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I just came across some very cool mash-ups of old-school video game characters integrated into photographic images at Retro Gaming on real backgrounds, care-of the fubiz blog. For example:

I’d like prints of these. I could mix them into my home’s collection of framed travel and family photos…

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the growth of the Internet. Two particular events, as far as I’m aware, have encouraged this. One of these was an announcement by Cogent that they were lowering prices. The other was the release of a Cisco whitepaper on global IP traffic growth.

Cogent has always been the low-price alternative for Internet transit. In their own words, from the Telphony Online article:

“The price differential between ourselves and our two active competitors has shrunk to 2.5 to 1 as opposed to 30 to 1,” Schaeffer said.

Given their announcement of $4 - $7/Mbps, that puts their estimated competition around $10 - $17.5/Mbps. That sounds about right for the “wholesale” market (Tier 2 ISPs, high-bandwidth web properties, etc) and high-capacity retail.

But the part of the article that’s most interesting to me is the quote:

“We have seen Internet traffic growth slow over the past year as measured by a couple of references,” Schaeffer said. “The rate of growth in percentage terms has slowed and that is because of a number of factors.

The key phrase here is “in percentage terms”, which is echoed in the Cisco whitepaper. For instance, here are some graphs that I threw together while trying to understand the data:

In absolute terms, traffic will continue to grow at an impressive scale.

But in relative terms, Cisco predicts that it will start slowing across the board.

Cisco goes on to produce more interesting (and prettier) graphs in their companion whitepaper Approaching the Zettabyte Era. But the point appears to be, as Cogent’s Schaeffer described, the rate of traffic growth is slowing. (I wonder what the MINTS data will look like in a couple years’ time…)

Which leads me to wonder what will happen to prices. They’ve been dropping while overall traffic growth has been rising. But some have suggested that prices are stabilizing. (recently including Ike Elliott) Could this be a reflection of growth rates slowing? Or of relative costs rising? Or of something else entirely which remains difficult to track? (like transit costs versus the cost of peering, as suggested at by Rob Powell)

More importantly, what happens next? Consolidation in the service provider industry has reduced the availability of long-haul dark fiber. If prices stabilize, then the last men standing win. At least until the fiber in the ground needs to be augmented or replaced…

Recently I attached a multimeter to my home’s main electrical feed with a current clamp, and let it log around 24 hours of data. It’s summer and it’s hot, so I have several air-conditioners running (window units; I have an old home). There are my servers (running Linux), as well. And in the evening of course we turn on lights, cook food, watch movies, etc. Given all of this I didn’t really know what to expect. But I thought it would be a lot more variable than this:

This is one of the first times that I’ve used the logging feature on my meter, and there are some anomalies in the data. So I’m going to have to play with it a bit before I’m confident. But in the meantime, I’m just not sure what to take away from this data. I guess I’ll just keep on measuring…

For a while now I’ve been hearing about a “war” between MPLS and Carrier Ethernet proponents. Sometimes it’s framed as an IETF versus IEEE debate. Sometimes it’s framed as the incumbent carriers versus next-generation service providers. And so on. Take for instance a blog post by Nortel’s CTO, John Roese, discussing The Future of the Internet Core. Essentially he is hyping PBT by pitting it against MPLS. But I don’t buy it. This isn’t about technology, it’s just marketing propaganda.

Today, vendors of MPLS gear such as Cisco and Juniper have solid footing in an established market. They created the technology, hyped it, built products and captured a market. Subsequently, other players such as Alcatel-Lucent (via Alcatel’s acquisition of TiMetra) and Tellabs (via their acquisition of Vivace) have been moderately successful at capturing market share by building platforms with relatively more software stability, interface flexibility, etc. But other vendors like Nortel just don’t have the credibility, have failed to produce a product of compelling value (15k? Neptune?), and as a result have failed to penetrate the market.

So, unable to penetrate the existing MPLS market Nortel has instead created a new market which they can own. They call the technology Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB, PBT, etc), and it has real value. Fundamentally PBB is MAC-in-MAC encapsulation, which pushes customer MAC forwarding tables to the edge nodes and allows the core to scale up. They’ve also defined protection schemes and OAM functionality, which makes Ethernet more suitable as a medium for critical transmission paths (i.e. to replace POS connections between core routers).

However PBB-TE relies on an end-to-end external management system, which is a paradigm that doesn’t fit too well with service creation in today’s dynamic packet networks. Frankly, those of us involved in operational network architecture were happy to move from ATM/FR to MPLS for Traffic Engineering. This is in large part because MPLS provides a set of tools that let the operator get away from static definition of paths, hop-by-hop configuration, and external management systems. On the other hand this is exactly what we want in metro environments for creating customer site connectivity, or perhaps even in the long-haul optical network as a Layer-1 path management mechanism.

Further, and more importantly, today’s MPLS-based platforms not only provide TE but also provide services. For instance L3VPN, aka BGP/MPLS Layer-3 VPN, is a popular application of MPLS. Similarly, MPLS enables L2VPN services such as VPLS. These services can even be provided side by side, on the same platforms that provide Internet access, IPTV, and so on. And they can be managed using the same mechanisms that have helped operators manage IP networks for decades.

So what is the battle about? Both technologies have their pros and cons, and seem to compliment each other. For instance I might use the OAM features of PBB in my long-haul transmission network, to carry MPLS traffic between core routers. I might use MPLS in my core network to create services, perform packet-layer traffic engineering, and enable operational monitoring. And I might use PBB in metro environments to connect customer sites into my provider edge router platform.

Personally I think the “battle” is a way for PBB vendors to get attention. The trade magazines and analysts love a good fight, and both Ethernet and MPLS are widely used (and hyped) technologies. Nortel has been fairly shrewd to leverage this situation into market awareness. But really, come on, it’s about time to move along. PBB and MPLS technologies are both going to be a part of networks going forward, along with ATM/FR and all the other legacy technology that has contributed (evolved) to the current state of the art.

If you really want an interesting topic, let’s start talking about TRILL. (Can you imagine it? PBB in the metro network, VPLS over MPLS in the core network, and TRILL in the Datacenter…)

From John Mauldin’s Outside the Box: The Geopolitics Of China:

China has placed itself in a position where it has to keep its customers happy. It struggles against this reality daily, but the fact is that the rest of the world is far less dependent on China’s exports than China is dependent on the rest of the world.

This is a great article from Stratfor on China, exploring their military and economic position in the context of geography. After reading this, the issues surrounding possession of Tibet and Taiwan make more sense.

Though my fears over China’s influence on global currency markets are still going strong. If anything, wouldn’t a China in economic decline be motivated to weaken their trading partners (like the U.S.) in order to make, i.e. naval invasion, more difficult?

Recently I bought a device (via EBay) that logs temperature and humidity. I intend to use it to monitor my wife’s greenhouse when we get it completed, to make sure it’s ready to support her orchids before we move them in. But in the meantime it’s been riding around in my backpack. Here’s what a day in the life of my backpack looks like:

It starts off in my work office, where it stays nice and cool until I go out to meet my wife for dinner. Then I returned to the office and worked late, finally returning home around midnight.

Note the rising humidity in my home office where the logger spend the night, until morning when it rained. It’s nothing remarkable, sure. But it’s amusing. And it tells me I need a dehumidifier.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/mro20080303earth.html

I would have liked to have this. The original source of 2600 Hz found in a cereal box. (And the cereal is pretty good, too.)

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110255449502

Thanks to Donn Lee for pointing it out.

I just signed the Digistan Hague Declaration at http://www.digistan.org/hague-declaration:en.

Ok, this is kind of cool. The Huffington Post FundRace search entry for my name shows that I’ve donated to the Obama campaign. I can even search for others at my company, in my zip code, etc. Sort of voyeuristic.

And of course it shows that I’m a cheapskate… ;-)