*preroll music*
Swiss German would be an option for me.
English, because you know the Swiss don't speak proper German.
My six year old digital native is telling people rather proud
that his Dad invented the fastest internet in Switzerland.
It’s called Fiber7.
*applause*
Thank you.
While we went to Greece for vacation, I was in a target conflict, because I had to
explain him why he couldn’t watch YouTube. I mean Greece, you know it’s maybe a bit
difficult, but as a matter of fact, here in Hamburg it’s not any better. I’m next
door in the hotel InterCity and they offer “free WiFi” with 256 kbit/s. If you want
5 Mbit Internet, you pay 8 Euros extra, per day. So this is where we are in 2015.
A few words about me: I’m married, one son as I said. He was born 2009. He was able
to unlock the iPhone with the age of 17 months. No one showed him how. My early
connection with digital techniques was about 1978 when I was playing with these
chips 7400. Who knows them? Raise your hand. Few, thanks. Later on I did an
apprenticeship as a Fernmelde- und Elektronikapparatemonteur. And I started
to do IT business about 1991. And 1996 – almost 20 years ago – we started with
Linux stuff. My first Linux was Suse 4.2. In the year 2000 we started with Init7
and later on I became president of the SwissIX association. This is an
association which runs a Internet Exchange. I had also my time in a startup
called Zattoo. It’s a network architecture OTT IP Television. Besides, I need a
hobby, so I’m also a politician for the Social Democrats in my city parliament,
already 8 years. Then I started with the other hobby, Fiber7 as you know. Oh
besides, I was also working in an internet expert group of the Social Democrats
Switzerland. The internet paper was adopted earlier this month by the national
Delegiertenversammlung. I don’t know what this is in English. So, Buffering sucks!
Ladies and Gentlemen, this talk is not about Deutsche Telekom. It’s not about
peering. It’s not about interconnection. It’s about these thousands and millions
of youngsters out there which want to watch YouTube in HD resolution without
buffering. So let’s quickly look at the reason why YouTube and all the other video
buffers. It’s usually lack of bandwidth. If you have a 2 Meg DSL or if you have
an InterCity free WiFi with 250 kilobits; so HD video is not possible. Sometimes
they have old PCs, so CPU power is an issue – these days no longer relevant.
WiFi quality sucks sometimes. This is rather an individual issue. And sometimes
we have an over-subscription of the shared node – mainly in cable networks. Streaming
source can be too far away. If you stream from the U.S., it doesn’t really go well.
That’s why we have so many CDN, Content Delivery Network systems, close to the
end users. Then adaptive streaming can be an advantage, but also disadvantage. You
cannot turn it off. When you watch HD and the connection sucks you just cannot keep
it on HD. It just drops to SD or lower resolution. It works, yes. But Claire
Underwood in low res is not so cool. Routing algorithm issues – sometimes it’s
a mismatch of client and server. If your client is assigned to the wrong CDN
server, then it’s also slow. Anycast routing is a trick sometimes. Last but not
least and the most important thing: It’s over-subscribed interconnections. We go
back quickly to the old days. The caller pays. When you call your mother-in-law
and you talk with her – well, she talks to you for 45 minutes and you say hello and
goodbye – you still pay the call. *laughter*
So with YouTube it’s not any different. You click YouTube and then YouTube talks
to you for hours maybe and then you say goodbye, basically. So is the broadband
customer calling the YouTube server or is it vice versa? Is the YouTube server
calling the broadband customer? Probably it’s the broadband customer who calls.
But still the data is flowing from the server to the client. But the client is
causing the traffic, because he is requesting the traffic. And if we look at
the structure of the internet, we have basically the end user to the right. We
have – here is the provider network and the end user is only connected to the
provider’s network. On the left side we have all the content in the internet.
We have the media and video and streaming and Torrent and you name it. But there is
always only one way going to the end user. It’s the yellow marked interconnection
points and there is no way around them.
This basically means, the provider can monopolize the end customer.
At least as long [as] he is connected or subscribed.
There is no alternative way. So this gives the provider
a position of power. On the other hand
these interconnection points used to be – for a long period of time –
so called Zero Settlement interconnections and they are basically the foundation of
the internet. Without Zero Settlement peering, without interconnection the
internet wouldn’t exist as we know it. The broadband provider, mainly the
incumbent, the ex-monopolist, or large cable operators, they tend to become
more and more restrictive to provide sufficient interconnection capacity.
Not upgrading interconnection to the requirements is very common these days
and it’s a passive aggressive behavior. So many providers
– to name a few: Deutsche Telekom – they just do nothing.
They just wait. And the end customers are suffering. Buffering is very common,
especially during prime-time. This is basically what the topic of…
…the main topic of this conference is: It’s a gated community. The provider
creates a gated community for his own end customers.
So as I said before: The data is flowing from the server,
from the video server to the end customer. It’s about 50 times more traffic
flowing to the client and the usual traffic ratio we have
for a broadband provider is 1:5 or 1:10. So they’re pulling about
10 times more traffic towards the end customer.
Then we have this interconnection policy. So they don’t do anything.
As I said before, they just over-subscribe the existing
interconnection. And if you want to upgrade you have to have a traffic ratio
of about 1:1.5 to 1.3. But no video stream service can deliver traffic and
also maintain the traffic ratio. No content provider can. So all they can do
is: They can pay money to get upgraded. And if they don’t pay, data is stuck in
congestion and the clients are suffering, seeing the buffering sign. Large broadband
providers, such as the incumbents and cable providers, they want to get paid
twice. They are able to force the money due to the temporary monopoly – as I
explained. And they can ask money from the end customer and on the other hand also
from the content. This is called double- sided market. And if they don’t pay, the
content is not paying, this is what we see. And sometimes – as a side note – the
end customer pays, but still sees this. But IP interconnection would be cheap.
The business cost per broadband customer is just a few cents per month. And if the
provider would invest this, people would be happy. On top content providers are
easy to deal for peering or provide cache servers etc. So please talk to our
community fellows of Akamai, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Limelight,
Netflix. T is not Telekom, it’s Twitch. And Zattoo and a lot of others. So traffic
congestion is costly. I took a random Google search and was looking for how much
traffic is actually costing. And “Die Welt” showed the result: “Staus kosten
in jedem Haushalt 509€/Jahr”.
So my assumption was: If traffic jam is costing money, then
probably data traffic jam is also costing some money. But I figured that no
one was really exploring that field, yet. So I thought I’m going to do a little
“Milchbüechlirächnig” *laughter*
*applause* When I was a child, the milk man came
every morning and we just put our order into the Milchbüechli and he put the milk
into the box outside of the house. By the end of the month, we went to the shop
and paid our Milchbüechlirächnig. So this is my quick calculation: We have about 30
million broadband connections in Germany. I assume that everybody is waiting for one
minute accumulated while watching Netflix, YouTube, whatever. Probably this is far
too less. Who thinks one minute is fine, or – who thinks one minute is not enough?
Oh, ok, so let’s stick with one minute for the calculation. And I also assumed that
5€ / hour waiting is a good salary. If you think, 5€ is not enough, you can adapt the
calculation. This is called “Reservationslohn”. I have no clue what it
means, but this was on Wikipedia, for time when you take a job or refuse a job,
how much would be the value for the spare time. So this is my calculation:
If you wait one minute per day, this is 6 hours per year. If you multiply this
with the 5€, every broadband customer would lose 30€ per year.
This sums up – with 30 million broadband subscribers –
to 900 million Euros per year. This is the economic damage in Germany per year.
*applause*
As we can assume that a large part of the buffering is caused by the insufficient
interconnection, especially during prime- time when everybody wants to watch
Netflix. This is also a result of the restrictive peering policy
of the incumbent and large cable operators and the ability for them to force
some extra money out of these double sided market power as I explained.
They probably would gain a few millions. I don’t have exact figures but I assume
it’s probably some 10..20..30 millions per year, they could force
through this market power. On the other hand we have the damage
of 900 Million Euro per year and I mean this is like a – how do you say that? –
imbalance. So my conclusion in democratic countries like [in] Western Europe:
The economic gain of a multibillion company at the expense of
the general public is commonly not tolerated. The next question is basically
following the previous talk of Thomas: When will the regulators wake up and force
every market participant to cooperative peering and interconnection because the
end user is suffering, the public is suffering. Zero Settlement peering – as I
explained – is rather common. Of course the “Deutsche Telekom Lobby” would tell
otherwise, this is clear. The unbalanced traffic should no longer be used to refuse
peering; and also disputes about the interconnection should be resolved rather
quick. My case against Swisscom is taking years already and still no end and no
light at the end of the tunnel. Then, last but not least we should have broadband
providers, must be committed to the interests of their own end user customer
base. As I said, Telekom managed to get paid twice because of their market power;
and other Telecoms, such as Telecom Hungaria or Swisscom, they use Deutsche
Telekom and their market power as a leverage to force their also restrictive
peering policy; and the regulators so far don’t do much. I quote here Marc Furrer,
this is the chief of ComCom Switzerland: “Nur ein fauler Regulator ist ein guter
Regulator”. *laughing*
Thank you! Questions? *applause*
Herald: Okay, thank you Fredy; and let’s have Thomas back up on stage and we’re
gonna take questions, please. There is actually more than the mics I said before,
there is 2 right up on the top and there is 3 in each aisle. So if you please
line up if you have any questions and ask; and please speak into the mic, we need
your questions on tape, and those who are leaving now: Do it silently please.
Okay, first question, over there! Q: I have a question for Thomas:
From your talk it sounds like you did a lot of work. Can you tell us a little bit
about the budgeting, that goes into having a team like that?
T: Yeah, so, SaveTheInternet is a coalition of 12 NGOs
which have all their independent budget. There is no fixed budget for the work
that we have been doing as a whole. All of them have transparency reports.
So I can not really speak for the budget of EDRI or accessnow.
The organization where I am based in Austria got a grant from the
media democracy foundation from 10.000€ and money from Netflix, 10.000€ also; and
we used both for development and paying for the Faxes. Because in the second run
of the Fax tool the provider that it was referring to was no longer paying.
Otherwise the funding in general about Digital Rights in Europe is awfully low.
So if you compare it to the U.S. where you had double-digit millions going into the
lobbying it is ridiculous what resources we have here in Europe; and we are
thinking about making a donation tool for the new SafeTheInternet; but again that’s
complicated because you have 12 NGOs with very different activity scales. Like
some of them do a lot, others not so much. So how would you divide the money?
These are unresolved questions, that we are working on right now. If you wanna
support us with independent funding, then just donate to the
individual organizations. EDRI, Initiative für Netzfreiheit,
are probably the ones I would mention most, because they have done
most of the work; accessnow as well, but they generally have a lot of funding
from the U.S., so I don’t think they need it that much.
Q: But to summarize, I saw a picture of your team. I saw all the work you did.
You did that for 20.000€? T: No. I never got a Cent. I was paid by
EDRI for 4 months when I was working in Brussels
within BEREC for the first reading; but otherwise this was mostly free
time. I got my expenses covered for travel but other than that I am doing this in my
spare time. Also now unemployed… *applause*
I work for Data Protection NGOs, so they are allowing me to do a lot of my stuff
also for Net Neutrality. Herald: We’re all elephants. We do it
for peanuts. Okay, No.1 go ahead! Mic 1: Yeah, hello! Hi Thomas, thanks a
lot for your work, that’s great. I have a question about the involvement of the
Business Angels and the companies: What is the reason, what do you think why
they came so late into this discussion in Germany. What probably can we do to change
this in the future because I think that’s a… they are great allies in this fight.
Thomas: That’s… you’re asking exactly the right question. Sadly in Europe you have
no organized voice for Startups or for SMEs when it comes
to Digital Rights issues; and you would have to work with them to get them
involved in the debate. They were really late to the party and then, again,
mostly activated through U.S. networks. So the
connection between the civil rights scene here and the business scene, particularly
the one which is organized in Brussels with European umbrellas is very weak. So
everything you can do there to strengthen this connection would be great.
But I don’t have those business contacts. I got a few people involved in the first
reading stuff but we definitely need more people that act as multipliers to get more
companies involved, particularly now when we enter into a new phase with the BEREC
guidelines. We no longer need the loud arguments of many people, we need more the
arguments from the business side, from the universities, from those people who run
networks. These arguments are better suited to make a difference with the
regulators. Fredy: And to add: Don’t underestimate
the influence of the lobbies, of the big names, the Telecoms and the liberty
globals, they have a lot of money and they try to influence the politicians as good
as they can. They do a good job from their perspective.
Thomas: You can be sure that the Telecoms will have people for all 28 regulators,
now continuously lobbying for an upcoming 9 months. The question is: Who is in our
team? Herald: Okay. Thank you. Is there a
question from the internet? Signal Angel: Yes, there is a question,
it is: Whether peering providers should differentiate between virtual private
network traffic and public traffic and where is the line between internal network
and the public internet? Fredy: What should I say… this is
difficult question, I mean… Basically, if you all commit your backbone then
there is always plenty of traffic… or plenty of capacity. So there is… there
shouldn’t be any differentiation. Networks should provide enough capacity and then
we’re good. A common argument from the big names: “Oh we are investing millions
and millions and millions in broadband expansion” but unfortunately they stop
investing right at the end of their own backbone so they don’t invest any money
beyond their little percentage of the total investment for their interconnections.
Herald: Okay, there is another question at No.1?
Mic 1: I have a question about buffering: So the most of the content in the web is
delivered over TCP/IP and… will changing the media to something like UDP which has
lower overhead over TCP/IP; will that change the situation?
Fredy: Not really. Mic 1: No?
Fredy: No. It won’t help. I mean packet loss is packet loss regardless whether it
is TCP or UDP. Herald: Okay, that was a short answer. Next
question please. Please talk into the mic. Mic: So when I came here, this year,
I had the impression that at digital subscriber line connections not only
bandwidth is bad but also the ping gets up way high. Of course – I mean – at home I
have Fiber7 nowadays so I just thought I got spoiled by fiber connections but I
noticed that ping times went up from, well, couple of years ago 60-80ms from
sites in your neighborhood more or less to nowadays 80-160ms. Where is the
problem there? Fredy: Well the latency is directly
related if the provider is not delivering enough bandwidth, then ping goes up
that’s a normal behavior of TCP. Mic: So the problem is also at the
interconnection sites? Fredy. Probably yes, most likely, you
can find out if you do traceroute, then you see where… well, there is a long
presentation how to interpret traceroute properly. If you look for “Nanog traceroute”
you should find this lecture. But that would probably give some indication.
Mic: Alright, thank you. Herald: Thank you. Next question from
the internet, just in between and then we’ll go back, go ahead.
Signal Angel: “Is Netflix a gated community by itself?” and “Are you sure
that their interest will align with the movement of net neutrality in the long
run?” Fredy: We should differentiate between
Netflix content and Netflix interconnections. So for the content I probably
would say: Yes, but I am not the expert. This would be then layer 7 in the OSI
model. I am talking here on layer 3, this is content agnostic. Netflix, they are one
of the good guys because they really help to deliver the packets. I know them
personally a few fellows from the peering community. They are the good guys,
definitely. Thomas: Just also to answer this question
for the European debate, Netflix was one of the good guys in the U.S. and they also
supported of course the European movement. But again, they are so big that I wouldn’t
really trust them as an ally because they could also pay, they could also survive in
a double sided market and for them in the growing emerging markets like Europe where
they just have started, it’s probably risky to allow for this new type of anti
net neutrality business models; but in the consumer side where net neutrality is seen
as an end user issue I think so far their interests mostly align. On interconnection
they have their own interests of course. Fredy: So I can say: Netflix is
definitely paying Deutsche Telekom otherwise no single Deutsche Telekom user
would be able to watch any movie on Netflix! So! For sure!
Herald: Okay, we are short for time so please, last 2 questions. No.2
first. Keep it short please. Talk into the mic.
Mic 2: Regarding the first talk: What is the… do you have an explanation for the
behavior of the European Commission in behave of the net neutrality debate?
I especially think of the behavior of Günther Oettinger who repeatedly said his
ridiculous lie of a “net neutrality kills” and he repeated it again and again
even if there was no reason behind it. And do you have an explanation for
this behavior of the Commission and Junker and this.
Thomas: For that argument, we had this great YouTube video “net neutrality kills”.
If you search it you will find it or “Netzneutralität tötet” in German. That
deconstructs this argument of Oettinger. But in general, and you can go back to the
previous commissioner Neelie Kroes that I showed. Our sole suspicion is that the deal
was that the telecom industry has to give up a little bit of their profits when it
comes to Roaming, but on the other side they gain a lot of future profits on
the abolishment of net neutrality and so it was like “Okay, we need a Populist argument",
Neelie Kroes also needs a quick win at the end of her career and this was again like
you take a little bit there and put it there for the Telecoms industry. And
Oettinger is a big industrial favor guy, he is always for big business.
Herald: Okay, short for time, last question, No.1.
Mic 1: Hi, so what strategy should an ISP use when their capacity on their backbones
is fully loaded? Like first-in-first-out or what is your idea about that, because
the capacity is limited, so when there is so much traffic that everything is stuck.
Fredy: Upgrade! Thomas: Yes, invest in the network!
Fredy: I mean, sorry, a 10G port is now some 3000€ including optic and cross
connect. It’s not that much. Upgrade! Herald: Okay, thank you!
*applause*
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