IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September 2018 - 46

Bits Versus Electrons

From Broadband
to Infrastructure
By Bob Frankston

magine trying to build an electronic
device if the company providing the
wires had to make a profit on each
circuit and interconnection. Today,
the Internet allows us to design systems that can span the world, but we
can't realize the full potential of those
systems because the suppliers of the
wires demand a payment for each connection. We need to rethink the interconnections as infrastructure rather
than as a message-carrying service. The
success of the Internet demonstrates
that we now depend on network operators to ensure that services, such as
telephony, work. The carriers are pushing back on neutrality because their
business model is threatened by a level
playing field. We should be encouraging innovative Internet-native business
models rather than working to preserve
an industry threatened by innovation.
The debate over network neutrality is
framed within traditional telecommunications policy. As such, it considers the
Internet to be just another service, such
as phone calls or cable TV. But the Internet is different. When we used dial-up
modems, we performed internetworking
as users. With the advent of digital subscriber-line and cable modems, the telecommunications and cable companies
engaged in the business of providing
Internet service. Whether we used our
own modems for dial-up or modems
supplied by the carriers, raw packets
themselves are a commodity whose

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2018.2835919
Date of publication: 9 August 2018

46 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

We need to rethink
the interconnections
as infrastructure rather
than as a messagecarrying service.
value comes entirely from what we do
with them.
Of course, the telecom providers
wanted to use their facilities to provide
valuable services. The regulators were
properly concerned about the very real
conflict of interest in having the facilities owners competing with their customers. The Internet was shoehorned
into this framework despite the fact that
it wasn't really a service. France's Minitel information service was one of the
most successful efforts to provide smart
services. The price or rate you paid was
tied to the phone number for that service. It was very successful because it
broke from tradition in its approach,
but Minitel couldn't compete on a level
playing field with the Internet and, particularly, the web. Cable TV isn't considered a network service like Minitel,
but with everything becoming digital,
cable content is increasingly moving to
the open Internet.
The carriers are left with just dumb
pipes. With network neutrality, they
have little opportunity to earn money
with the revenue from services in transit across those pipes, not even a service so basic as more reliable delivery.
Furthermore, there is no differentiation;

september 2018

all pipes are the same. This means competing pipes are like competing electric
grids; it doesn't make economic sense.
We have a single grid that supports
competition by providers of content (i.e.,
electricity) using a common infrastructure. There is also competition from
other energy sources. The problem, with
or without neutrality, is that we're increasingly adept at programming around
the network. The packets don't depend
on reserved paths or pipes; they can each
take a different path and are assembled
at the end points.
Instead of trying to bring back Minitel, we need to look forward to expanding the level playing field. This means
understanding that we no longer require
networking as a service. We simply
need a way to forward packets because
we implement the services, such as
Skype for phone calls, on our own
computers. This not-a-network approach
is also called the end-to-end argument
[1]. That means services can be implemented at the end points (i.e., outside
the network) without depending on network operators along the path. If we
don't depend on network operators,
they can't charge for services. This profound change isn't obvious because we
still buy broadband services from a provider just like we did in the days of
dial-up modems. We even call them
cable modems.

A Different ApproAch
In 1995, I was at Microsoft, which was
based in Seattle, although I worked remotely from Boston. I had long been

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - September 2018