed?  Likewise cable modems (DOCSIS3.0) are adding channle
bonding for
higher access link speeds.

But I think Mr. Stephenson's point was a network bottleneck
is not always
based on the access link speed some ISPs put in their
advertising. Just go
to any ISP user forum and you will see long threads
complaining they can
only download X Mbps from site Y in city Z. The bottleneck
may be the
remove server, a peering interconnect, a backbone link, a
city router,
etc. On the other hand, its not a good idea to generalize
because other
users in other cities may get better performance from other
sites.

There are also differences in how people use the network. 
Power
users and gamers are looking for any edge they can get. 
Casual users
may be more price sensitive and may not perceive enough of a
difference
between 6Mbps and 16Mbps for what they do.  If you consider
it from a
marketing point of view rather than a technical point of
view, if you
are a mass marketer where do you find the biggest target
markets?
Wal-Mart targets a specific price point and target market
and is very
successful even though it doesn't sell ultra high-end
goods.

That's not to say things are static, and will never change.
If you
listen to Stephenson's presentation, he says access link
speeds will
increase, as well as the backbone capacity will increase. 
For financial
analysts, the foreseeable future is the next quarter's
financial
results. Next year is long term.  Two years is an eternity.

At 05:25 AM 4/1/2006, Sean Donelan wrote:
>But I think Mr. Stephenson's point was a network
bottleneck is not always
>based on the access link speed some ISPs put in their
advertising. Just go
>to any ISP user forum and you will see long threads
complaining they can
>only download X Mbps from site Y in city Z. The
bottleneck may be the
>remove server, a peering interconnect, a backbone link,
a city router,
>etc. On the other hand, its not a good idea to
generalize because other
>users in other cities may get better performance from
other sites.

Since AT&T provides nearly all of the transit bandwidth
to Comcast in 
New England, this thread says to me, more or less,
"those folks at 
Comcast claim speeds they can't deliver, because the
backbone they 
use -- which happens to be AT&T's -- is too congested
to deliver 
those speeds anyway." Or something like that.

Yes, clearly I'm poking fun at AT&T here. Large
providers who want to 
play in both the wholesale and retail space really should
think about 
how their marketing in one area affects their claims in
another. 
That's a non-marketeer's view, clearly. 

On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 08:34:36AM +0200, Mikael Abrahamsson
wrote:
> 
> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060331-6498.html
> 
> "In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps
Internet capability is 
> irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at
those speeds," he 
> told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that
AT&T's field tests 
> have shown "no discernable difference"
between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and 
> Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the
last mile but in the 
> backbone."

No the problem is at AT&T's congested peering edge.


-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <rase-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/r
as
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41
5ECA F8B1 2CBC)

On Sat, 1 Apr 2006, Daniel Senie wrote:
> Since AT&T provides nearly all of the transit
bandwidth to Comcast in
> New England, this thread says to me, more or less,
"those folks at
> Comcast claim speeds they can't deliver, because the
backbone they
> use -- which happens to be AT&T's -- is too
congested to deliver
> those speeds anyway." Or something like that.

If you listen to Comcast's presentation to financial
analysts, you
know Comcast has already announced plans for its own 40Gbps
backbone
using dark fiber leased from Level 3. There are probably a
few howlers
in Comcast's presentation too, but network geeks aren't
the intended
audience.

Financial analysts probably joke about technologists making
presentations
and getting tongue-tied about basic accounting terms too.

> Yes, clearly I'm poking fun at AT&T here. Large
providers who want to
> play in both the wholesale and retail space really
should think about
> how their marketing in one area affects their claims in
another.
> That's a non-marketeer's view, clearly.

The next few years should be very interesting, and provide
lots
of fodder for pundits everywhere. Comcast buys backbone
service from
AT&T.  AT&T buys programming for several video
channels from Comcast.
They'll both need to exchange phone calls with each other
in every city
they sell local phone service.

While its great fun to make fun of pointy-haired bosses
everywhere, it
may be more useful to look past the various foot-in-mouth
statements
and try to understand what each of them is trying to
accomplish.  Even
though they are all fierce competitors, they also all do
business with
each other.

On Sat, 1 Apr 2006, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

> "In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps
Internet capability is irrelevant
> because the backbone doesn't transport at those
speeds," he told the
> conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's
field tests have shown "no
> discernable difference" between AT&T's 1.5
Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps
> because the problem is not in the last mile but in the
backbone."

Regardless of the chitter-chatter about IPTV in this thread,
I can say
pretty definitively that the 6Mbps I am getting via DSL
(I'll get to cable
next) is much faster in practice than 1.5Mbps DSL.  I most
certainly can
sustain ~4Mbps for a single stream video feed, with the
remaining headroom
still mostly usable.

Now, when you get into a shared channelized medium like
cable (Comcast),
there is a difference in the backing network, and congestion
is a much
bigger threat.  That said, I was using Comcast when they
went 3Mbps, and at
the time, I could sustain 2.4Mbps downstream from an
external ASN with no
problem.  I still have MRTG graphs showing it.

FUD, indeed.  I have no idea how to sustain 2.4Mbps on a
1.5Mbps DSL
connection, but if someone here knows how, I'm all ears!

(...The frustrating part about those figures is that I might
as well have
FTTH, because my DSLAM is less than 50 feet from my premises
-- it's in a
green-monster canister on the corner of the block.  The
modem says I *could*
attain better than 9Mbps down and 2Mbps up, were such
service available to
consumer low-lifes like myself.  <g>)

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tvduh.org> <tvpobox.com> <toddvierling.name>

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Todd Vierling wrote:
> (...The frustrating part about those figures is that I
might as well have
> FTTH, because my DSLAM is less than 50 feet from my
premises -- it's in a
> green-monster canister on the corner of the block.  The
modem says I *could*
> attain better than 9Mbps down and 2Mbps up, were such
service available to
> consumer low-lifes like myself.  <g>)

The GigEthernet interface on my PC says I should be able to
get 1,000Mbps
too.  There are lots of different bottlenecks in a typical
network.
Changing your access link speed may or may not make a
performance
difference.

Suppose you hacked your cable modem configuration or your
DSLAM
configuration, and opened your access link full throttle.
Would you
be able to download 27Mbps cross-country from your favorite
server? It
depends where the bottleneck was.

All things being equal, a faster access link usually results
in better
performance.  But I would think the people on this list
would know
better than most, that things are almost never equal in the
network
world. Remember all those debates whether Keynote or other
performance
tests were actually valid measurements.