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Tag: Internet

  • 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:

  • StarHub and SingNet Practices Traffic Management

    Slow Internet access tonight? ISPs say, blame it on the P2P.

    In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about how the Internet really works and why there’s really no such thing as dedicated Internet bandwidth. To tackle the increasing bandwidth usage, ISPs are now installing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to reduce bandwidth contention.

    StarHub has publicly announced its use of Sandvine Incorporated‘s Policy Traffic Switch to shape individual user’s traffic to allow fair use of network protocols for better user experience.

    StarHub has been working with our technology partners to mitigate the heavy burden caused by the volume of P2P traffic on the network. To ensure latency-sensitive applications (such as web-surfing and video-streaming) are not severely affected, especially during peak periods, we have implemented traffic shaping to optimize the overall efficiency of the network.

    SingNet also has a clause in fine prings, urm… prints, hidden deep beneath their website just like any other SingTel legal agreements:

    SingNet employs a fair use policy that ensures no single traffic protocol monopolizes all available bandwidth at the expense of other traffic protocols. Network management activities are carried out only for the P2P traffic protocol by ensuring that P2P traffic does not consume more than 10% to 25% of the total available bandwidth during peak and off peak hours respectively.

    So, what really is fair? Is it fair that I get less P2P bandwidth than my neighbor next door watching YouTube? Afterall, everybody uses the Internet differently.

    Quoted from Macbeth: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

  • 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.

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