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January 03, 2007
Tragedy of the Common's Internet
This is a Net Neutrality story, but you have look deep to break the story.
Per the Wall Street Journal the article reads....”Internet services in Hong Kong operated at 70% to 80% of their capacity on the first, full working day of 2007 after earthquakes disrupted Web access in Asia last week.”
As so often happens to me I ask the question? Is that the usage statistic or the capacity of backbone? So I read further....
“Y.K. Ha, Hong Kong's acting director-general of telecommunications, said six of seven undersea fiber-optic cable systems in the Luzon Strait linking the city to the global Internet had been damaged by the quake, and repair ships were likely to fix one of these within weeks.”
So with 12% of the cable capacity available; the capacity only diminishes by 30%! I am further confused...
“Disruptions could have been worse had local service providers not managed to free up capacity by rerouting traffic through Singapore, China and even Western Europe, Mr. Ha said.”
Using what facilities?
“The quake ... snapped undersea cables off Taiwan. This cut telecommunications across the region and left companies scrambling to reroute traffic through satellites and cables that weren't damaged. Mr. Ha said the complex repairs would take longer than first anticipated, partly because repair ships are in limited supply and they are being sought by other places whose Internet service was also disrupted, including Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China.”
Interesting. Why is this article about the Internet? Mr Ha, provides the Aha!
“[Mr. Ha] played down the economic impact in Hong Kong, saying most of its big companies had taken contingency measures.
"It's not as bad as we thought. We understand that most of the operations are quite normal," he said. "We don't expect the large corporations to experience any difficulties."
But small and medium-size businesses that rely on the public Internet "may experience some delays or some congestion," Mr. Ha said, as might home users during office hours. IDD calls, mobile phones, faxes and text-messaging services were back to normal, he added.
Now I get it! With only 1 cable of 7 left the choice was made to keep the traditional telecom facilities up... And still (even with network planning neglect) the Internet is functioning at 70%.
I would like to think that at some point the choice is to protect the Internet with the same prioritization as the rest of the telecom traffic, but the history is that the Internet was built because the choice of prioritization was not available to the end points.
Here is where the real story of the Internet’s need for net neutrality is required. When selecting between the Internet and other telecom services we will suffer from the tragedy of the commons. Or in the immortal words of Jonathan Swift "In all distresses of our friends, we first consult our private ends"
Posted by carl at January 3, 2007 05:32 AM