Thu March 27, 2007 Monitor letter by TJ Taub

I don't know TJ. I think she sells real estate with Los Alamos Properties, a realty business. Her letter recommends a campaign to educate us about the value of broadband here in Los Alamos, and wider participation, specifically local business, medical and educational sectors, in Los Alamos County's discussion.

Why don't we have dozens of people clamoring for faster, better, cheaper internet, at least as big a contingent as the Performing Arts Center campaign was?

The Biggest Problem, and Two Ways to Approach Solving It

The biggest problem is the price of getting internet traffic between Los Alamos and Albuquerque. That price is too high. The monopoly vendor for it is Qwest. We really need to solve that problem first.

First, several large Los Alamos customers need to co-operate and order one big connection and share it. The biggest of those customers is LANL, and all the rest are by comparison insignificant. So we should all encourage LANL to do the right thing in this case. We smaller customers should unite much sooner than the behemoth federal government can even decide what to do, in the meantime.

Second, we should find a way to add an alternative to Qwest. Perhaps a commercial bandwidth provider could extend their own fiber to Los Alamos, maybe some already have extended to Santa Fe. Or we should pool our resources and buy our own fiber installation to at least Santa Fe, perhaps all the way to Albuquerque. Personally, I am seriously considering a wireless link between Albuquerque and Los Alamos. It looks to me like we could have 300 Megabits on 5-year 7% loan payments for what Qwest charges for 9 Megabits (6 bonded T-1 circuits).

List of Future Topics

Six days have passed since my last post. That can't be good. I do have lots of material, though. Here are the items I added to a note to myself so far.

traffic: good, bad and ugly
bad traffic unblocked: spam, 419, id theft, botnets, scans
good traffic blocked: protests against injustice, freedom fighter communication
one person's bad traffic is another person's good traffic
good traffic delayed because bad traffic wastes resources, causes congestion, or is just plain a denial-of-service attack
QOS = quality of service, give preference to such as voice, take preference from such as long downloads

P2P
IP, patents, copyright
bittorrent
kazaa, limewire, bearshare

CALEA Law Enforcement
PCI Payment Card Industry security rules

Truth in advertising
bits is not necessarily bits, then bytes just confuse us, or vice versa

Truth, Secrets, Partial Truth and Lies

Microsoft
windows security bugs, botnet bait, Vista attempt to fix made a big mess
excess traffic for updates
Office (starting with Basic for Apple/Commodore/Atari/etc) tendency to mix data and instructions

Cisco
Juniper
PacketFront?

Open Source
tools, servers, LAMP - Linux/BSD, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP

Digital Convergence
Triple Play, phone, TV, internet -- just internet covers that

Digital Divide

Generation Gap

network management, instrumentation
SOHO/residential router problems
10 Mbits half duplex autonegotiate
forwarding packet storms
No IPV6

IPV6

diversity (tpc term,) redundant paths

CDN
akamai, limelight, nyud.net:8090 coral coralcdn.org

LANL
ESnet mandate by federal government

#Design-nine, Blacksburg, VA and Andrew Cohill
# www.designnine.com, ./staff/cohill.html,
# library/docs/handouts/D9_case_studies.pdf (Waterloo vs. Cedar Falls, IA)

fiber equipment
3-or-more-port bridge for loop
PON, B-PON, GE-PON, Fujitsu? in Lincoln City, OR
instruments, OTDR, fusion splicer, light source - power meter, fiber identifier

PON - passive optical network
commodity equipment - so far, *not* PON, but active power equipment
used to be 10 Mbit, not 100, now 1 Gbit, not 10 Gbit
PON standard is asymmetric, slower upload than download
Japan moving from B-PON to GE-PON (gigabit ethernet)
active means copper power wires (see power backup)

excavation, trenching, drilling, trenchless technology, sub-surface utility engineering (Underground Focus,) robotic gopher, pedestal, splice closure,
equipment cabinet/rack/box
call before you dig, nmonecall
GPR, magnetic-field locators
little beaver, underwunder
pneumatic mole

sewer as conduit, citylink

overhead distribution

wireless, interference, especially 802.11b/g, unlicensed vs. icensed
wifi
proprietary
wimax
cell phone companies
municipal projects failure rate
internet cafes, airport hot spots

government outside county
state General Services provision, osogrande vs. qwest
universities/stategov/munigovs NM Gigapop, lambdarail/internet2

corruption
Santa Fe schools IT manager, Sandoval County - alleged, no convictions yet

county
franchise
# Milder committee - Spivak, Uptown, Utilities - Robert (Buck) Monday
# ?some third study before 2004 -- Cohill - PacketFront?
Feb 17, 2004 council meeting at courtroom
http://files.losalamosnm.us/cco/CouncilMinutes/2004%20Minutes/021704min.pdf
Brunetti-DEC contract, http://communityfiber.blogspot.com/2004_04_04_communityfiber_archive.html

peering exchange
IXNM
local

locality

power backup
UPS, batteries, generator, solar for non-wired spot (ridge-top repeater)

financing installation (rent vs. own)
government: bond, loan guarantee or tax credit

Utilities Department report

The February 26, 2008 Los Alamos County Council meeting (pdf of agenda) had a discussion of the Utilities Department report on fiber. Eventually, minutes of that meeting should show up on the index of 2008 Council meeting minutes, but currently February 12 is the newest. Other items at that meeting have attachments on the internet, but the Utilities fiber report does not, currently. There is video of that part of the meeting on PAC-8, see PAC-8's video on demand page and select part 2 of the February 26, 2008 meeting. A transcript of the presentation and discussion would be good to have.

Note that the minutes of the January 16, 2008 Board of Public Utilities meeting (pdf) also included a presentation by the Utilities Department regarding fiber. Mr. Monday was more pessimistic about the financial impact of a fiber project at that time than he was at the Council meeting later.

Blacksburg, VA, Andrew Cohill and DesignNine

The 1st-mile web site I mentioned in the previous post and my phone conversation with Richard Lowenberg led me to look up DesignNine and Andrew Cohill.

Richard said that Andrew was involved with one of the past Los Alamos County fiber consulting episodes. Perhaps that was the one that involved PacketFront. Andrew certainly was involved with fiber internet in Blacksburg, Virginia.

The DesignNine web site has a Resources link where I found a number of one-page handouts as pdf files. One I'll highlight here is the Case Studies (pdf) one that compares Waterloo and Cedar Falls in Iowa. Although Cedar Falls is smaller, it managed to attract new industry at a faster rate, and DesignNine is hinting that fiber is a major part of that. On the other hand, Waterloo has lots of the John Deere one-company town aspect that it shares with the national laboratory influence on Los Alamos.

I encourage everyone to see what DesignNine and the references it provides have to say.

1st-mile.com

I got an e-mail today from Richard Lowenberg of Santa Fe, formerly of Davis, California and Telluride, Colorado. We had a nice chat on the phone. Check his web site at www.1st-mile.com. I like this open network idea.

btno post: Fiber poor diet

Thanks so much, Jim Rickman, for the mention on your btno blog.

I guess it's just human nature. Fiberlanm drew only a single comment other than my own. That is overwhelmed by the number of comments the Fiber poor diet post on btno drew. My answer to the single comment is that I'm not sure whether 2.9 cents per minute for long distance on voice telephone has any relationship at all to fiber, or internet, except that long distance is a competitive market, while, in contrast, internet between Los Alamos and other locations is a Qwest monopoly.

I subscribe to the nanog mailing list and a message on that last Friday complained that it's outrageous that 20 Megabits of bandwidth in China costs $3400 per month. Well, in Los Alamos, the best price I can find is about $4000. (Well, 45 Megabits is only about $400 more than that, but then there's another big jump to, say, 46 Megabits.) This is not for a home DSL or cable connection, this is for an ISP (Internet Service Provider) connection that is dedicated, symmetric and has an SLA (Service Level Agreement) that guarantees refunds for downtime if it exceeds mere minutes per month. In some ways, China is more primitive than the farthest outpost of rural America, but at least it has cheaper internet prices than Los Alamos.

In northern Virginia, internet is about $12 per Megabit per month, or $240 per month for 20 Megabits, and even in Albuquerque it can be $35 ($700 for 20,) but, no, Los Alamos, you're not Virginia.

If we meekly allow Qwest and Comcast to continue business as usual, the ratio will continue to be starkly adverse. If we get our County government to build an internet project, we might see more reasonable monthly prices and much greater capability, but it will cost needless millions in taxes.

I appreciate what faster, higher capacity internet can do. Those of us who share that view should invest in our own piece of it. We should do it with fiber. We should also inform those who think internet is some passing fad or a luxury how utterly wonderful internet is, so they will join us. The County government should do two things:

1. get out of the way of citizen owned and installed local fiber;
2. finance private (see below) installation of fiber to neighboring cities, including between the townsite and White Rock.

By neighboring cities, I mean Santa Fe, Espanola, Cochiti and probably Cuba. Pueblos such as San Ildefonso and non-native villages such as El Rancho should be included on the way, and should be encouraged to participate in the financing, too.

By private installation of fiber between cities, I mean we would set up a co-operative which would charge for fiber use according to the cost of it on an amortization schedule, and including an option that a fiber user can buy dark fiber outright and just pay for maintenance of that dark fiber as maintenance events happen. The maintenance fee could be an estimate with a refund after a year when the estimate exceeded expenses, something of that nature.

I think we only have two problems to solve:

a. get the price for packet transit between Los Alamos and the rest of the world down to a reasonable level;
b. stop renting from the Qwests of the world, we should own our infrastructure, not rent it.

February 9, 2000 comments, an overview (repeat)

I don't know whether to put this first or last. I think I'll put it first, then after I post the pieces, I'll convert it to links and repeat it as last, also. Basically, this is a Table of Contents for the over three pages of printed comments I wrote over eight years ago. And the conclusion was so short, I'll just include it here.

I've been thinking about whether I should add new posts to discuss my self-criticisms, and I've decided that instead I will add comments to my own posts to do that.

County (involvement, and non-involvement: when will we cooperate?)
Media (prefer fiber)
Lower Latency
tpc (Qwest)
Locality
Usage-based Pricing

Conclusion
So I'll keep looking for a solution. Obviously, I'm not the only one with a problem. Let's cooperate on a solution.

Usage-Based Pricing

[note: this was the second half of the Locality paragraph -- redhardhat]

We need to share that expense, and share it fairly. Some practices that are going on are not wise, such as web pages that have continuing connections to refresh advertisement animations, which are congesting networks. Usage-based pricing must eventually happen, because flat-rate pricing is not fair. With flat-rate pricing, there is no incentive to stop wasting expensive bandwidth on unwise practices.

Locality

The structure of the Internet should have high local bandwidth, and locality of connections should be encouraged. Multicast should be used for audio and video distribution, otherwise we will clog our bandwidth with multiple copies of the same streams, or programs. External connections have to have sufficient bandwidth, and be able to keep latency low, too, and that's expensive. Some of the expense of external connections has to percolate up to the backbone of the global internet, with value added infrastructure at each level extracting its share to pay for the equipment.

[note: Usage-Based Pricing was the second half of this paragraph -- redhardhat]

tpc (Qwest)

[note: tpc means "the phone company" -- redhardhat]

U S West, just as the other RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) do, is fighting to get permission to offer long distance and in general escape regulation, claiming to have big financial losses adding data infrastructure. At the same time, it refuses to offer other services that make more sense for the infrastructure it owns, such as "dark copper" for DSL using customer-owned equipment. It also spends considerable sums of money on telemarketing high-margin "extended" services, such as call waiting and voice messaging. In a competitive environment, a local voice telephone service would probably offer such things free, or charge per event based on the few pennies per month all such services actually cost for a typical customer. The state of New Mexico has its unique problems with U S West, but probably every one of the other 12 states does, too. U S West also handles nearly all its customer contact in interstate fashion, trying to avoid the jurisdiction of any single state, and for the most part federal jurisdiction, too. Of the original 7 RBOCs after Judge Greene's 1982 decision, SBC (Southwestern Bell, Texas to Missouri) bought Pacific Telesys (California,) Bell Atlantic (Virginia to Pennsylvania and New Jersey) bought Nynex (New York and New England,) and Ameritech (around Chicago) wants to merge in with SBC, too. So now there are 5, or 4. AT&T, the national survivor in the break-up, bought TCI (Tele-Communications,) the largest cable TV company. And U S West is being purchased by Qwest.

Judge Greene died a couple of weeks ago. We should respect the departed, but he should have split the AT&T local phone companies into 3 national companies instead of 7 regional ones. That way, large cities would have immediately had competition in local phone service, and eventually even communities down to the size of Los Alamos and smaller would have gotten competition. Competition in long distance has worked. Calls that used to be \$1.50 per minute are now routinely 30 cents, 15 cents, a dime, even 7 or 5 cents per minute. All my long distance is 9 cents per minute with no monthly fee or minimum, even calling card ones are 9 cents with just a 40 cents per call fee added. What has worked for the long distance business needs to be unleashed on the local telecommunications business. We need local competition in phone services, both voice and data. Eventually we need voice service to be via data. We need to leave the current structure of the RBOCs behind. Currently they can cross-subsidize several businesses that have nothing to do with providing wire or fiber from central offices to customer premises (or between central offices.)

· U S West is in the Internet Service Provider business, competing with customers one layer down such as New Mexico Technet and its for-profit division Oso Grande Technologies and two layers or more with customers such as Southwest Cyber Port and Route 66 Internet.
· U S West is in the business of publishing directories.
· U S West runs a web site, and sells advertisements on it. There may be several U S West web sites operated this way.
· U S West is in the cable television business (they bought Continental Cablevision.)
· U S West is in the business of voice mail, competing with customers who run answering services.
· U S West is in the business of enhanced services by the dozen such as caller id, three way calling, call forwarding, call waiting, various call blocking features, camp on busy, 800 service, 900 service, on and on.

But not interstate long distance. Thank goodness, so far, for that last impediment to them harrassing us more than they already do.

The entity that owns the right to have telecommunications cables that cross everybody's property should be in no other business. Too many games with cross-subsidization and discrimination are played the way things are now.

I have my own tale of woe in dealing with U S West. I'm trying to get ``dark copper'' to run Lucent DSL equipment between my home and two other locations. I placed an order on August 31, 1999. U S West has been using tactics of delay, obfuscate and pleading ignorance, and haven't delivered this order yet. I call that DOPI, as in dopey (delay, obfuscate and plead ignorance.) They say, from Phoenix over the phone,
[U S West] We can't do it.
[Dale] You mean you won't do it, obviously you can.
[U S West] No, we can't.
[Dale] Please put that in writing, in a letter to me.
[U S West] Our management has forbidden us to put any of this in writing.
[Dale] I'll just need to make an audio recording of you saying it then.
[U S West] I won't repeat it for an audio recording.
[Dale] This is really getting weird.
I think U S West has what we need, they just won't sell, or even rent, it to us. Of course, they always rent everything, they never sell anything. Selling would be too fair.

Lower Latency

Not only is higher bandwidth a goal, but also lower latency. Interactive use of the Internet, such as commands to and responses from remote systems, suffers when latency increases due to too many "hops" or due to congestion in any of the "hops" along the path the command and response traffic takes. In practice, we find that non-interactive traffic can cause interactive traffic to become frustratingly slow. The technical solutions proposed to help minimize this problem involve policy-based routing, also known as "Quality of Service."

Media (prefer fiber)

Long term, fiber to the home (and the business or public facility) should be the goal. One connection at each building or area, be it a home, business, church, library, stadium, hospital, whatever, can handle all communications needs for it, be the needs voice, video, audio, data, whatever. A copper connection, even coaxial cable, just has too many disadvantages compared with fiber for handling that single connection.

Short term, wireless is a possibility. The chief problem with wireless, besides distance, is trees in the way of a line-of-sight path between antennas. The way to get over trees is towers. Some people think towers are ugly. Trenches are pretty ugly, too, as well as safety hazards, and cost. We have to have poles for street lights, we can't just hang the street lights from the sky, so why not put communications media (wire or fiber) on those poles again? Media buried underground are, in general, more secure from most hazards, except backhoes and ditch witches digging more trenches. If we do bury something underground, it should be conduit, pipes to contain wire or fiber media, not directly bury the media itself. And bury multiple conduits, so one pipe's media can be active while the media in another pipe is being replaced.

DSL (Digital Subscriber Loop) can use current twisted-pair phone wires. U S West seems antagonistic to renting wires to use for DSL, though. Perhaps too many DSL circuits in a bundle of wires will cause interference among the DSL circuits. Not with voice circuits, though.

Wireless links can be owned instead of rented. The radios are expensive, but prices are dropping. If a radio lasts long enough, both in the sense that it doesn't fail and in the sense that it stays up-to-date with the price and speed of newer models of radios, it can be cheaper than wires or fiber. Fiber, or even coaxial cable, could have higher bandwidth than wireless, though. Reliability of a wireless link can be decreased by weather or other natural phenomena, especially wind and the growth of trees. Too many wireless links in a small area can result in interference among the links.

There are a few other problems with media on poles. A phone installer tells me media on poles attract woodpeckers which make holes in the outer layer, and water gets in and disrupts the quality of signals on the media. A letter to the Monitor several weeks ago was a complaint that Adelphia has not removed CATV cables from a pole in their backyard. A letter in Tuesday's, February 8, 2000, Monitor was a complaint that there are too many towers for antennas cropping up around town, and that they're just plain ugly. I don't know why people think such things are ugly. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They should be grateful they aren't blind, it seems to me.

County (involvement, and non-involvement: when will we cooperate?)

The County government should not so much subsidize or control data communications infrastructure, as it should get out of the way of private interests installing and maintaining it. For instance, the Police Department antenna tower could be rented out for antenna placement for wireless data radios. Water towers may also be good places to put antennas.

There is a Waltons episode about the mother, Olivia or Livvy, learning to drive. Her son, John-Boy, taught her. Her first trip alone in a car after she received her driver's license was supposed to be a daytime trip. But she wasn't back home by dark. Her husband, John, was discussing the possibilities with their son, John-Boy, on the front porch as the hours after sunset passed.
[John] Did you teach her how to change a flat tire?'
[John-Boy] Well, Daddy, I was planning to.
[John] Son, planning isn't doing.
That scene reminds me so much of Los Alamos the 31 years that I've been here that it brings tears to my eyes. Or raises my blood pressure.

Aside from cable TV and telephone monopolies, chiefly U S West, there is too much competition and not enough cooperation. We have ourselves to blame for that. We all want to be in control of our own destiny, facilities, whatever. But if we all go our own way in getting Internet access, we will all pay more, and get less. We need to openly discuss our budgets and ideas, and do something together. Would somebody already be doing wideband Internet access throughout Los Alamos County, except we have been putting up roadblocks in their way?

February 9, 2000 comments, an overview

I don't know whether to put this first or last. I think I'll put it first, then after I post the pieces, I'll convert it to links and repeat it as last, also. Basically, this is a Table of Contents for the over three pages of printed comments I wrote over eight years ago. And the conclusion was so short, I'll just include it here.

I've been thinking about whether I should add new posts to discuss my self-criticisms, and I've decided that instead I will add comments to my own posts to do that.

County (involvement, and non-involvement: when will we cooperate?)
Media (prefer fiber)
Lower Latency
tpc (Qwest)
Locality
Usage-based Pricing

Conclusion
So I'll keep looking for a solution. Obviously, I'm not the only one with a problem. Let's cooperate on a solution.

One Thing at a Time

Lest some idea would get lost in a blog post that addresses several separate ideas, I intend to keep each topic separate. There's a problem with that in a blog, though. The most recent post gets so much more attention than previous ones. Even comments about previous posts tend to get added to the newest post, or far fewer visitors to the blog will read those new comments if they are added to the proper previous post. Those two tendencies reinforce each other. And I myself have posted a comment to the wrong post in a blog, and I suppose I could easily post some to the wrong blog. That was one of my first comments I ever posted, but I'm not very confident that I'll never do it again.

Plus, since a blog has a very simple organization of a post and a link to its associated comments, on a page that contains a limited number of posts in reverse chronological order, the flow of ideas gets constricted to a similar model. It's also difficult to find where one left off reading comments to any given post previously. There's probably no solution to any of these bumps on the road, so we'll just have to learn to cope with them. We can re-introduce ideas if it seems important to do that, and certainly the hyperlink capability of the web will help with that.

What I'm getting set to post next comes from comments I printed for a meeting of the Utility Board with a report from the Spivak consultant, dated February 9, 2000. Wow, before the Cerro Grande fire, just about exactly three months before. It was a little over three printed pages. But since it addresses many topics, I'm going to split it up and try to get posts from it that will be fairly close to this OTaaT idea. Wish me luck.

Then I'll cover some of the things I missed, starting with what I got wrong (hmm, did I get anything wrong??,) and things that have come up since. In OTaaT posts. Trouble is, I'll probably blow right past the first page in the process, before much of anybody has read the First Post!

First Post

Now is the time to get this ball rolling.

I knew when I first saw Mosaic, the web browser from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC,) that the old ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense) and its e-mail, plus remote access and file transfer features, had taken a step that could be similarly significant when compared with Neil Armstrong's "Giant Step for Man." There was an earlier feature, the Wide Area Information System (WAIS,) and it almost showed that promise, but it didn't have pictures, a key part of the web.

After all, blogger.com wouldn't exist, google.com wouldn't exist. There wouldn't be Internet Service Providers (ISPs.) We wouldn't be searching using all those search engines, ordering from Amazon, ebay, and such. We wouldn't be doing banking and payments, watching youtube and revealing personal details on social networking sites. We wouldn't be doing all those good things, if the internet were as dull as dishwater. We wouldn't even be doing bad things like spam, outright crime, denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, if the internet were as dull as dishwater.

Here in Los Alamos, New Mexico, we have debated and dithered over "wideband," Digital Subscriber Loop (DSL,) cable TV delivery of internet, wireless, fiber, buried conduit, overhead utility poles, and such, for over 10 years. To what effect?? Qwest does offer really expensive fiber or DS- or OC- connections. Qwest also offers DSL, which is economical but bottom-end for speed and not available in some areas too distant from certain Qwest facilities. (I think DS- means Digital Signal and OC- Optical Carrier, but only phone company employees, and probably few of them, would care, and they're followed by numbers, like 3, also for DS-, 1, or also for OC-, 12, 48 or 192.) Comcast offers an option or two, probably faster than DSL except when it isn't, but not subject to the distance problem of DSL. However, it is still subject to problems with the physical cable in certain areas.

I work with Radio Shack's local owner, Bill Cabral, to offer fiber service in the Quemazon and Hawk's Landing developments and some downtown business locations and wireless to a few other spots via Bill's company, LA Commnet (Los Alamos Community Network.) Black Rock serves the Research Park building and some wireless customers, mostly in the Rio Grande Valley. Other companies sell Qwest's DSL, notably Virtual Los Alamos locally and several Santa Fe and Albuquerque providers. LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) has its deal with Qwest, subject to what the DOE (United States Department of Energy) and its NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) allow with their esnet (Energy Sciences) connections, and also provides certain contractors, such as LATA (Los Alamos Technical Associates) with internet access. UNM-LA (University of New Mexico, Los Alamos branch) has some way to communicate with the internet system at the main campus in Albuquerque. The Los Alamos Public Schools have some connection they buy via bids, and get some subsidy from that strange tax on everyone's phone bill, for schools and libraries. Those bids are not solicited locally, it appears to me, by the way. Mesa Public Library used to be part of the county government network, but that changed several years ago. Perhaps they are subsidized by some of that tax, too. But, for most residents and businesses, we continue to debate and dither, either person-to-person with no hope of any concerted action happening as a result, or in formal governmental meetings with, so far, about the same result. The county government has spent tens of thousands of dollars on consultants, resulting in more meetings and a bunch of paper with something printed on it. The county government has installed some of their own fiber, for their own use, plus several wireless links, again for their own use.

The county council at their February 26, 2008 meeting again discussed fiber coordinated with wireless. Maybe a blog, more specialized than Jim Rickman's btno (Bomb Town News Observer,) could contribute to less dithering and more action. Toward that purpose, I'm starting this fiberlanm blog.