June 2000 COOK report published
Gordon Cook
Rapid and reliable delivery of web-based content anywhere in the
world has become one of the most critical issues in enabling the
continued the scaling of the Internet. Web caching started out in
1996 as an attempt of many ISPs to store locally as much of the
content of the web as possible. Each ISP would make its own decisions
about what content to fetch and how often to do it. This system
created many problems for web content providers because they had no
knowledge about what was cached where, by whom and with what
frequency. Furthermore, since caching distributed their content to
many sites, they had no reliable way of reporting to their
advertisers how many people had seen the material. It was a hit or
miss system that no one was happy with and one that created a major
opportunity for others to fill. A year ago Sandpiper and Akamai were
the most talked about competitors. We note that since then Sandpiper
has been acquired by Digital Island and has been focusing on the
rapidly growing field of business-to-business e-commerce, leaving
Akamai as the acknowledged leader in general content delivery.
In late 1999 Avi Freedman left his position as Vice President of
Engineering for AboveNet to become Vice President of Network
Architecture for Akamai. We publish a long interview where Avi
explains in detail Akamai's extremely interesting business model.
What Akamai does is enabled by a very significant new use for DNS
that it has developed.
Akamai it has its own network of DNS servers that keep in contact
with each other globally. Akamai's other servers take the web
content of Akamai's customers and store it in hundreds and then
thousands of copies at the edge of the network as Akamai's global
network of servers continues to grow. Akamai solves the problem of
the world wide wait by pushing content as close to the end user as
possible.
Akamai's network of DNS servers then accomplishes a kind of global
air traffic control task of communicating among themselves network
traffic conditions in real time to determine which local server to
send a user's request to or, in the event that regional traffic
problems are interfering with local reachability, how to retrieve the
data from a more distant server.
Within a site Akamai figures out what data is not constantly updated.
That data is migrated to Akamai's edge servers on a regular basis.
The minimum amount of data possible is pumped from the host web sites
to the edges, while each edge web server is kept constantly informed
of the best path to get to the fresh host data it needs. Akamai
charges each web site owner for the aggregate amount of its data
delivered to end users anywhere in the Internet. The table (at the
end of the interview on page 12) shows how many networks receive what
percent of Akamai's total aggregate of content traffic. Its
intelligent overlay network of DNS servers that direct web content
look up must keep very good statistics so that Akamai knows what to
bill each of its customers who pay to have their web sites included
in Akamai's distribution network.
Akamai has, in effect, created a virtual private overlay of the
internet where, as much as possible, it keeps packets on a single
network and minimizes their having to flow upstream to transit from
one backbone to another (where most packet loss occurs) and them move
to the downstream customers of the other backbone. This means that
Akamai can go to an ISP and ask to place its servers in the its key
POPs for no co-location charge and no charge for bandwidth used.
Why? Because it can generally show every ISP how, with Akamai servers
locally, its customers will pull far less web traffic across the
ISP's backbone that they would if the ISP tried to do its own
caching. Or, if the ISP just sent the packets back and forth to the
content provider's central servers. In addition Akamai can
demonstrate how, in return for nothing more than some co-lo space and
bandwidth, the ISP will save bandwidth and give its customers better
service.
Freedman also describes how Akamai must deal with the needs of its
customer's central servers that are most often located at large web
hosting centers at major backbone sites. In these cases he may act
as an advocate for the Akamai customer in procuring if necessary some
Akamai owned and operated short haul links to ensure that they can
have enough burstable bandwidth to meet peak traffic periods. Given
his experience at AboveNet which ran this type of operation, he is
well equipped to deal with the web based, content provider, the web
farm backbone operator and the large number of down stream networks
where delivery oriented servers can be placed as close to customers
as possible.
Akamai has taken advantage of a narrow window of opportunity to
become, in contrast to the older generation vertically integrated
backbones, one of a small but growing number of content distribution
networks. Such a network hopes to solve problems like the peering
problem for a BBN which in the summer of 1998 rebelled at granting
Exodus free peering because Exodus dumped more traffic into BBN than
it took out.
Commoditizing Bandwidth, an interview with Andersen Consultings Lin
Franks pp. 13-18
Focusing on her role in ongoing efforts to develop a commodity market
in bandwidth, we interview Lin Franks of Andersen Consulting. Lin
helps to bring a non Internet protocol perspective to the issue of
bandwidth commoditization by explaining in some detail her role in
the commoditization of oil, natural gas and electricity. In the mid
90s she went to work for Portland General Electric. When Enron
acquired Portland in early 1998 she met Stan Hanks. The interview
recounts how she worked with Hanks to learn the technology issues for
trading bandwidth while techning the internet technical people what
skills were necessary to successful commodities trading.
For the past year Franks has been working with Andersen consulting in
developing a training program that will acquit executives at the
large carriers with the issues behind bandwidth commoditization, make
certain that they understand the staffing that must be done to get
their companies ready to participate in bandwidth trading, to help
them form an industry group that can agree on a benchmark and
standard contract and to coach them through the process of carrying
out the first trades. She notes that a nascent industry trading
association had its first meeting in Washington, DC on March 23.
Although the price of bandwidth is declining, Franks is bullish on
its future. She states that "the real disruptive event is the
realization by those in the industry that, regardless of
technological advances, regardless of their fever to lay fiber across
the world, there is really no way that supply is going to
consistently be able to keep up with the ungodly increase in demand
at which we are looking. Whereas there may appear to be a supply glut
right now, bandwidth demand will rise to fill it and will exceed the
available supply. Then there will be another technological advance
that will increase the available bandwidth supply. Then demand will
rise again and so on and so forth."
IBGP in Network Design, pp. 18 - 19
From the inet-access list we present a brief discussion on the
complexity of design decision issues involving the use of IBGP in
network design.
ICANN Footnotes, pp. 20 - 22
We present a brief series of ICANN goings that readers won't be
seeing in ICANN press releases. The first is the announcement from
last October of a new investigation of ICANN by the GAO - one that
was announced with such stealth at the time that we missed it
entirely and from which we expect very little.
The second is a much more interesting April 7th, 2000 report from the
European Union noting with confusion that the Department of
Commerce's public position on ICANN is that it is it (DoC) and not
ICANN which is in control of the DNS and ROOT. The report complains
that U.S. officials nevertheless are still promising to turn over
all powers to ICANN by October 1, 2000. It concludes with the
expectation that just before American elections in the fall all power
will be turned over to an ICANN under the watchfull eye of the
Government Advisory Committee. Overall it shows how raw European
feelings have become on the subject of American Internet technology
leadership.
The third is a brief from London on a presentation by ICANN Board
Member Johnathon Cohen in which Cohen is alleged to have said: " It
is now believed that there are new policies in place at NSI following
the appointment of Roger Cochetti, formerly in charge of electronic
commerce regulation at IBM, as senior VP and chief policy officer in
February." Yet another IBM monetary contribution to ICANN is
announced at
http://www.icann.org/correspondence/ibm-letter-24sept99.htm.
Finally the fourth footnote is a brilliant April 14th critique by
patent attorney John Berryhill. Berryhill shows the absurdity of the
Michael Palage plan to grant trademark interests full sway over a
list of famous marks and 20 variants for each one known as the
Sunrise proposal. While Berryhill's comments need to be read in
their entirety the following excerpt gives a good flavor. "My
comments essentially boil down to the fundamental maxim of Law,
'Where there is a right, there is a remedy.' The ICANN Intellectual
Property Constituency's various exclusion or 'sunrise' proposals are
not in accordance with the remedial nature of the Law. These
proposals are for prospective, pre-emptive restraints of the kind
that we do not permit our own government to exert in the enforcement
of criminal law relating to the use of words. Why should private
individuals have greater power in the context of potential civil
liability?"
We predict however that, effectively, the fix is in and despite
widespread opposition the Board will do what it is told by its
trademark masters.
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The COOK Report on Internet Index to 8 years of the COOK Report
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January 2000 COOK Report: http://cookreport.com/icannoverall.shtml
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