[NNagain] FCC NOI due dec 1 on broadband speed standards

[rjmcmahon]

Thanks for sharing this. I agree this works for researchers.

I think we're at a different state and economic returns matter too.

I sent the following to our engineers in hopes we can all better 
understand what we're all trying to accomplish.

Hi All,

The attached Notice of Inquiry by the FCC shows how much our work 
matters to most everyone in our country (and, by inference, worldwide.) 
Broadband networks are no longer entertainment or social networks but 
they are critical to all regardless of gender, age, race, ethnic group, 
etc. People's health, learning, and ability to earn for their families 
all depend on us providing world class engineering to our customers who 
in turn provide these networks for each and all of us, our friends & 
families, our neighbors, and most everyone else.

Early in my career, I worked at Cisco and had the privilege to work on 
some of the first BGP routers that enabled the commercial build out of 
the internet, and I'm very thankful we did that way ahead of the 2019 
pandemic. There was no "pandemic use case" that drove us - we just 
wanted to build the best products that engineers could build. A 
worldwide pandemic w/o the internet could have been disastrous - so that 
work by many in the mid 1990s seems to have paid off well.

I hope you each realize, today, what you've accomplished since then and 
continue to be a part of. It's truly significant. It's been a high honor 
to work with so many of you over the last 14+ years.

To the FCC report:

We begin this annual inquiry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic during 
which time Americans increasingly turned to their broadband connections 
to conduct their lives online by using telemedicine to access 
healthcare, working from home, attending classes remotely, connecting by 
video with out-of-town family and friends, and streaming entertainment. 
Our experiences with the pandemic made it clear that broadband is no 
longer a luxury but a necessity that will only become more important 
with time. Never before has the critical importance of ensuring that all 
Americans have access to high-speed, affordable broadband been more 
evident.

Also note, we have more work to do. We need to increase resiliency as an 
example. Also, the thing I'm most passionate about is low latency. The 
FCC is now recognizing the importance of that. People are slowly 
learning why latency is becoming equally important to capacity when it 
comes to quality of service.

Bob

PS. The rest is TLDR but I thought I post some snippets for those 
interested

We believe that in examining household use cases, a simple summation of 
required speeds for individual activities may provide a misleading 
picture of actual broadband needs for at least three reasons. First, we 
believe it is appropriate to take into account at least occasional 
downloads of very large files which can be bandwidth-intensive. Second, 
it is important to account for larger households; in 2022, approximately 
21% of all U.S. households had four or more people, and the number of 
families seeking out multigenerational homes to live with additional 
relatives rose.57 Households of all sizes must have sufficient bandwidth 
to satisfy their needs. In addition, the number of connected devices per 
household continues to grow, from 18.6 in the average household in 2021 
to 20.2 in the first half of 2022.58 Taking these factors into account 
suggests that fixed broadband download/upload needs could easily exceed 
100/20 Mbps.

...

Service Quality. We recognize that other factors, besides the speed of a 
broadband connection, can affect consumers’ ability to use the services 
effectively. Chief among these factors is latency, which is the measure 
of the time it takes a packet of data to travel from one point in the 
network to another, and which is typically measured by round-trip time 
in milliseconds (ms). As a measurement of advanced telecommunications 
capability, latency can be critical because it affects a consumer’s 
ability to use real-time applications, including voice over Internet 
Protocol, video calling, distance learningapplications, and online 
gaming. Actual (as opposed to advertised) speed received, consistency of 
speed, and data allowances are also important. Such factors are not 
simply a matter of service interruptions and consumer satisfaction—they 
have a real and significant effect on Americans’ ability to use critical 
web-based applications, including those that facilitate telehealth, 
telework, and virtual learning.



> In the beginning days of the Arpanet, circa early 1970s, ARPA made a
> policy decision about use of the Arpanet.  First, Arpa Program
> Managers, located on the East Coast of the US, were assigned computer
> accounts on USC-ISIA, located on the West Coast in LA.  Thus to do
> their work, exchanging email, editting documents, and such, they had
> to *use* the Arpanet to connect their terminals in Washington to the
> PDP-10 in California - 3000 miles away.
> 
> Second, ARPA began requiring all of their contractors (researchers at
> Universities etc.) to interact with Arpa using email and FTP.   If
> your site was "on the Arpanet", you had to use the Arpanet.  If you
> wanted your proposal for next year's research to be funded, you had to
> submit your proposal using the net.
> 
> This policy caused a profound attention, by everyone involved, to
> making the Arpanet work and be useful as a collaboration tool.
> 
> JCR Licklider (aka Lick) was my advisor at MIT, and then my boss when
> I joined the Research Staff.   Lick had been at ARPA for a while,
> promoting his vision of a "Galactic Network" that resulted in the
> Arpanet as a first step.  At MIT, Lick still had need for lots of
> interactions with others.   My assignment was to build and operate the
> email system for Lick's group at MIT on our own PDP-10.  Lick had a
> terminal in his office and was online a lot.   If email didn't work, I
> heard about it.   If the Arpanet didn't work, BBN heard about it.
> 
> This pressure was part of Arpa policy.   Sometimes it's referred to as
> "eating your own dog food" -- i.e., making sure your "dog" will get
> the same kind of nutrition you enjoy.   IMHO, that pressure policy was
> important, perhaps crucial, to the success of the Arpanet.
> 
> In the 70s, meetings still occurred, but a lot of progress was made
> through the use of the Arpanet.   You can only do so much with email
> and file interactions.  Today, the possibilities for far richer
> interactions are much more prevalent.   But IMHO they are held back,
> possibly because no one is feeling the pressure to "make it work".
> Gigabit throughputs are common, but why does my video and audio still
> break up...?
> 
> It's important to have face-to-face meetings, but perhaps if the IETF
> scheduled a future meeting to be online only, whatever needs to happen
> to make it work would happen?  Perhaps...
> 
> Even a "game" might drive progress.  At Interop '92, we resurrected
> the old "MazeWars" game using computers scattered across the show
> exhibit halls.  The engineers in the control room above the floor felt
> the pressure to make sure the Game continued to run.  At the time, the
> Internet itself was too slow for enjoyable gameplay at any distance.
> Will the Internet 30 years later work?
> 
> Or perhaps the IETF, or ISOC, or someone could take on a highly
> visible demo involving non-techie end users.   An online meeting of
> the UN General Assembly?   Or some government bodies - US Congress,
> British Parliament, etc.
> 
> Such an event would surface the issues, both technical and policy, to
> the engineers, corporations, policy-makers, and others who might have
> the ability and interest to "make it work".
> 
> Jack
> 
> On 11/14/23 10:10, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
> 
>> Hi Jack,
>> 
>>> On Nov 14, 2023, at 13:02, Jack Haverty via Nnagain
>>> <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> If video conferencing worked well enough, they would not have to
>>> all get together in one place and would instead hold IETF meetings
>>> online ...?
>> 
>> [SM] Turns out that humans are social creatures, and some things
>> work better face-to-face and in the hallway (and if that is only
>> building trust and sympathy) than over any remote technology.
>> 
>>> Did anyone measure latency?   Does anyone measure throughput of
>>> "useful" traffic - e.g., excluding video/audio data that didn't
>>> arrive in time to be actually used on the screen or speaker?
>> 
>> [SM] Utility is in the eye of the beholder, no?
>> 
>> Jack Haverty
>> 
>> On 11/14/23 09:25, Vint Cerf via Nnagain wrote:
>> 
>> if they had not been all together they would have been consuming
>> tons of video capacity doing video conference calls....
>> 
>> :-))
>> v
>> 
>> On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 10:46 AM Livingood, Jason via Nnagain
>> <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> On the subject of how much bandwidth does one household need, here's
>> a fun stat for you.
>> 
>> At the IETF’s 118th meeting last week (Nov 4 – 10, 2023), there
>> were over 1,000 engineers in attendance. At peak there were 870
>> devices connected to the WiFi network. Peak bandwidth usage:
>> 
>> • Downstream peak ~750 Mbps
>> • Upstream ~250 Mbps
>> 
>> From my pre-meeting Twitter poll
>> (https://twitter.com/jlivingood/status/1720060429311901873):
>> 
>> <image001.png>
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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>> 
>> --
>> Please send any postal/overnight deliveries to:
>> Vint Cerf
>> Google, LLC
>> 1900 Reston Metro Plaza, 16th Floor
>> Reston, VA 20190
>> +1 (571) 213 1346
>> 
>> until further notice
>> 
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