One of the most daunting technological challenges we face today is scaling up this old internet of ours to meet the burgeoning consumer demand for bandwidth-intensive real-time applications such as telecommuting, cloud computing, and streaming media.

And as internet video continues to trend from short-form/long-tail/low quality content towards long-form/short-tail/high quality (premium) content (i.e. from YouTube to hulu to TV/films on embedded hardware), exploding consumer demand could bring things to a head even more quickly than currently anticipated.
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I’ve already written a few times (here and here) about DNS.

Why?

A concerted effort to drive readers away with dry technical information about internet plumbing, possibly?

No,  it’s because I don’t think DNS gets the love and respect it deserves – either for its sheer technical coolness as a massively replicated global peer-to-peer data structure, or for its vital importance to The Internet As We Know It.
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Net Neutrality.  Up to now, the conventional definition of the concept has been that internet service providers shall be prohibited from “blocking or slowing content from some applications or companies” (as quoted from a recent NetworkWorld article).  Arguably, the definitive infraction against this particular notion of Net Neutrality was Comcast’s recent ‘managing’ of Bit Torrent traffic via the insertion of spurious connection reset packets.

However, the whole issue the issue of Net Neutrality (at the last mile between the ISP and the consumer, at least) is rapidly becoming a moot point: in preparation for the expected explosion of demand for longer-form video over IP, most major carriers are now scrambling to assemble and/or acquire proprietary content delivery networks (CDN)s to avoid the ever more congested and unpredictable system of routers out there in the public cloud (a recent post about just what Google, Microsoft, and Verizon are up to can be found here).

So while your neighborhood ISP might maintain a commitment to Net Neutrality itself, the real action is well upstream, as major corporations join already established CDN players such as Akamai, Edge Networks, and Yahoo’s Cloudfront to distribute and/or cache digital media content out along the edge of the cloud, in effect forming competing private mini-clouds to minimize the role of the public internet itself.

Put another way, in the purest sense of the term, Net Neutrality has already become something of an anachronism – not due to any localized slowing down of unfavored packets at the ISP level, but due to a globalized speeding up of favored packets on CDNs, before they ever reach the ISP.   A recent Wall Street Journal article touches on just this nuanced distinction: according to Google, their recent proprietary internet/CDN initiatives “do not rely on the carrier’s unilateral control over the last-mile connections to consumers, and also do not involve discriminatory intent“ – and even the independent public interest organization Public Knowledge (whose directors include internet academic and Obama advisor Lawrence Lessig) now maintains that “caching in no way is a part of the Net Neutrality issue.”

I’m of the opinion there’s considerably more gray area here.  But no matter – since the public internet will simply not scale to meet the anticipated bandwidth demand once short-tail (mainstream) premium digital media over IP becomes widespread, both carriers and content owners will increasingly invest in proprietary content delivery networks – and as consumers buy into the mass-market internet video offerings made possible by these high-performance CDNs, the very concept of Net Neutrality will seem increasingly quaint – and the “internet” as a whole will come to resemble the American health care system: multi-tiered and largely privatized.

So to the extent long-form video over IP ultimately enjoys widespread mass-market success,  the innocent ideal of a truly egalitarian and fundamentally neutral internet is destined to end, no matter what your local ISP’s policies are.

Don’t shoot the messenger…  

A recent issue of Barron’s pointed out (see my recent fan mail on Barron’s here), times are tough for the US telcos: in Q2 2008, Verizon lost 1.7 million lines while ATT&T lost close to 1 million lines.

Ouch.

Evidently, following trends elsewhere in the world, a new generation of Americans is happily going without POTS (plain old telephone service) in favor of using the cell phone at home.

What’s left as a compelling reason for a residential phone line? ADSL broadband access? Maybe not anymore – for the first time ever, a major US telco reported a quarterly loss of DSL subscriptions: Verizon losing 171,000 accounts. What Barron’s somewhat grim article fails to point out, however, is that rather than representing a net loss, this number is undoubtedly due to the continuing rollout of Verizon’s FIOS fiber service: during the same quarter, Verizon signed up 187,000 new FIOS customers (for a net gain of 16,000 new broadband subscriptions).

Clearly cable has been taking residential broadband market share away from the telcos for a while now. Add to that the ongoing paradigm shift away from land lines to cell phones and/or VOIP, as well as the advent of fiber (FIOS or U-verse), and there’s even less of a compelling reason to maintain that twisted-pair of copper coming into your home. In other words, while the telcos see continued potential in residential fiber, clearly they must recognize that the sun is setting on their residential land line business.

The big advantage of fiber is that it allows telcos to sell television – that elusive third component of the type of ‘triple play’ bundles they’ve jealously watched cable companies sell for years now.

Evidently not getting that memo is small Massachusetts startup Sezmi – although details are scant, they’re developing a unique hardware solution they hope to lease as CPE (consumer-premises equipment) through DSL partner providers. Although transparent to the user, video is delivered in 3 different ways:

• Local Broadcast Channels The Sezmi solution is clever in that it takes advantage of the imminent FCC mandate to broadcast local channels digitally – included is modular HD antenna.
• Cable Television Content Sezmi hopes to negotiate agreements with content providers and lease unused OTA digital broadcast spectrum and get popular cable programming into the home via that same antenna.
• On Demand/LongTail Content Lastly, Sezmi will include the capacity to stream video over IP via a… DSL broadband connection.

And therein lies the rub – with the accelerating loss of DSL lines and the concurrent rise of (already television-capable) fiber, Sezmi’s business model of being the solution for DSL carriers looking to finally get into the television business may be fatally flawed. We’ll see.