Stacey Higginbotham

Content delivery network Akamai is still attempting to speed up the web and it has teamed up with OpenDNS to add optimized DNS routing to its arsenal of services.

For customers using OpenDNS, content hosted on Akamai’s servers will arrive faster -- as much as four times fast in some cases. So now a user in Austin, Texas who types in the URL for a YouTube video will share part of his IP address as part of the DNS request. That way, the domain name system server can route the request to a Google data center in Dallas, as opposed to one in Ireland.

This can substantially speed up access to content.

As the government discusses the pending Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable, the latest broadband adoption stats from Leichtman Research Group show that if the deal goes through, 79 percent of US broadband subscribers will find themselves under a data cap.

Because Time Warner Cable, the third largest broadband provider in the US, didn’t have a cap, the acquisition by Comcast would notably change the number of people who will go from unlimited broadband to those who have a cap or pay more the more they download.

[Commentary] Apple is reportedly building its own content delivery network and is in the process of signing peering agreements with the big Internet service providers (ISPs), according to Dan Rayburn, an industry consultant and analyst.

Rayburn uses Apple’s apparent willingness to sign peering agreements with ISPs as a way to argue that Netflix’s complaints about having to pay Comcast an interconnection fee are dubious.

But what’s dubious is not Netflix’s complaints over paid peering agreement or Apple’s willingness to enter into these agreements. Instead, the bigger issue is the secretive nature of how content is exchanged on the Internet at a time when a number of the significant content and broadband players are consolidating. Not only are these deals secretive, but they happen in markets that aren’t competitive.

Both edge providers and ISPs consolidating their power -- Google’s YouTube potentially buying Twitch, which is a growing source of traffic (about 1.35 percent of total bandwidth according to Sandvine) is an example of this consolidation on the edge provider side.

Meanwhile, while AT&T’s Dish deal or Comcast’s proposal to buy Time Warner Cable shrinks the overall ISP market -- fewer players are at the negotiating table.

If you sign up for AT&T’s GigaPower fiber-to-the-home Internet service in Austin (TX), you can expect to pay more than twice the advertised rate on plans that include video to keep your privacy and web surfing history intact.

AT&T’s GigaPower service, which currently delivers 300 Mbps to homes and will eventually get upgraded to a gigabit, launched last December in Austin. It did so with two different pricing plans, one that cost $99 a month for typical service, and another that cost $70 a month provided users agreed to let AT&T monitor their packets to see where on the web the user has been. In turn, AT&T would sell ads targeted to that customer based on his or her habits. But the $29 more a month to keep your privacy isn’t actually $29 a month.

As you add video service, the price differential between choosing privacy and letting AT&T snoop rose to $62 a month for an equivalent package and included a $49 one-time fee (see the screenshot below). Keeping your web history out of Ma Bell’s hands would have cost almost $800 the first year you signed up at the high-end and $531 at the low-end of ordering only Internet (there’s a $99 activation fee and a $7 monthly gateway box fee).

[Commentary] There are plenty of people concerned that wireline and wireless network routing, as it is now, might not work for much longer.

Between battles of peering, concerns over network neutrality, the changing shape of content and even concerns about network resiliency and privacy more people are looking at the current Internet and dreaming of a change that takes into account the growing dependence society has on the Internet. While, the projects below are not a complete list, they illustrate some of the big trends in how people with a stake in the Internet are thinking about making it better for the long haul and future network demands.

• Push everything to the edge: there is a dilemma for network architects: can pushing files out to the edge continue to solve problems as demand increases for fat content like video, but also when we’re building connected homes and cities that benefit from a more mesh-network structure where devices talk to each other as well as the public Internet?
• Peer to peer: the Internet isn’t just for serving content. It has always been a two-way communications mechanism, but in the last few years consumers have, well, consumed, more traffic than they have created online. That’s changing as more people put up videos, network their homes and communities start to use networks for sharing video content, sending medical files or other high-bandwidth applications. In some cases, while the data can be small, it tends to be sensitive to latency and distance, so sending it back to a central server doesn’t make sense.
• Named-data networks: here are a class of projects around the world and research networks that envision taking this concept to the network itself. Instead of talking to servers to get an address for a URL or device, nodes on the network are given a name and content is stored everywhere. The way content is given a name and the levels of encryption involved help define the different types of these networks.

Level 3 Communications, a company that provides bandwidth for a wide variety of customers trying to get content from point A to point B on the Internet, just accused five US Internet service providers (ISPs) and one European ISP of using their market power to interfere with how traffic flows from Level 3 onto the ISPs’ last-mile network.

The result is that customers of those ISPs experience degraded quality for services going over Level 3′s network. This is a so-called peering problem. The issue is that at the interconnection points where Netflix traffic attempts to enter the last-mile ISP’s network, there isn’t enough capacity. Usually, when that happens, the transit provider or the content provider negotiate to add more capacity by opening up more ports.

However, in recent months Level 3, Netflix and Cogent have all gone public accusing some ISPs of keeping those ports congested while trying to charge above-market rates for direct interconnection. Netflix has signed such a direct interconnection agreement with both Comcast and Verizon. But it isn’t happy about it and accuses the ISPs of abusing their market power to extract payments from content companies trying to serve the last mile.

The world is still sucking down bandwidth like it’s an elixir of the gods, with global bandwidth demand reaching 138 Tbps in 2013, a 4.5 fold increase from the 30 Tbps of capacity from five years before.

But it’s the mix of that growth that’s worth noting, according to a report out from Telegeography.

Traffic on private networks owned by Facebook, Amazon, Google and other web giants is driving the majority of that growth -- about 55 percent of it averaged over that five-year period between 2009 and 2013. The remainder comes from public network traffic operated by carriers like AT&T, Comcast, Level 3 and others. Those public carriers still make up most of the traffic, however.

Akamai released data detailing a plethora of attacks against its clients as well as the increase in broadband speeds seen around the world.

Its quarterly State of the Internet report for the fourth quarter of 2013 is chock-full of data about broadband speeds, IPv6 deployment and new types of website attacks. According to the report, the fourth quarter of 2013 saw a rise in the number of denial of service attacks. For the most part these attacks came from inside the US, hit one website and if they didn’t find a weakness, moved on.

The report also gave an update on IPv6 adoption (it’s getting better, but is still not the majority of traffic on any network except Google’s Fiber network).

Overall the global average connection speed reached 3.8 Mbps in the fourth quarter with 5.5 percent quarterly growth and 27 percent growth for the year. The US ranked tenth globally this time around with average connection speeds hitting 10 Mbps, a 25 percent improvement from the year before.

Most notably, the US also saw its fastest broadband get faster, with the average peak broadband speeds hitting 43.7 Mbps.

Finally, on the mobile side speeds are improving and we’re seeing a lot more traffic. Based on traffic data collected by Ericsson, the volume of mobile data traffic increased by 70 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013, and grew approximately 15 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2013.

Overall, Akamai is seeing more people on the Internet with faster speeds. And in the US its data is showing that broadband is getting better, even in the areas where it’s relatively slow today.

AT&T, the nation’s second largest broadband provider and wireless company, is getting into the streaming business with a $500 million joint venture created to acquire, invest in and launch a Netflix-style video streaming service.

The deal marks the first time a big US ISP has decided to go over the top with a TV service.

AT&T has joined forces with media and entertainment company the Chernin Group, and together the two companies have committed $500 million in funding to the venture. Chernin Group will bring assets to the venture, including the contribution of its majority stake in Crunchyroll, a subscription video on demand service.

[Commentary] AT&T is announcing that it plans to discuss bringing its gigabit service to 21 municipalities that have that certain set of je ne sais quoi that AT&T is looking for.

The “receptive policies” and “strongest investment cases” the company mentions in its press release dismantles the idea that network providers must serve all community members and can take away a point of leverage that municipalities have traditionally used to ensure that low-income areas also get infrastructure upgrades. And wait, there’s even more uncertainty ahead. In Austin, which AT&T is “already servicing with fiber today,” so far AT&T’s GigaPower service is limited to 300 Mbps and is set to get an upgrade to a full gigabit sometime in 2014.

Google is not blameless here, but given the new type of invasive plans that offer advertising in exchange for a lower price tag, and the fact that AT&T’s efforts to bring a gigabit so far aren’t delivering a gig, Ma Bell should have some explaining to do before these 21 cities get too excited about their hoped-for gigabit service.