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viernes, abril 25, 2008
¿Todavía no tiene su marca en internet?
Comcast, "regañado" por interferir en su servicio de Internet.
 Science & Technology. |
| Tech.view Apr 18th 2008 From Economist.com Delivering the bits Fear not, the dumb old internet can still cope |
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| Shutterstock Uncloggable artery? |
A DOZEN years have passed since David Isenberg, then a distinguished engineer at AT&T Labs, wrote his seminal essay "The Rise of the Stupid Network". In it, he outlined how a new philosophy and architecture were changing the communications business, and pointed to some of the cataclysms ahead. Far from being a scarce resource used intermittently, Dr Isenberg argued that future networks would be "always on", with their intelligence located in the end-user's equipment rather than within the network itself. They would make no fancy routing or traffic-management decisions; they would just "deliver the bits". Unlike the telephone circuits of the day, which used their built-in smarts to determine where messages were to be delivered, the data would tell the network where they wanted to go. In short, the data would be boss. The stupid network Dr Isenberg had in mind was, of course, the internet we know today. Central to his vision was the radical notion that end-users—or customers—would be free to do as they pleased, and the network would make no assumptions about the kind or content of data being transmitted. The engineering community applauded the idea. The phone companies (AT&T especially) thought it stank. And Dr Isenberg wound up working for himself. Dr Isenberg will likely be watching this week's deliberations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with interest. As your correspondent was scribbling away, the FCC was preparing for its second hearing on network-management practices. The meeting, held at Stanford University on April 17th, concerns whether internet service providers (ISPs) should be allowed to shape, filter or even block content travelling over their networks. The hearing stems from a complaint filed last autumn alleging that Comcast, America's largest cable-TV company and one of its biggest ISPs, was blocking a perfectly legal file-sharing program called BitTorrent. Ever since, Comcast has been scrambling to prevent the FCC from rewriting its rules about peer-to-peer (P2P) software like BitTorrent, which is widely used to download video and other large multimedia files. Comcast argues that throttling P2P traffic is justified because it's swamping its network. Unlike conventional networks, where central servers dish out files to peripheral client computers, a P2P network is an ad hoc collection of individual computers all acting as servers and clients simultaneously, sharing bits of a large file between themselves until each has a complete copy and leaves the party. All very friendly and helpful, save for one thing. By definition, the peers are all on the periphery of the network—in users' homes and offices at the end of the so-called "last mile". That's where bandwidth is hugely asymmetric—being designed almost exclusively for downloading files, not uploading them as well. For instance, the maximum upload-speed of AT&T's premium 6mbps (megabit per second) service dawdles at 768kbps (kilobits per second). P2P presented no problem before the web, when it was used for sharing articles on Usenet. Then Napster, Kazaa and Gnutella came along and changed everything. And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks and podcasts used to be offered for streaming at 128kbps; versions at 256kbps or even 320kbps are now common. Video has an impact, too. Though online video-rental and distribution has only recently begun in earnest, all those HDTV sets sold over the past few years will shortly make high-definition downloads the norm. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is "4k video", which promises four times the resolution of today's HDTV, and needs a whopping 6gbps (gigabits per second) to fill the screen. Once again, alarmists are issuing dire warnings about the internet collapsing under the weight of its traffic. But that's nothing new: they've been doing so since the 1990s. Bob Metcalfe, who invented the Ethernet protocol for local area networks, once claimed that the internet was about to be overwhelmed by e-mail traffic. That was in 1996. A year later, Dr Metcalfe not only admitted the error of his doomsday prediction, but literally ate his own words—grinding his speech from a year before with liquid in a blender and quaffing the lot to cheers from his audience. The latest panic started with a scare-mongering story in the Wall Street Journal last year, which concerned the rise of internet video and the inability of the network to handle it, especially at network edges where the internet enters the home. The author talked of the "coming exaflood", referring to the exabytes (ie, billions of gigabytes) of HD video users would soon be downloading. Others in the industry have continued to fan the flames, with cable companies like Comcast wafting the hardest. Unlike the individual DSL lines that telephone companies use to deliver broadband, cable operators provide services using a single loop shared by up to 450 households at once. Comcast claims it takes only about a dozen people simultaneously using a bandwidth-hogging program like BitTorrent for others on the loop to find their web activities grinding to a halt. While neither the DSL nor the cable companies have beefed up their local connections as fast as the internet backbone operators have boosted their capacity, there's still enough bandwidth over the last mile for current traffic. And soon there will be a whole lot more—at least for Verizon, Sprint and even Comcast. Verizon is spending $18 billion pushing its FiOS fibre network out into neighbourhoods. Despite its woes, Sprint is pressing ahead with WiMAX, the faster, longer-range version of WiFi. And Comcast is making good progress with the latest cable protocol, DOCSIS 3.0, which should allow it to offer 100mbps within a year or two. Comcast has also made its peace with BitTorrent. The two companies are to collaborate on addressing some of the issues caused by P2P. It has also teamed up with an outfit called Pando Networks which has a nifty traffic-management technology known as P4P. The technology helps P2P file-sharers find each other more selectively, thus boosting their download speeds. Comcast and others hope Pando's P4P can persuade the FCC to back away from implementing stronger net-neutrality rules. That could well forestall any further legislation on Capitol Hill that might force them to keep their networks open to all comers in the way Dr Isenberg intended. Following a number of aborted bills over the past few years, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act that's currently working its way through committee has the express backing of Senators Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other congressional bigwigs. The bill specifically bans blocking or degrading lawful content, and forbids ISPs from charging more for downloading things like video. The present political climate gives it the best chance yet of making it on to the statute book. |
Open article at "The Economist" Web Site |
 Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007. All rights reserved. |
domingo, abril 20, 2008
Internet, medios e información
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martes, abril 08, 2008
Internet a gran velocidad.
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| From The Sunday TimesApril 6, 2008 Coming Soon: Superfast internet Jonathan Leake, Science Editor THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. | |||||
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| "On the Internet, nobody knows you´re a dog" | |||||
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, "the grid" will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spin-off from CERN, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could "revolutionise" society. "With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine," he said. The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at CERN have termed their "red button" day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates. CERN, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high. This meant that scientists at CERN - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse. This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission. By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years. Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: "We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at CERN. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries." That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from CERN to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world. One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire. From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks. It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn. Ian Bird, project leader for CERN's high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet. "It will lead to what's known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere," he said. Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded "frozen screen" experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information. The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature's most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass. The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid's huge capacity busy for years to come. Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so. Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists. It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years. "Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science," Doyle said. "Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate. "The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge." | |||||
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lunes, abril 07, 2008
“Cinco estrategias necesarias en este momento para el futuro”.
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