In 1938 Hawaii’s surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku held the first US national surf contest on the shores of San Pedro Bay in Long Beach, California.
For a variety of reasons, including development of Long Beach as a deep water port and use of Long Beach by the US Navy, a nine mile 50 foot deep breakwater extending nearly 12 feet above the ocean was built between 1932 and 1949. The breakwater is owned by the US government, and thus the city of Long Beach has been merely an observer in the process over the past 60 years, and has suffered the negative impact of a breakwater which has significantly altered the eco-system of San Pedro Bay.
Google Maps View of Long Beach Breakwater
Impacts of the Long Beach Breakwater
The ocean has a natural flow, developed over millions of years. Currents keep runoff from the land, and other sources such as the Los Angeles River from stagnating in the bay, recycling the water through nature’s own system of environmental maintenance.
Since the natural current of water coming into San Pedro Bay was changed, the current has moved further south along the beach area near the Long Beach Peninsula, resulting in accelerated beach erosion. Property owners are in danger of flooding due to this erosion, and are now being forced to pay for a beach replenishment project needed to protect property when heavy southern swells push massive amounts of water through the narrow inlet created by the breakwater.
While Long Beach has one of the most impressive beaches in the Southern California area, on any given summer day the beaches are nearly deserted. The water, lacking any real recirculation or current, is stagnant and much higher in pollutants than other beaches around the area. The “Save the Bay” organization has a monthly review of all beach areas around Los Angeles County, and routinely fails Long Beach’s coastal areas.
Just a few minutes away, the beaches at Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, or even the South Bay area around Redondo Beach are close enough to provide a much better alternative than spending an afternoon in an unhealthy, sometimes smelly beach such as most of Long Beach.
Legitimate Concerns
Of course, as with all things, this is not a simple issue. The THUMS oil islands would need to be reinforced to withstand additional surf. The areas around Shoreline Village would need some reinforcement, although the breakwaters on the Long Beach Harbor side of the bay would probably not be affected, and Shoreline would be secure.
Since the Naples area was heavily built and populated after construction of the breakwaters, there would also be a potential of higher water levels and flooding within this rather opulent section of town. There is also some disagreement on the potential effect on the Long Beach Peninsula, with some believing removing the breakwater would increase the risk of flooding in that area as well.
Breakwater Politics
On July 24, 2007, the Long Beach City Council directed staff to fund a Long Beach Breakwater Reconnaissance Study. “This reconnaissance study is the first step in answering the community’s questions about the impact and role of the Long Beach Breakwater, and could help determine the future of the City’s coastal areas.” LB Gov
Other organizations, with the “Surfrider Foundation” at the top of the list, have done extensive studies on the oceanic, climate, environmental, and social impacts of the Long Beach breakwater. The Surfrider Foundation has been successful in bringing public attention and awareness to the debate. Their studies are available as detailed reports at:
- Surfrider Foundation Long Beach Breakwater Study
- Kalon Morris report on LB Breakwater
As an emotionally charged issue, politicians are naturally attracted or forced into the discussion. The congressional district of Long Beach falls into the 42nd congressional district, a seat held by Dana Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher has fallen on both sides of the issue, recently bending to the volume of discussion favoring removal of the breakwater.
Long Beach Councilwoman Rae Gabelich is in favor of doing a detailed study of the issue, not making a definitive statement one way or the other.
Frank Colonna, a former council member and resident of the city’s peninsula area was also the lone vote against approving a study two years ago.
On Friday, 26 June (2009) Congresswoman Laura Richardson announced she had secured $100,000 in federal funding to evaluate the Federal interest in a reconfiguration of the Long Beach Breakwater.
“After requesting funding last year, conducting several meetings with the Army Corps and intense negotiations with Appropriations Committee leadership, today all of Long Beach once and for all can review the facts of the longest urban breakwater in the country,” Congresswoman Richardson announced. “This $100,000 allocation for the Army Corps’s reconnaissance report is one of the most vital allocations this region will receive and it is particularly vital in these economic times to ensure an objective evaluation is made so that all resident, business and government issues and concerns are considered.”
Next Steps
The federal announced by Congresswoman Richardson is only the first step in a fairly lengthy process. This first step only funds the Army Corps of Engineers to initiate the “Reconnaissance Study,” which will determine if there is US Government interest in removing or altering the breakwater. If the Army Corps of Engineers determines breakwater alterations are in the government’s interest, they will then create a Project Management Plan (PMP).
The PMP documents the purpose of a feasibility study for the alteration, and tasks needed to complete the project. The PMP may include the City of Long Beach, and recommend a potential agreement that would outline the relationship between the city, the Army Corps or Engineers, and the federal government to complete the project.
This would include items such as who pays what percentage, which agency completes the tasks, and the overall plan to complete the project. This could take years.
On the other hand, we have to start at some point, and Congresswoman Richardson has taken the lead in representing the people of Long Beach in addressing the issue.
What We Can Do
Regardless of which side of the Long Beach Breakwater issue we stand, we need to take a stand. The result of this study and debate will potentially cost the city and government a lot of money, change the environment, and change the value of property near the waterfront. There will be an impact on surrounding communities, and an impact on the oil industry.
On the other hand, maybe someday in the future surfers will return to Long Beach and the city will regain its historical nickname as the “Waikiki Beach of California.”
John Savageau, Long Beach
“Waste is Good”
So says the Gordon Gecko of data tech, Chris Anderson, in his July 2009 Wired Article of the same title. His article goes on to state “Technology is becoming too cheap to meter. So stop metering. It’s time to harness the power of abundance.”
Using examples such as the Tsunami of junk videos on YouTube (“Making the World Safe for Cat Videos”), Anderson presents analogies from nature to make his case for promoting data waste. If you look at the number of fertilized fish eggs produced .vs the number of fish actually making it to the end of their life cycle, you will see the ratio of survival is almost too small to calculate. One in a million fish eggs actually finds its way to being a fish.
So why bother worrying about waste? Darwin says it is the survival of the fittest, so let DNA develop from the data and file survivors that will make the species stronger.
Thus goes Anderson’s case for supporting waste data. If you can go to Amazon and search the cost and size of hard drives, you can now get 1Terabyte network attached drives for under $125. A terabyte of storage for $125…. So why not back up every piece of data you have ever created, downloaded, or spawned through runaway rogue code?
I remember all too well my own experiences trying to sift through files and files of data, only to try and remove enough junk to get around “disk full” errors. The time I spent cleaning and maintaining hard disks, files of floppies (for those of you who do not know what a floppy disk is, check Wikipedia… Old age is not pleasant), and suffering through ensuring I could travel with enough capacity on my computer… Those days are over.
With my 500 Gigabyte drive at home, I can backup pretty much everything I have ever recorded to a disk. With Multi-Terabyte home system drives popping up, I will hopefully be able to continue filling drives with whatever junk I need for a long time into the future. I will never use 99.99% of the files on the drives, but who cares? As Anderson so eloquently states, “we have a very developed sense of the morality of waste.” But, on the other hand, “nature wastes life in the search of better life.”
Thus of those terabytes of wasted disk space that cost less than $125 per whack, possibly 100 megabytes contain that gem of data I may need at some time 15 years in the future. We don’t know.
Associated Content states there may be in excess of 100 million videos available on YouTube. Nielsen claims there may be more than 5.5 billion YouTube videos downloaded a month. If we wanted to view YouTube content 24 hours a day, we would probably never even approach viewing 1% of the available video during the course of an adult life.
I s this all wasted disk and network space? For me, yes, for the other 2 billion Internet users around the world – well, I am sure there are a large number of people who actually do spend their entire day watching cat videos.
John Savageau, Long Beach
Why does one house with a cable connection to the Internet have great performance, and the house next to them with a different Internet provider have marginal or potentially poor performance? The answer may lie in the sometimes dark art of Internet peering.
Peter Cohen stopped by to discuss the topic, and try and shed some light on peering recently at the North American Network Operator’s Group (NANOG) conference in Philadelphia. Peter has worked in the peering community for more than 12 years, with experience at some of the largest Internet Service Provider networks in the United States, as well as managing peering for Telia-Sonera, the national telecom network of Sweden.
“Peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the customers of each network.” Wikipedia
Savageau: Peter, why is peering important to Internet networks?
Cohen: Peering cuts out the middle man, allowing networks to connect directly to each other without a transit or intermediate network (such as Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint). In addition, peering helps networks to improve data throughput, reduce some operating costs, and provide some protection against high transit pricing (by Tier 1 and transit network providers).
Savageau: Do all networks peer?
Cohen: Peering is not for everybody. Smaller networks and enterprise networks generally do not have enough traffic (to make peering worth it). Also, a lot depends on a network’s location. Peering normally occurs in large markets, such as the NFL cities. A network needs to have other networks or content providers who want to peer with them. You also need to have an ASN number (autonomous system network), which is reserved for those networks who have a need (traffic volume) to peer with multiple networks and content delivery networks.
Peering is not a free connection to the rest of the Internet. When a networks peers with another network, they only receive routes available directly on that network’s, or customers of that network (if it is a larger regional network which provides Internet services to both access networks and smaller content networks). In addition to having peering relationships with one or more networks, unless a network is among the largest (which we call Tier 1 Internet networks), they will still need a “default route” for routing network traffic to the rest of the global Internet.
A default route, also known as the gateway of last resort, is the network route used by a router when no other known route exists for a given IP packet’s destination address. All the packets for destinations not known by the router’s routing table are sent to the default route. Wikipedia
Savageau: Where do networks peer?
Cohen: Networks peer in larger cities where there is a higher density of other networks and content providers. In Los Angeles the Wilshire Corridor in downtown LA has several locations, such as One Wilshire where networks can connect at either public Internet Exchange Points/IXPs, or through private network interconnections (PNIs).
Los Angeles supports several large public exchange points, including those managed by Equinix, Switch and Data – as well as the (CoreSite) Any2 Exchange. Other cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Miami are also major points of peering in the Internet community.
Savageau: How is peering done differently in the United States, versus Europe or ASIA?
Cohen: A lot of the US peering model was developed early in the development of public Internet. There were very few commercial networks present in the Internet, and those networks peered with each other. As the Internet of the 1980s and early 1990s was “hubbed” in the United States, those early American networks were built from the beginning with global views of Internet routing – thus becoming the first Tier 1 networks.
The Europeans and Asians were a little later to the game. Many of the early non-US networks were operated by national carriers with very little reason to peer with or support competitive networks within their countries (no reason to make your competition stronger and more competitive in your national market). Thus the national carriers only peered at points within the United States, and since those networks did not have global Internet routing visibility, they had to buy transit from the American Tier 1 Internets.
Even today, in some countries national carriers will not peer within their own market, but will peer with competitors at peering points and exchanges outside of their home country.
On the other hand, the European networking community did learn from the American experience, and today the largest pubic exchange points exist outside of the United States, allowing smaller networks and content companies to gain all the advantages of local peering, without the need to “hairpin” their traffic through a Tier 1.
Savageau: Is the current model of peering in the US good enough? Change needed?
Cohen: Traditionally networks which peer come in two types. Those who only peer with private network interconnections/PNIs, and those who peer at public exchanges, and also support PNIs. PNIs are most useful when traffic on a public exchange hits a certain threshold, and then it makes more sense for the networks to interconnect with much higher capacity individual circuits.
A new model emerging in the US is with remote exchange point connections (Remote IXP Access). Remote IXP access allows a network geographically separated from a major public peering point to lease a long distance circuit, usually around a Gigabit, and “test the waters” by connecting to the IXP. If the peering point effectively serves the needs of the remote IXP access network, then they may at some point establish a direct point of presence the facility supporting the IXP.
The only real drawback of remote IXP access is that without a physical router present at the data center or carrier hotel housing the IXP, they are limited to the single exchange point connection, and cannot establish a PNI with another network at the facility.
Savageau: Final question. Most difficult topic for last! Give me your feelings on the topic of net neutrality, how it is currently affecting the Internet community, and how you think it will evolve.
Cohen: Many of the current policies in effect between networks and content providers are purely based on internal politics. That’s why you may go into a neighborhood and find an Internet Service Provider giving outstanding performance to one customer, and across the street you will get poor performance. Most local Internet providers are called MSOs, or Multi-Service Operators. MSOs include cable TV companies, phone companies, and satellite TV companies.
One MSO, such as AT&T, may determine the content providers should pay a higher rate to subsidize the cost of network build outs. A cable company MSO may determine that peering with content networks is the best policy.
There is no regulation at this level, and the ultimate victims are end users in the home. End users who believe they are paying a flat rate to their MSO to receive the best possible performance on their home Internet connection – but at the end of the day are receiving service performance based in a large part n the personalities of persons making decisions on peering models, not necessarily on business rules or objectives.
Savageau: Peter, keep looking out for us
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Peter Cohen has been involved in the Internet since the 1990′s starting out at CAIS Internet. He has held a wide range of positions and has worked extensively with peering, transit, interconnections and network design/colocation for ISPs, Carriers and other Internet related companies around the world. His work and travel have brought him to more than 35 countries and 5 continents. He is a frequent speaker at NANOG, Ripe, and other industry events worldwide.
Presently Peter works at Switch & Data where he facilitates interconnections among customers and the PAIX product. He lives with his wife and two children in McLean, Virginia. He enjoys cooking, reading, golf and tennis in his spare time.
Having lived through a dark period of grim economic news, unemployment, bank failures, and a meltdown of the auto industries, it is refreshing to see technology companies bucking the trend, gaining strong investment support. The Los Angeles website SoCalTech.com lists over 100 investments totaling over $300 million (only those with investment totals listed) just since June 1st. Those investments stretch from Santa Barbara to San Diego, covering investments ranging from biotech to telecommunications.
Hunter Newby, CEO and Founder of Allied Fiber, notes that “with the right idea, team, timing and audience anything can happen.” Allied Fiber is a start up telecom company addressing the lack of accessible dark fiber in the market by making carrier neutral dark fiber available to enterprises, carriers, and network providers.
“The global economic collapse actually helped me as it scared, or pushed away all of the inferior plans (weak team, model, or combination, etc). No one out looking to build anything in telecom today has the exact Allied Fiber model” continues Newby. “The investor community knows this as they see congestion in wireless backhaul, video over IP, etc with no real plan to solve the issues, so when they hear about Allied Fiber it is like finding the missing puzzle piece that fits right in.”
While the Dow Jones VentureSource reports Q2 of this year was “one of the worst” ever for venture capital backed firms, Southern California’s “Tech Coast” appears to be ignoring the trend. Companies such as Irvine’s online advertising and marketing company WebVisible announced that “it has thrived during the first half of 2009, even as the overall advertising industry struggles in the current economy.”
WebVisible is not alone, as SoCalTech’s daily headlines show a robust listing of investments, exits, partnerships, and acquisitions within the California tech industry. On May 19th Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels, a group of private investors dedicated to assisting startup companies in the SoCal region, announced they had reached a record $100 million in angel investments.
“The $100 million total represents funding, as well as mentoring, expertise and industry contacts, provided by TCA members over the last 12 years to more than 150 young California-based companies in a range of fields including life sciences, software, Internet, biotechnology, media, business services, and consumer products. TCA’s contributions to these companies subsequently helped attract more than $1 billion in additional capital.” Press Release – May 19, 2009
Hunter Newby, who has previous managing sales and strategy at both MCI/Worldcom and Telx, is well tuned to the needs of American telecom and enterprise companies, and knows the value of a well planned and prepared business case.
Newby explains “The global economic collapse actually helped me as it scared, or pushed away all of the inferior plans (weak team, model, or combination, etc). No one out looking to build anything in telecom today has the exact Allied Fiber model. It is a combination of unique elements that could only have existed and been brought together at this point in time. The investor community knows this as they see congestion in wireless backhaul, video over IP, etc with no real plan to solve the issues, so when they hear about Allied Fiber it is like finding the missing puzzle piece that fits right in.”
Southern California and New York (home of Allied Fiber) are not the only bright spots on the venture horizon. Oregon and Washington State are also showing signs of a great year for both investors and startup companies. The Portland BizJournal reported that at least one local venture capital firm is planning to put more than 10 times as much money into investments in 2009 as they did in 2008. The story also indicated that Silicon Valley firms having difficulty with funding are now considering a move to Oregon, as the Silicon Valley region’s VC firms and “early stage investors are tapped-out.”
Some people call our current economic situation a crisis. Others see it as a major opportunity. The big question is how prepared are you to take advantage of both business and investment opportunities. Now is the time to take stock of your own personal visions, goals, and actions.
Join a fast-pitch competition, test your business case and planning, take a shot at presenting your plan in a 30 second elevator pitch. Money is available to fund your ideas if you do your homework. You can either sit back and wait to see what happens in the current business world, and run the risk of becoming a victim of recession or economic downturn, or you can get out on the street like Newby and take control of your future. Show no fear in hitting your vision, and become part of the economic rally that will redefine our country.
John Savageau, Long Beach
Green technology and green living are nearly as popular in the world of buzz words as solving global hunger and “i-Everything.” Some cities take the topic more seriously. Looking at the Long Beach Press-Telegram on July 2nd, 2009, of four headlines, three dealt with green projects and green initiatives within the city and Port of Long Beach.
Long Beach is an important city, not only to the Los Angeles area, but also to the entire United States. With the adjacent Port of Los Angeles, Long Beach Port is the largest port facility in North America, and among the largest in the world. In addition, Long Beach sits on top of the Wilmington Oil Field, producing more than 15 million barrels of crude oil each year.
Island Grissom
And yet, those of us who live in Long Beach find it one of the most exciting cities in the area, if not the country. Why? In addition to the urban renewal programs, Long Beach is a leader in green technologies and policies ranging from setting new global standards in the port, to world-renown desalination projects, to innovations in the Wilmington Oil Field that make an often maligned industry a source of pride for the city.
Cleaning the Ports
While the Port facilities may account for a large percentage of the pollutants covering the greater LA Basin, Long Beach is taking creative and positive steps to reduce the impact of container ships and diesel trucks on the environment.
Construction of the Alameda Corridor, a 20 mile largely underground train line connecting the port facilities to cargo distribution facilities in downtown Los Angeles (the Intermodal Container Transfer Facility), took hundreds of diesel trucks off the road, and further increased efficiency offloading and onloading cargo at the port. From the Los Angeles distribution center, cargo is further sent on to destinations throughout the United States and Canada, using much cleaner rail systems. Current development projects are focused on replacement of existing train locomotives with electric trains, further reducing the impact of container transfer in and out of the port.
Another recent innovation within the port of Long Beach is the new “Dockside Power System,” which allows ships visiting the port to plug into electrical systems provide at dockside power stations, allowing container ships to use electrical auxiliary power systems, rather than continuing to burn diesel while docked at port. The LA Times reports that “emissions reductions amount to 50%, even when factoring in pollution created by power plants in generating the electricity.”
Water Desalination Projects
The Long Beach Desalination project started in 1996 with a federal grant authorizing funding for construction of a pilot plant pumping 9000 gallons per day. With innovations patented by the Long Beach Water Department (invented by Diem Voung, Asst GM at the LBWD) called the “Long Beach Method,” the city has perfected a two stage nano-filtration process which reduces the amount of energy required to desalinate water by up to 30%.
Long Beach Reclaimed Water
Long Beach’s current desalination project called the “Long Beach Seawater Desalination Research & Development Facility” is the largest project of its kind in the United States, producing more than 300,000 gallons per day. The output from this facility will reduce the city of Long Beach’s need for Colorado River water by more than 15%.
To be honest, there are many other desalination projects in cities lining the coast, including Huntington Beach, San Diego, Oxnard, and others. However Long Beach has provided, and will continue to provide, strong leadership in global desalination initiatives.
Of the “green” headlines in the LB Press-Telegram mentioned above, one story does discuss a grant of nearly $3,000,000 in stimulus funds to further develop Long Beach’s desalination technology and innovations.
Another great project within the city is the use of reclaimed water. In 2008 Long Beach provided more than 1.5 billion gallons of reclaimed or non-potable water to various users for both landscaping, as well as “grey” water usage in air conditioning systems used within commercial properties.
The reclaimed water project is using water from many different sources, including water runoff from storms, barrier water from the Los Angeles River, and other waste water which would normally run into the Pacific Ocean.
The Wilmington Oil Field
There is no real way to have a completely clean environment when you are dealing with oil. Not only the waste surrounding drilling and pumping oil, but also the process of refining oil creates a tremendous environmental mess. The area starting in Long Beach, and passing through Carson to El Segundo supply much of the refined oil used by California drivers, and drivers in surrounding states.
Vintage Wilmington Oil Field
Until we, as a culture, further embrace transportation which does not require the use of fossil fuels, we will not have a clean environment. The one concession Long Beach has made to reducing the negative impact of pumping oil from the rich Wilmington Oil Field, which underlies much of the area from San Pedro to Seal Beach, is some beautification of the oil pumping islands in San Pedro Bay.
The photo on the top of this page shows Island Grissom near the Shoreline Drive area of Long Beach, in sharp contrast to the historic photo immediately above showing the old Long Beach and Signal Hill of past, when the priority was drilling at any cost. The Honolulu Advertiser has mentioned the efforts to produce a more pleasing façade to the oil field as a “prime example of the aesthetic mitigation of technology.”
There are four offshore islands, operated by THUMS (originally named for a consortium consisting of Texaco, Humble, Union, Mobil and Shell — T.H.U.M.S.) are named after astronauts who died in NASA accidents (Freeman, Chaffee, White, and Grissom), and are about 10 acres apiece. From these island drilling platforms, constructed in the 1960s and 70s, more than 1200 oil wells have been placed. (AAPG Explorer)
To its credit, THUMS has never recorded a major oil leak or spill, and claims that “in addition to investing millions of dollars to install pollution limiting equipment throughout our operations, we are working to help meet California’s energy needs by developing a long term supply of clean burning natural gas.” (Frank Komin, THUMS facility Manager)
The Reality and the Future
While the Long Beach Port area continues to be a major source of pollutants in the LA Basin, the city and community continue to push Long Beach to be a leader in not only solving the local problems of a damaged environment, but also use creativity and technology to produce a better future for Long Beach and the world. Of particular note, the desalination projects within Long Beach are a major source of community pride.
This is part 1 in a series on Internet peering and network neutrality
In an Internet “shot heard round the world,” AT&T’s former chairman Ed Whitacre stated in reference to Google and Microsoft’s Internet content:
“How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?” (Ed Whitacre, Former Chairman of AT&T)
Not withstanding the fact Whitacre neglected to mention much of his network was subsidized with public money supplied through Universal Services Fund fees (USF), and that individual subscribers are already paying for accessing content through the Internet, AT&T’s attitude was a wakeup call to both the Internet user community, and Internet-enabled content providers.
The American commercial Internet scene has been dominated with a select few “Tier 1″ service providers, including AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and Level 3. Those service providers carry Internet traffic through large capacity network pipes around the country to most of the major cities, and then deliver consumer services or hand off Internet traffic to smaller, local service providers and cable TV companies. The Tier 1 network providers not only provide a large portion of the long distance transport of traffic, but also carry a complete table of Internet routes, which maps the manner in which Internet traffic finds its way around the world.
So, if you are a network manager for AT&T, it is in your interest to have as many smaller networks and content providers connected to you as possible, as you make money on both sides of the “eyeball” to “content” relationship.
The smaller networks don’t see it that way. A network (such as Colour Broadband) serving a local market in Long Beach, California needs to serve content to its clients. If they serve a lot of content, in AT&T’s perfect world they would continue buying larger and larger network “pipes” to accommodate demand from their eyeball customers.
On the other hand, if a Google or Microsoft had a presence within the LA area, and could connect their content directly to the Long Beach network, bypassing AT&T, then theoretically you would be able to get better network performance (by eliminating a “transit” network), and deliver the content to “eyeballs” without having to pay a fee to the “middle man” (again, AT&T).
This type of relationship is called “peering” in the Internet world. To get customers the best performance, for the lowest cost, access networks such as Colour Broadband establish a point of presence in a location where they can meet as many other networks as possible.
In Los Angeles, facilities like One Wilshire in downtown LA, or other facilities located in nearby buildings offer both data center colocation space, as well as meet-me-rooms and Internet exchange points (IXPs) where content providers can store their media, and network providers can connect to other networks and content providers in a single location.
This “peering” is the way networks and content providers can bypass the Tier 1 networks. Much of the fiber optic cable needed to connect a company like Colour Broadband to Google, YouTube, or Sony is available though neutral alternative telecom carriers, such as utility provider Southern California Edison, Wilshire Connection, or Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Once Colour Broadband has established a physical presence within a colocation facility in downtown Los Angeles it becomes fairly easy to establish individual interconnections with other networks and content providers – or connect one-to-many via an Internet exchange point such as Any2, Equinix IBX, or the LAIIX (Los Angeles International Internet Exchange).
Every interconnection Colour Broadband makes in Los Angeles is a percentage of traffic they will not have to pay AT&T or one of the other Tier 1 networks.
The Tier 1 networks still have a role to play. Colour Broadband still needs to provide its customers access to content in other countries such as Russia and Spain. They may not be able to find networks serving Russia or Spain within the downtown LA peering community, and thus will still need to pay AT&T or another Tier 1 network provider to make that global connection.
The intent of Colour Broadband using their downtown colocation facility and peering relationships is to:
- Reduce operational expenses by eliminating their need to connect to Tier 1 network providers for connecting to other networks and content
- Improve performance by eliminating physical transit networks operating as a middle man between Colour Broadband and other networks or content
- Provide an additional layer of disaster recovery capability in the event a primary Tier 1 has network problems or service failure
Peering for content providers and access networks is the best expression of companies taking control of their destiny, and network neutrality.
In the next segment we will have an interview with Peter Cohen, an Internet peering expert and long time peering manager with network service providers in the US and Europe.
John Savageau, Long Beach
Possibly due to international pressure, possibly due to the fact it probably simply wouldn’t work, China has made a decision to delay the deadline for companies to install the controversial “Green Dam” software in all new computers sold in the country. The software package, formally called “Green Dam Youth Escort,” was promoted by the Chinese government as a utility to protect Chinese citizens from being exposed to pornography.
However, once the package was released to manufacturers and testing organizations it quickly became apparent the software had other features, including filtering words and topics deemed too sensitive for Internet users. Those topics include phrases like “Falun Gong,” and “7/4 (a reference to the Tianamen Square Massacre).” If a user typed sensitive phrases into a browser search window, Green Dam would immediately close the browser window denying the user access to both the browser and content.
Other content being requested resulted in POP UP screens announcing the content is “harmful” to web viewers.
It is also probable (although not confirmed) that when a user did try to use those sensitive phrases or access porn sites, that the attempt would be recorded and sent to authorities. This would be the equivalent of state-sponsored spyware being loaded on computers.
Within China many protests were threatened by activists demanding the government Ministry of Information and Information Technology rescind their order to install the software prior to the 1 July deadline. Even with the threat of potential civil disobedience, China also acknowledged that PC vendors and manufacturers would not have been ready to meet the deadline.
CNN reports that “had the government not delayed its controversial order that all computers be equipped with Green Dam by July 1, the result would have been the same — Chinese computer retailers were far from ready.” Manufacturers assembling and distributing computers in China include Dell, Lenovo, and Hewlett-Packard.
While the US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and the US Trade Representative Ron Kirk have sent letters of protest to the Chinese government, as well as their counterparts from the European Union and other international trade groups, it is probably domestic pressure that led to the delay. Chinese groups all around the country promised to boycott, including rather prominent Chinese personalities such as Ai Wei, the artist who designed the famous “Bird’s Nest Stadium” for the Beijing Olympics.
Reuters reported Wei organized a “Green Dam Party” for Internet users to protest the software deadline by gathering a large group (~200) at a trendy café in Beijing. Wearing T-Shirts mocking the government program, protesters gathered to attend the rally – and were pleasantly surprised to find out they had already won the fight – or at least helped cause postponement of the deadline.
Baby steps. Learn more about Green Dam with a Google search – it is important to ensure we all understand both government attempts at censorship, as well as efforts to prevent censorship and freedom of information.
John Savageau, Long Beach
