Computers in Physics Free the Internet! Glenn Ricart Citation: Computers in Physics 8, 508 (1994); doi: 10.1063/1.4823328 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4823328 View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/cip/8/5?ver=pdfcov Published by the AIP Publishing Articles you may be interested in Archaeology by Internet Comput. Sci. Eng. 18, 108 (2016); 10.1109/MCSE.2016.40 Internet rooms from Internet audio Proc. Mtgs. Acoust. 19, 015050 (2013); 10.1121/1.4799954 Internet rooms from internet audio J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 133, 3347 (2013); 10.1121/1.4805672 The Internet Directory of Publications Phys. Teach. 39, 378 (2001); 10.1119/1.1543674 Engineer works to provide free worldwide internet access Phys. Today
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INTERNET CORNER
FREE THE INTERNET! Glenn Ricart
Department Editor: Glenn Ricart
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T
he largest structural change ever made to the Internet is being put into place during September and October, and its advance billing has raised anxiety world-wide. Untold thousands are worried that their Internet fees will double or perhaps be adjusted on the basis of rising usage. Some have argued that the demise of a "free" Internet will violate their first-amendment rights.
Background For the decade from 1984 to 1994, the main backbonefor Internet traffic in the United States has been the National Science Foundation (NSF) backbone. Its T3 links [see CIP 8:2 (1994), p. 146] have provided the long-distance, national transport for about 3 x 10 14 bytes in that decade, with halfthe traffic being counted in just the last year. When local network routers did not know how to deliver a packet, they would send it to the NSFnet backbone. The NSFnet routers knew how to send traffic to all 34,000 different local Internet networks. And best of all, the service was free. Well, perhaps not really free. The NSF has been spending about $10 million per year to provide the NSFnet backbone, and significant contributions have been made by IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan. (Michigan's state network Merit has the cooperative agreement to provide NSFnet.) But to network users, it was free. Of course, because the NSF paid the bills, it also made the rules. The NSFnet acceptable-use policy (AUP) restricted most commercial enterprise from the NSFnet backbone. As a result the purely commercial Internet-service providers created a Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) for national transmission of commercial traffic, but it never carried even a small fraction of the traffic that flowed over the NSFnet backbone. By 1993, Steven Wolff, NSF's Director of the Division ofNetworking and Communications Research and Infrastructure, had reasoned that future growth of the Internet would be strangled if its major backbone were hampered by a restrictive AUP policy and if Internet providers could not compete freely
Glenn Ricart is the director of the Computer Science Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, and assistant vice chancellor for Academic Information Technology for the University of Maryland system.
to provide national transport. He began looking for a new, more-competitive architecture for the Internet.
The new Internet architecture With input from many individuals, the new architecture was created in early 1993. It has four main components of interest to the NSF: Network Service Providers (NSPs), Network Access Points (NAPs), a very-high-speed network backbone (vBNS), and a Routing Arbiter (RA). Together, these four groups of organizations will replace the NSFnet (see figure). The NSPs will compete to provide the national transport services for each of the major regional and commercial network providers who have been relying on the NSFnet. Rates and services will be negotiated, but since the NSF will not directly fund the NSPs, there will be no AUP restrictions. The NAPs are needed to provide for traffic exchange among different NSPs. If the sender of an e-mail message is on SURAnet and the recipient is on PSInet, there has to be some neutral exchange point for the e-mail traffic to hop between SURAnet and PSInet. More than one neutral exchange point is needed nationally to provide for redundancy in case of a NAP failure and to allow the NAP operators to compete with one another. In fact, NSF chose four NAPs-in Washington, New York, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area-from four different organizations (MFS Datanet, Sprint, Bellcore for Ameritech, and PacBell, respectively). The vBNS will replace the experimental function performed by the NSFnet backbone. The vBNS contract was awarded to MCI, which will dedicate 155-Mbits/s links to meritorious high-bandwidth research on a scheduled basis. Finally, the RA will help each of the NSPs discover which networks can be reached through the other NSPs, at what cost, and under what policies. Such information helps a network decide which route to use to send traffic. The RA contract was awarded to Merit (the Michigan state network) and the Information Systems Institute (lSI) in California. The entire system of new players has been scheduled to go into effect on September 1,1994. Networks funded by the NSF that have not switched over by that date will find their NSF funding reduced by 1I365th for every day they miss the September 1 date. By October 31, the NSF hopes to reduce
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flat-rate billing based on the capacity of the circuit connecting you with their network. Small providers often charge by the hour, but, to my knowledge, none is yet charging by the byte. Therefore, extra or incremental use is "free." That means that if you already use the Internet in your work, you are not causing any extra expense to your organization by sending an Internet message to Junior at college or by browsing through the electronic malls after official quitting hour. Several of the NSPs and NAP providers have suggested they will charge by the byte or the packet, thereby causing considerable concern that these • NSF Netwo rk charges will be passed back to instituAccess Poinl (NAP) tions. The introduction of metered • Regional, state, or commercia l network connects directl y to charges could destroy the ability to send NAP (solid line) or to national serv ice provider (dotted line) incremental traffic for free. This concern has some basis but must be tempered by knowledge of the National Service Providers interconnect NAPs in new Internet architecture. market: (1) Billing per byte takes effort and costs money, and so it has to be proved worthwhile. drastically the capacity ofthe NSFnet backbone and, by April (2) Many customers will continue to request flat-rate 30, 1995, to have decommissioned it entirely. billing for their own budgeting purposes; this situation is This restructuring represents a substantial financial hit to analogous to telephone customers' wanting flat-rate or unlimnetworks that must now buy their backbone service instead of receiving it free from the NSF. An equivalent connection ited local service rather than paying by the call. Internet to the one NSF was providing, but without AUP restrictions, providers will likely respond by continuing to provide flatwill cost $250,000 to $350,000 per year. To soften the blow, rate billing. (3) Internally, the Internet handles traffic on a "best-efthe NSF has set up a scheme for awarding to qualified netfort" basis, and some percentage (typically 1-2%) of all traffic works of research and academic institutions an annual subsidy during the next five years of95%, 75%, 50%,25%, and finally is lost. This lost traffic is not noticed directly by the customers, 0% of the cost of a new commercial connection [see elP 8: 1 because their software automatically retransmits the lost information. But, the customers may notice a billing increase (1994), p. 12]. of, say, 5% if, for some reason, lost traffic increased by 5% Concern 1: Prices will go sky-high one month. Such billing variations can be especially large With $10 million dollars of funding being taken out of with small Internet redistributors whose traffic-handling cathe network over the next four years, will Internet connection pability may not be keeping up with their customers' traffic prices go sky-high? No. The typical regional research and growth. The result is a dramatic increase in packet loss when academic network connects about 150 institutions; the addiall the customer data cannot fit through the redistributor's tional cost per institution will be only $2000 per year. Even network. this number will be phased in over four years. The extra $2000 My prediction is that larger accounts will continue to use flat-rate service with no incremental cost. Small accounts is about 10-15% of the price now being paid by the institution. Individual Internet customers connecting through smaller may find that usage-based accounting actually lowers their redistributors will probably see the effect of this additional costs. cost as a 10-15% price increase. However, much can happen in the next four years. Concern 3: Internet "freebies" will disappear Internet-service costs for such non-people-related expenses Many sites that once welcomed network access as a as circuits have been decreasing at about 10% per year for public service are having second thoughts; some are even the last several years. This decrease comes from both lower closing their doors. The problem is the exponentially growtechnology costs and increased economy of scale as the ing size ofthe Internet. A few years ago, a university making Internet gets ever larger and sends more traffic. Even taking a service available to the whole Internet instead ofjust its own people and administrative costs into account, the price/percampus would get considerable recognition among its peers formance improvement will easily wipe out the increased and have a trivial amount of extra workload on its computers. backbone costs over four years. Now, that extra workload can consume a machine, and that university may no longer be sure from whom it is gaining Concern 2: Incremental use will not be free recognition. At present, nearly all large Internet-service providers use For example, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside has Reuse of AIP Publishing content is subject to the terms at: https://publishing.aip.org/authors/rights-and-permissions. Download to IP: 107.173.44.92 On: Thu, 28 Jul 509 2016 22:20:25 COMPUTERS IN PHYSICS, VOL. 8, NO.5, SEP/OCT 1994
INTERNET CORNER taken its music server off the public Internet for just such a the next several years. And if! cannot get Internet goods and reason. The service was so well-done and so popular that it services for free, perhaps the next best thing is not to have to attracted an overwhelming number of netizens around the pay for them for at least a month. clock. It has been taken off the public network while its owners seek sponsorship for the network access. Wrap-up The disturbing part is that it is precisely the best and There are big changes happening in the depths of the most-useful sites that are most likely to be overwhelmed and Internet this month, but they will not have much immediate withdraw their excellent services. There are possible remeeffect on the costs of Internet service. The future will be dies, however, some of which look promising: determined by competition, supply, and demand instead of by Sponsorship. Services of nominal cost or very-wide readthe NSF. With the removal of the acceptable-use restrictions, ership can be successfully sponsored by corporations intermore advertisers and sellers will find it economical to use the ested in having their names attached to the service. This Internet for commerce. And that will trigger economies of scale and competition-both factors known to reduce costs. approach is being used, for example, by Internet Talk Radio [see CIP 8:2 (1994), p. 146]. Sponsors get mentions in the The customer orientation may well become seductive. The program similar to those given to sponsors of programs on new Internet will not be free, but it is likely to get your dollars National Public Radio. and ECUs faster by attracting them rather than extracting them. Advertising. Some services can be successfully linked with advertising. For example, a menu screen may have not only information services but also teasers to get viewers to read about advertiser specials. Internet users are believed to have fantastic demographics for advertisers; if people have enough disposable income to buy personal computers, they likely have enough disposable income to buy the advertisers' products as well. It is also believed that the typical Internet user is well-eduFortran 90 introduces a wealth of cated because of the Internet's connecnew features that make tion with universities. And while the programs easier to design, write person is using a computer, he or she and maintain, and provides many previously unavailable capabilities. certainly is not watching the adverVAST -90 brings you all the way into the new world of Fortran 90 by tiser's television messages. giving you both a full Fortran 90 compiler and a sophisticated Fortran Subscription. Some services are be77-to-Fortran 90 translator. And "clean" doesn't mean slow -- VASTing sold on a subscription basis. For 90 incorporates PSR's industry-leading optimization technology, example, the Clarinet information servresulting in superior performance as shown in published benchmarks. ice packages bundles of paid news and VAST-90 is available on most Unix workstations and many other columns and distributes them on the Internet to subscribers. USA Today has popular platforms. a similar subscription service. Subscription services are popular. Suppliers High Performance Fortran is the new charge flat-rate prices based on the size industry-wide dialect that provides of the organization subscribing. The portable performance on distributed subscription mechanism is a good one systems such as massively parallel processors and workstation for continuing services but can suffer from careless customers. For example, clusters. VAST-HPF compiles High Performance Fortran programs columns by Dave Barry used to be carfor efficient execution on many kinds of scalable systems. Like VASTried on Clarinet until too many custom90, VAST-HPF helps bootstrap you into this new realm of ers began electronically forwarding performance by also providing a Fortran 77-to-HPF automatic them to friends and other newsgroups. conversion tool. VAST-HPF is available now for many workstations Knight-Ridder reportedly then pulled and other platforms. Contact PSR for full details. all of its syndicated material from the Clarinet service. Credit card. There are now dozens of electronic stores on the Internet that accept Mastercard, Visa, and American Express. I suppose the security is just about as good as using a credit card over the telephone. I ewect a big jump in Circle number 18 on the Reader Service Card credit-card-based Internet commerce in
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