Any discussion on network management these days must include a discussion on net neutrality. Why? Because limiting access to certain types or sources of content is one way to ease resource demands across a network.

What is net neutrality? Net neutrality is the idea that access to content on the Internet should be equal and fair, regardless of the access method or the provider of access. This sounds simple, but it’s not.

A neutral network is free of restrictions to all Internet content and is also free of restrictions on the equipment used to access the content.  A partially non-neutral network would be a cellular phone company.  They restrict what equipment you use to get access to the content. You typically must buy a phone they provide. A neutral network will let you use any equipment you choose when connecting to the network.

What’s the big deal? When Internet access companies are also content providers, net neutrality issues come to the forefront. A great example of this is Time Warner. Time Warner owns and produces content as diverse as Bugs Bunny videos and CNN. They also own Time Warner Cable. If you’re a Time Warner Cable subscriber, chances are that you will have unrestricted access to Bugs Bunny videos, but if you subscribe to DSL from a phone company, Bugs Bunny videos may not even be available to you. Now take the Time Warner Cable subscriber who wants to watch a video on the Fox News website.  Fox News is a direct competitor of CNN. Is it in the best interest of Time Warner Cable to restrict or filter the access to the Fox News website in order to get their subscribers onto their own website (CNN)?

But the market will win, right? Maybe. It is obvious that not all content will be owned by one access provider. That’s not the issue with net neutrality. Net neutrality is about allowing unfettered access to all types of content, regardless of ownership, viewpoints, opinions, or criticisms. It’s my opinion that net neutrality can be legislated, but access providers will find ways to show preferential access to certain types of content no matter what the regulations say, thus bypassing regulations. The reason Access providers will bypass regulations is simple, the demand for bandwidth is skyrocketing.

Unprecedented demand for bandwidth. Access providers are seeing explosive growth in bandwidth utilization. Access providers are supplying larger connections and oddly enough, consumers are using them. The old adage is, “On the Internet, content is king and the king is damned fat”. 

Recently the iTunes store started offering both high definition and standard definition formats for episodes of this season’s television shows.  You might say hurray, but the Access providers are saying OUCH! A standard definition episode might be 300 Megabytes, but a high definition episode will be anywhere from 1 gigabyte to nearly 3 gigabytes.  iTunes is only 1 reason Access providers have seen a huge jump in bandwidth utilization over the last 18 months.  

We at ipHouse have seen a 35% increase in the bandwidth utilization from our individual accounts over the last year. During that time we have transferred over 4 petabytes (4,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of email, pictures, videos, songs and who knows what else. When I divide this into my subscriber base, the numbers are staggering. It means that every single one of my subscribers is downloading 1 Megabyte of data every day, even when they’re not online!  But this is not a true representation of what is really happening on the network. Statistics show that most subscribers are downloading less than 200 kilobytes a day. 

The majority of bandwidth is being consumed by a few individuals who are transferring an unprecedented amount of data. These individuals pay their bills on time, do not utilize tech support and are advocates in the market place by praising us to their friends. Still, they’re consuming a large amount of technical resources… We categorize the top 5% of our individual subscribers as “excessive” utilization users, regardless of other business metrics.

“Excessive” utilization? Access providers are focusing on these heavy users, creating their own definitions of excessive utilization. This month excessive utilization might be 250 gigabytes. Next month it might be more, less, or the same. The Access provider holds all the cards when it comes to defining Excessive utilization. The Access provider can restrict when a subscriber can get full or limited bandwidth, what services are available (for example, bit torrent or file sharing), and how many bytes can be transferred in a given period. Access providers are already providing Quality of Service on their networks, so restricting “excessive” utilization is just another metric that becomes automatic. 

Coincidently, Quality of Service also creates what appears to be a neutral network while still meeting the business objectives of having preferential content delivered to subscribers. By defining the Quality of Service for a given set of content, or services, it becomes easy to show Net neutrality, while delivering something completely different.  Net neutrality only works when bandwidth is not limited or when bandwidth paid for on a consumption basis which leads me to…

Time based vs. consumption based markets. Consumers of services are used to two basic billing models. The first is flat rate but time based.  We are all familiar with this model. You can rent a movie for 24 hours for 99 cents. The second model is a variable rate, but purely consumption based. The water company or the electric company charge based on a small but measurable variable rate and the consumer pays for the amount of service consumed. There is also a hybrid model of time and consumption. An example of the hybrid model is a car rental that is a $39 dollars per day PLUS mileage.

Access providers had originally chosen the hybrid time/consumption model, as an example - $19.99 for 100 hours per month. The heavy costs to provide the service were tied to acquiring and supporting customers, not in the technical resources the customers used. Access providers quickly abandoned the hybrid model for fixed rate service offerings with “unlimited” access. Access providers quickly learned that the demands of some subscribers would heavily tax the infrastructure they share with other subscribers. Limiting the heavy users proved problematic as those subscribers cried foul and demanded that the Access provider provide what they were sold.  Access providers have no choice but to either jettison “Excessive” users or bill those users based on what they consume. It’s probably too late to change the model one more time and I doubt subscribers would be accepting of a model based purely on consumption.  Instead Access providers are looking for ways to offer “full spectrum” services while limiting what is being consumed in some fashion. The cable operators that provider Internet access were the first to move in this fashion.  AT&T recently joined the pack in limiting the data transfers available with each access account.

The underlying question is, can the demands of more and more bandwidth by subscribers be in concert with network neutrality?

The marriage of network policy and business objectives The answer to the above question is YES – IF subscribers are willing to pay for it.  I believe that the typical Access provider wants to offer neutral access to content.  Most Access providers do not own content and are interested in allowing their users unfettered access to content. The problem is who is going to pay for the bandwidth? Some access providers are forming alliances with content providers to support their bandwidth needs. These alliances can create sticky situations for the Access providers though. I think the better answer is simple Quality of Service offerings that manage the bandwidth demands on the network.  By keeping this issue as a technical problem, a technical answer can be found. If bandwidth demand becomes a financial issue, then the logical course of action is to implement a hybrid time/consumption billing model. While a small number of subscribers may be dismayed by the new billing model, only the excessive users will actually be impacted. But what about access to content regardless of where it originates and how much bandwidth it uses? This raises the question of regulation of Access providers… 

Regulation preventing access to networks, prevents network neutrality. Most small Access providers are not worried about getting access to the content kings of the Internet such as Google/YouTube, but Access providers are worried about the old media empires restricting access to content.  Regulation now prevents small Access providers (like ipHouse) from accessing the cable and phone company physical networks for providing network access to our subscribers.  Since we’re locked out of the telecom side, the next logical step is for the content companies, (who own the cable companies) to restrict content access to their own Internet access subscribers.

Time will tell, but net neutrality is a war that is likely to be lost by consumers and small Access providers. Even though most of the individuals battles are winnable, the small Access provider just doesn’t have the resources to win this war, even if we have legislation on our side.

I was also asked to talk about managing data content as an Access provider. within the following topics:

File sharing / Individual Privacy: Should access providers become data managers? I think this question is best asked, why should Access providers become data managers for content owners? I cannot find an analogy in any of the historical media distribution systems that is similar to the models that have been proposed for Access providers. One model makes the Access provider responsible for their subscribers’ file downloads, with the Access Provider paying the Content Owner for all downloaded media. That’s similar to the old C.O.D. model used for shipping chattels.   Why on earth would Access providers want to collect revenues for a third party?

Another model is a $5.00 per month ISP tax for music. The Access provider collects a tax and sends the revenue to someone to be distributed to someone else, thus adding a middle man. Huh? Do they think Access providers are a replacement for the jukebox companies of yesteryear?

The answer is no. Access providers are not data managers for Content Owners, nor should they become data managers by legislation. Still, stranger things have happened.  It’s been more than a decade since the Internet Revolution and people are STILL trying to figure out how to munge their old business model, be it music distribution or classified ads, into the Internet connected world.

Who would pay for such management? Ok, lets say either model gets some foothold. Access providers are acutely aware of bandwidth and resources required to shape bandwidth as it is delivered to subscribers. The infrastructure required to measure file downloads is technically available, but the cost to implement such a system is not worth the costs when divided into the number of subscribers. Assuming the Access provider is collecting transfers or a flat tax, who will pay the Access provider for the infrastructure to measure and tabulate the data? Adding systems adds costs and managing data is not a cheap cost.  So the question should really be, why are old world Content Owners forcing their old business model into the new world? Update the business model and the question of who will pay becomes moot.

What about the privacy of subscribers?  Who will protect them? Part of the problem with monitoring subscribers use of Internet access is just the “Big Brother” aspect of snooping into innocent and private communications. What do Access providers do when they stumble upon a discussion about a possible transportation strike or a shortage of a flu vaccine? Are Access providers responsible for monitoring the activities of their subscribers? Are telephone companies responsible for the drug deals that are setup via the telephone network?  

Today, Access providers are bound by existing law to protect consumer information and are treated as publishers and as carriers without liability to the content that traverses their networks. Assuming Content Owners get their way, this will all change and your tastes and interests will become just another metric Access providers will have in their database. Access providers need to manage their subscribers to the benefit of their own business, not the business of Content Owners.

Where does that leave net neutrality?  As much as you might think that Content Owners want net neutrality, think again.  Dedicated partnerships between Content Owners and Access providers might force subscribers to pay for content, fully to the benefit of Content Owners and logically, Access providers can restrict the choice of the content available.  Legislating net neutrality might be a good thing or it might not. Consumers need to speak out and make sure their voices are heard before they don’t have a way to speak out.  

Peace.

-Bil

ipHouse is working hard to position our network and data center for the future.  This fall, we initiated a huge virtualization project. By using high-performance, efficient, virtual servers, we have been able to reduce the total number of physical machines used for hosting email and web services without impacting performance. Mike, our CTO, has been blogging about the virtualization project in his multipart series, “Virtualization and the ISP.”

Of course, virtualization is only part of the solution. IT departments need to think about the power consumption vs. performance of every machine on their network and every machine they are thinking of getting. Decommission machines that are no longer needed. Replace outdated energy hogs and stop getting more machine than is needed for the task at hand.

For years, data center and colocation power and cooling costs have been hidden or ignored. ipHouse is working to fix that. We are looking at both the power used by our equipment and the power consumed by colocated equipment. Colocation pricing is being revised to have a power consumption component. We want customers to consider power when they are choosing servers. We are also encouraging customers to take another look at their network assumptions. Especially with virtualization, separate services do not necessarily need to be on physically separate machines. 

If you are considering a move to a more energy efficient network design and want a second opinion on server specs and choices, let us know. We have been helping customers make infrastructure decisions for more than a decade and want to make sure you make the right choices for your organization.

Radio and television broadcasters as well as Broadway theater producers are very disappointed by the ruling. In their tests, the use of the new frequency interfered with wireless microphones and television signals.

The F.C.C. is confident that the interference problem can be solved by strict regulation of any new devices that use the white space.  To be certified by the commission, any new devices will need to include technology that will detect existing broadcast channels and change their own broadcast to avoid any possibility of interference.

It will be interesting to watch how these new spectrums are used. Their potential has been described as Wi-Fi on steroids. Perhaps the most immediate devices will be used for applications within the home such as connecting your computer to your TV. It remains to be seen if the new spectrums can solve the broader home or business to ISP issues we have seen with existing Wi-Fi technology.

For more information on this, check out ipHouse customer, Ann Treacy’s Blandin on Broadband blog, the New York Times article, and the official F.C.C. web site.

Get to know the ipHouse staff better — new, or at least edited, staff bios are now up. 

If there are items you love or hate about the site, please let us know.
We want our site to be informative, easy to navigate and maybe a tad bit entertaining.

Many of you probably know our other aliases.  If not, here they are:

     hostmaster@iphouse.net
     Domain and IP address Requests
     for your existing ipHouse hosted domain name

     noc@iphouse.net
     Existing Colocation, Dedicated & Managed Server Requests

     webmaster@iphouse.net
     Issues regarding our website
     or your existing ipHouse hosted website 

     abuse@iphouse.net
     Abuse Reports

And of course for sales and billing questions, you can use:

     sales@iphouse.net  
     billing@iphouse.net 

By using one of the specific aliases above, you help us, help you by sending your question or request directly to the group that will work on it. Our web site has been updated to show all the above aliases.

We can and do patch our machines and lock them down as much as possible.  However, as an ISP, our job is also to make sure that information flows smoothly to and from your account. To a very real extent, you are in direct control of the weakest security link for your account, your password.

We have lately seen a rash of accounts compromised because they had passwords that were less than ideal. You may think your account isn’t worth hacking, but you would be wrong.

Most hackers do not target individual accounts to determine the best ones to compromise. They just setup their password cracking programs, aim them at encrypted password files and let them do their thing. The password files are encrypted but have to be publicly accessible in order for customers to actually log-in to their accounts. The cracking programs are very fast and very sophisticated. In the first couple minutes they will have tried all dictionary words and common names not only in English but in other languages. Then they move on to any and every password combination that includes the actual username or makes simple number-letter substitutions like using a 0 for an o.

Once an account is compromised, the hackers can use it to gain access to other systems, read or re-direct your email and, most commonly, use your account to send spam out to the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter who you are or how interesting your email is, accounts are compromised on an equal opportunity basis.

Some people feel that it is more trouble than it is worth to have a secure password. Remember, it is okay to write down your password, just don’t write it down in an easily accessible location and never keep it with your account name. Some people use the phrase trick to create secure passwords that are easy to remember. For example: “Traveling up the amazon in 1974 by boat was a great vacation!” becomes the password “tuTA’74bbGV!” Don’t be afraid of forgetting your clever, secure password. We all forget passwords sometimes, just call the friendly ipHouse support team and we can help you re-set your forgotten password.  

Protect your account. It is a good idea to change your password annually if not more often. If you are still using the password that was auto-generated for you when your account was originally setup, change it now.  

Does your password pass the 5 basic rules of password security?

(1) At least 8 characters
     (our system can handle passwords of over 200 characters).
(2) Not a dictionary word or a name.
(3) Not a dictionary word or a name with select numbers substituted for letters like 0 for o or 1 for l.
(4) A mix of lower case and capital letters with numbers and symbols thrown in for good measure.
(5) Your password is completely unrelated to your name and your account name.

You can change your ipHouse password now by going to:
https://ipmom.iphouse.com/ 

And remember, you need more than one secure password. If you use the same password for multiple accounts or in multiple places, that creates its own level of insecurity.

Recently I sat down to talk with David Pogoff of Complex Programming Incorporated. David uses ipHouse for corporate email and domain hosting, as well as his DSL connection.

David is a math and statistics expert, implementing many of his solutions using his background in software development and database design. He consults primarily for small to medium-sized businesses and helps his clients with all their computer needs from software installation to network security. He has worked with individuals to setup their home offices with efficient, secure connections to their work places.

David describes himself as being, “vocal and tenacious about raising hell when a client’s vender doesn’t deliver.”  His clients appreciate this dedication. Thus far, all his clients have come from word-of-mouth referrals.

David shared with me that he wants to be equally vocal when a vender does a good job. He thinks that, “Many ISPs do not do good work. ipHouse has delivered. It seems like you guys can do no wrong.”  David is impressed with the breadth of knowledge of ipHouse staff. “It is nice to have a vender whose technical support team is savvy about issues beyond the traditional support call.”

Peer-to-peer applications, including BitTorrent, the most well-known, give Internet users the ability to view and share high-quality video. The FCC found that Comcast’s network management practices were inconsistent with the concept of an open and accessible network and had significant effects on their customers. These effects were made worst by the fact that Comcast tried to hide what it was doing. It changed its story more than once and only admitted the extent to which it was blocking traffic when confronted by solid third-party data.

The FCC was particularly concerned with how this secrecy interacted with the anti-competitive nature of Comcast’s blocking policies; stating that:

The Commission also concluded that the anticompetitive harms caused by Comcast’s conduct have been compounded by the company’s unacceptable failure to disclose its practices to consumers.  Because Comcast did not provide its customers with notice of the fact that it interfered with customers’ use of peer-to-peer applications, customers had no way of knowing when Comcast was interfering with their connections.  As a result, the Commission found that many consumers experiencing difficulty using only certain applications would not place blame on Comcast, where it belonged, but rather on the applications themselves, thus further disadvantaging those applications in the competitive marketplace.     

It is not surprising that Comcast attempted to block traffic.  In fact, Bil MacLeslie, ipHouse’s CEO, predicted in a StarTribune Op Ed piece in 1999 that providers would eventually begin to preferentially filter content.

Comcast has new plans for how to manage the traffic on their network. They are now planning on selectively limiting bandwidth to high bandwidth users. The New York Times had a good article on the new bandwidth restrictions back in June.

In its official ruling, the FCC reiterated that while providers need to allow consumers to access legal Internet content, ISP’s can still block unlawful content such as child pornography, pirated music or videos. 

ipHouse engineers have been waging a battle against spam since the 1990s. As the Internet has grown and changed during the last 15+ years, the amount of spam has increased exponentially.

The problem of online viruses has also grown. Effective spam and virus filtering is now an essential component of any mail server.

The dilemma is always how to balance false positives with reliable protection. 

 Mike Horwath, ipHouse senior admin, recently wrote about his frustration trying to find the perfect anti-spam solution.

ipHouse has developed a fairly comprehensive anti-spam solution for mailboxes hosted on our mail cluster. Not only are all incoming emails scanned for spam and viruses by our MailFoundry system, there are also a wide range of filters and blacklists that can be applied on a per mailbox basis. These customizable filters help customers get only the mail they want, because one person’s spam is another person’s legitimate email.

Through ipMom, ipHouse customers can decided exactly how many hoops they want their mail to jump through on its way to their inbox. Options include turning greylisting on or off, enabling various sender checks, and applying both DNS (IP address) blacklists and RHS (domain name) blacklists to incoming emails.

Greylisting is one of the most simple and most effective ways to stop spam.  If greylisting is turned on, new incoming email is deferred from the sending mail server. Mail servers that are configured correctly will just re-send the message and on the second send, it is successfully delivered to your inbox. This simple technique works because many spammers use mail servers that are not correctly configured.

Sender Checks check both the sending mail server and the domain name associated with the sender to make sure they are configured properly. Sender Checks can block a fair amount of legitimate email and should be used with caution.  

Blacklists range from the highly conservative with very few false positives to the gung-ho that seem to block messages if they even look at another message that might be spam. More detailed explanations of the different types of spam and virus checks are available on the ipHouse support pages.

ipHouse has long provided customers running their own mail servers the ability to have their incoming email scanned by the MailFoundry system. Yet we have been frustrated by our inability to do more.  This summer, our engineers have been working on new anti-spam solutions for customers with their own mail servers.  We are just finishing the beta tests and hope to formally launch the product by the end of summer.

We are very excited about this upcoming feature.

They are:  

218-258-0005 (Buhl, MN)
507-697-0004 (Morton, MN)
507-788-4037 (Odin, MN)
507-873-4029 (Slayton, MN) 

Most ipHouse access accounts (including DSL) come with some dial-up hours.  We maintain local dial-up numbers in communities across Minnesota and the US.  They give you the ability to have general Internet access and check email, even when you are traveling.

To find local dial-up numbers outside the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, just type a local phone number for the location you are visiting into our phone number search on the dial-up support page.

If you have any questions about dial-up access, including how many hours are included with your account, please contact our support team at 612-337-6340.

If you want to know how many dial-up hours you have used so far this month, just log into ipMom using your ipHouse email address and password.

Happy traveling!