Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category

Ideologically Derived Facts

Friday, August 20th, 2010

There’s a great post today on a statistics blog I read, entitled Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts. You should read this for yourself, but from my preconceived anti-ideological worldview the truth of it is almost self-evident. Here’s an excerpt:

Of course, it makes sense that people with different judgment of the facts would have different views on policies: if you think carbon dioxide doesn’t cause substantial global warming, you’ll be on the opposite side of the global warming debate from someone who thinks it does. But often the causality runs the other way: instead of choosing a policy that matches the facts, people choose to believe the facts that back up their values-driven policies. The issue about Obama’s birth country is an extreme example: it’s clear that people did not first decide whether Obama was born in the U.S., and then decide whether to vote Republican or Democratic. They are choosing their fact based on their values, not the other way around. Perhaps it is helpful to think of people as having an inappropriate prior distribution that makes them more likely to believe things that are aligned with their desires.

Broadband vs. Internet Speed: Not So Fast

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

An email I received this afternoon contained a forwarded link to an article entitled “Conflating broadband speed with Internet speed is misleading“. The article makes a valid point that access capacity (“Broadband speed”) isn’t the same thing as end-to-end throughput (“Internet speed”). Clearly this difference is valuable for consumers to understand, and is a critically important distinction in the Network Neutrality debate.

Which is why I’m disappointed in the article; sadly, it oversimplifies the issue to the point of covering up critical details.  The comparison to fax technology is imperfect, maybe even flawed. It conjures an incorrect conclusion in the mind of a reader. And the material result of this is to avoid a discussion of provider responsibility for effective bandwidth.

To be clear, end-to-end throughput across a network is affected by everything in between the two hosts (computers) that are communicating. It is affected by the equipment, configurations, and interconnects. It is also affected by the capability of the transport protocols, round-trip latency, packet overhead, and more. In this regard, the article is correct to say that effective bandwidth shouldn’t be compared directly to broadband access capacity. But likewise, to compare the effective bandwidth to the coding rates of fax machines is a vast oversimplification.

Looking at the factors that might affect end-to-end performance, a number of those are directly in the hands of the network provider.  The access link (i.e. broadband connection) to the customer is just the first component.  It terminates in an edge / aggregation network that is probably oversubscribed.  The edge networks may be interconnected across a backbone, with its own bandwidth constraints and physical distance inefficiency.  And Internet connectivity, to the backbone or to the edge network directly, is enabled by a number of peering and/or transit connections that are not necessarily equal.  This isn’t even considering the possibility of NAT, security, or bandwidth management devices that might constrain effective throughput.

When all is accounted for, there may be a considerable oversubscription rate.  Not that oversubscription is inherently bad; most users aren’t using 100% of their bandwidth at the same moment in time, allowing the provider to time-multiplex their users without causing negative performance.  And this oversubscription allows the provider to make money in an otherwise low-margin business.  But because it’s hard to determine how oversubscribed a provider is, they’re often tempted to push costs lower by oversubscribing more.  (Which is evident when providers get irritated by increasing usage, such as P2P traffic, by their customers.)  Further, the Internet transit connections might be acquired on-the-cheap, offering lower quality network paths (read: more oversubscription, more latency).  And the effect of these choices directly accrues against end-to-end performance.

Now, to be clear, I’m not advocating regulation of how service providers build their networks.  It should be up to each business to determine for themselves what is an effective network topology, interconnect strategy, oversubscription rates, etc.  But to focus the entire network debate on the access connections while ignoring the complex network that interconnects those to the Internet is misleading.

Zombie Apocalypse or Recession?

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

I’ve been delayed posting the follow up to my previous post Network Virtual Appliances Are Silly, for reasons I’ll go into later. Sorry. But for now, I’ll continue to post other stuff as usual. For instance I came across this video, via Nebraska never looked so appealing: anatomy of a zombie attack. Oops, I mean a recession.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ssIhiD8kKM

Level(3) Found God, Bought Metro Fiber

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I just read a great post on the Telecom Straight Shooter blog about Level(3)’s business.  Excerpt:

…all applications will originate and terminate in a metropolitan market with local access along with their associated revenues.  Long haul pipes are in vast quantity with plenty of inventory buried in the ground. In all fairness, however, if you are going to build a long haul network, you don’t undergo the expense to put only one pipe in the ground.

Metropolitan markets are 10x more expensive to build, operate and install than a long haul network. You actually require more fiber to be deployed in a metro setting in order to support stuffed, long haul dumb pipes from long haul networks dumping packets at a carrier hotel for metro distribution or third party interconnection facilities.

Pic >1k words: U.S. Health Care Ineffectiveness

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

In case it isn’t clear to you, this graphic recently published by National Geographic shows that the U.S. spends the most on health care yet receives little treatment and has a negative correlation to life expectancy.  On the contrary, a country like Japan spends less money than average, accumulates more time receiving medical care, and has an excellent life expectancy.  Basically, in my humble opinion interpretation, U.S. healthcare == FAIL.

Healthcare Worldwide Spending, Visits, and Life Expectancy