tzlee.com/blog

Tag: Bandwidth

  • A Word On Amazon Web Services

    Today’s lecture was given by folks from Microsoft and Amazon. The Microsoft part was on the Imagine Cup 2010, a global student competition. I’m out of bounds already, so I won’t talk about that. 😛

    The most part was on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s pretty interesting how they had created a variety of products from technology and be able to monetize it, but I think the concept of utility computing is still at its infancy, or maybe early teens. The huge complexity here is the billing. Amazon bills for memory, CPU, disk, I/O bandwidth, etc. That’s a pretty exhaustive way to suck your money! I’d much prefer a billing scheme more like my mobile phone where I pay a flat rate a month and get billed some extras. While the aggressive billing ensures low contention on AWS, it is not economically viable for small companies to jump on it yet.

    There was a fair bit of discussion about pricing. Surely the sales folk looked uneasy and was all ready to stand up and defend himself, but let me add a few words in their defense – real bandwidth is expensive. A 1 Gbps “dedicated” link costs upstream providers like SingTel IX and StarHub IX an average of S$10,000 per month. We may find AWS slower here because of the latency we get transiting our Tier 2 providers (SingNet Broadband, StarHub MaxOnline) taking the cheapest (and thus longer) routing paths. We all think BGP is a distance algorithm, but in reality it can be easily manipulated using a technique called AS-prepend and policy-based routing.

    If you want to read about bandwidth, I wrote an old blog entry here.

    Most of our servers here load up slow in the US for this matter, so if you have a business that wants to reach millions around the world, you will probably not want to host it in Singapore, and when you start thinking of deploying overseas, manpower (or your time and air ticket) alone would make you think about switching to AWS instead.

    P.S. My angmor is getting from bad to worse. I didn’t realize I was writting terrible Engerish until I read some very old documents I wrote back during school days. This is what the working society does to you! Argh!@#!@

  • Why FTTH Will Suck and 1 Mbps Symmetric Broadband is Enough for Everybody

    Watch this video. Although this video was made for entertainment, it does goes to show what people think 100 Mbps can give them.

    I think I need to start my rant. People have the wrong impression of subscribed broadband speeds. If everybody had 100 Mbps to their homes, we’ll be in for big trouble.

    As of 2007, Singapore’s broadband subscriber count is 796,500 – approximately 22% of our population. The population has grown from 3.7 million in 2007 to almost 5 million in 2009. If the percentage of subscribers remain, we’ll have approximately 1 million broadband subscribers to date.

    Multiply 1 million subscribers by 100 Mbps each, we need a whooping 100,000,000 Mbps total bandwidth to run broadband in Singapore. That’s 100 Tbit/s. Does such a bandwidth exist? No. The APCN 2 cable system has only 2.56 Tbit/s of capacity shared by the entire Asia Pacific.

    Think of the Internet as a highway. Data travels across the Internet like a car on a highway. Each car is loaded with goodies in the boot – YouTube, Windows Update, Facebook, BitTorrent. What happens if everybody drives a Boeing 747 on the highway? Sure, you can put more YouTube, Facebook and BitTorrent in a plane, but that plane’s not going anywhere because there’s simply not enough space on the highway for so many planes!

    Here’s another problem. Think of an auntie at NTUC with a years’ worth of groceries queuing up at the express cashier. Servers have limited capacity. Most network devices run either 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. There’s some adoption of 10 Gbps in ISPs, but it’s expensive and not commonplace in enterprises. If one person hogs the server with their all-so-awesome 100 Mbps broadband, you’ll just have to wait for your turn.

    1 Mbps (megabit per second) translates to approximately 125 KB/s (kilobyte per second). 1 byte contains 8 bits. I have a 8 Mbps StarHub broadband at home. Do I see 1000 KB/s downloads often? Nope. More like 60 KB/s; that’s barely 512 Kbps. So what makes people think 100 Mbps will make a difference?

    I’ve heard people ask complain why we aren’t enjoying 100 Mbps like Japan and Korea. They say Singapore’s broadband providers suck. Well, look guys. Japan and Korea rely highly on local content due to their language.

    On the other hand, Facebook and YouTube are the top two visited sites in Singapore. These sites aren’t local. In fact, blame it on the content providers here. They are the ones that suck.

    Korea has 14 million broadband subscribers as of December 2006. Do the math. They’ll be in a massive traffic jam if they had relied on international content.

    Humans are born selfish. Everybody wants a piece of the Internet. We need to start giving (uploading) instead of taking (downloading). Broadband has to be symmetric. Up-selling 100 Mbps asymmetric broadband will only make things worse. Just like Globalization, we are consuming more than we can produce. Mark my words.

    Further reading:

  • What You Need to Know About Your Internet Connection

    Due to the recent APCN2 undersea cable outage, I read quite a bit of complaints from subscribers and thought I should write a little educational entry on how the Internet works.

    What are you really paying for?

    When you buy a connection to your ISP, you are merely buying the link from your home/office to your ISP. Theoretically speaking, ADSL users should have the first advantage over Cable Modem users as the Cable Modem sits on a shared topology.

    The ugly truth about the bandwidth test.

    However, this isn’t much of a concern as your nearby POP (Point of Presence) would usually have enough bandwidth to take care of this so subscribers always get near maximum bandwidth up to this point; StarHub users should be familiar with the annoying Bandwidth Test that always seem to report excellent bandwidth. If it doesn’t, your physical line might be faulty.

    Going international.

    Beyond that, it gets a little more complicated. Data from a subscriber travel through some tens of kilometers of fiber optic cables, then to some routers and switches within your ISP. When it reaches the border – the part of the ISP that connects to the “outside world” (other ISPs, known as peers), the data goes in all directions, e.g. if the subscriber requests a site in China, it might go through Hong Kong, then to China.

    Well, that’s for data heading out. It’s a different story when the data returns from China.

    (more…)