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An ISP for the 21st century.
Back in about '94 there were lots of people about into BBS and Fido, and there were lots of new computer owning people wanting to get online and connected, there was this new WWW thing see...
So I met up with this local guy called Mark, he had borrowed about half the cost of a small house and bought a couple of racks of modems, a server or two and pipe into the backbone, such as it was. At the time I had some spare capital and I could have thrown my lot in with him, but his service was £20 a month to dial into his new, fast, 14.4k modems, plus the phone bills at 3.5 pence per minute, plus when you finally got on to the "WWW" there wasn't any content there to speak of, so I looked at all this and decided that while I might be a customer of his, I wasn't going to buy into it as it was obviously doomed.
I was wrong and he was right, mainly because I failed to see that his main targeted customer was business, the other local ISP who targeted punters lasted about two years.
So basically in those days an ISP was someone you paid money to in order to log-in to their systems and thus connect to the wider internet, oh, and you got 10 megabytes of web space too, and an email account.
So the ISP was really just a glorified BBS node, and that was all she wrote, and your phone bills were still IRO 500 quid per quarter....
Fourteen years have passed, and today the ISP is quite different.
Back in those days the eventual head of what became one of the country's largest ISP's said to me "the internet is all about copyright violation anyway" and he was OK with that, but start screwing with the network as a whole by dumping malware or suchlike and your account was history and so were you... sure you got a warning, but it was a serious one, an "or else" and once sanctioned you were basically cut off.
Since those days the role of the ISP has changed, and indeed the legal status too (of which changes I have played my part in) but the biggest change is the basic business model.
In those days you bought or leased a pipe, and then you turned around and tried to sell it at a profit, and the sweet spot commercially was around ten to twelve customers per lines in and modems, (back then phone lines automatically disconnected you after 2 hours) any more than that and people got frustrated unable to log-in, any less and you had under-utilised capacity, but the basic deal was buy X, cut it into slices and sell the slices for X plus profit margins.
Today the business model is first you get your customers, then you put those slices together, then you take out your profits and with whatever is left you buy a pipe, and since connections are now "always on" we now call this a "contention ratio" on the customer side and "oversubscription" on the ISP capacity side. (Technically contention ratio is how many customers share a specific pipe to the ISP, in the old days, "modem sharing")
So contention ratios started out, naturally enough, at about ten or twelve to one, but times passed, and today contention ratios of between 20:1 and 50:1 are not uncommon, plus the sum of all customers also wildly exceeds upstream pipes from the ISP.
The other thing that changed was routing redundancy, back then this early ISP had a main T1 connection, cost a lot of money, but it also had dual bonded 128k ISDN as a backup, and a single 64k ISDN as a third backup, with priority to port 25/110 for email, and when the main pipe was up these "backchannels" were used for the less important stuff like syncing the ISP's internal NNTP pool and suchlike.
With the change in business model all this stuff went, when you take your profits out and use what's left to buy a pipe then all these things get the chop, local NNTP, cut it, local FTP, cut it, redundant routing, cut it, round robin DNS, cut it, redundant hardware, cut it, perhaps most significant of all, network abuse attack dogs, cut it, but after a while even this isn't enough.
So all that is left is throttling, euphemistically called network neutrality or traffic shaping or QoS if you happen to be the one holding the tap, but, it is throttling plain and simple.
So the brand that is Virgin media sells me a 20mbit down 768k up pipe for 40 quid a month, well, no, that isn't true, they took over the 10m/512k blueyonder pipe, and "upgraded" it by opening the tap a bit, thus overselling the resource, then proceeded to continue to oversell, so that irrespective of the time of night or day I am lucky to see a sustained 450k down out of my fat 20 mbit pipe.
Which isn't that surprising, because a little digging reveals that there are, including me, 68 cable modems sharing the same node as me, so the actual contention ratio here has gone from 7:1 with Blueyonder to 68:1 with Virgin.
And so, just before the NTL Business broadband (20mbit down, 1 mbit up, guaranteed no traffic shaping, guaranteed better than 12:1 CR, guaranteed SLA, guaranteed phone, all for the same money as Virgin) guys turn up to do the site survey the postman arrives...
Junk mail, including one huge glossy "ooh, shiney" red brochure from Virgin, the guys who have oversold my 20 mbit connection down to 25% of nameplate already, and what does it say?
My 20 mbit connection is cheaper than I am paying now. £10 p.c.m. for the first 6 months, thereafter £20 p.c.m. for a 20 mbit (ooh, "up to") connection, how could anyone possibly not want a piece of this bargain of the century.
So if I thought the traffic shaping (what traffic shaping? have you tried rebooting your computer sir?) was bad NOW, wait a few months, except I will be long gone as a customer... same fibre though...
Which brings us to the point and title of the article, an ISP for the 21st century, what do we want?
Well, I dunno what you want, but I know what I want from a 21st century ISP.
By a Smart Box*** I mean a box that performs the modem function, a box that povides DNS for my subnet, a box that provides a firewall, and a box that provides traffic shaping for my subnet, all in one, with a web based admin interface.
By all means, ship the box with a default set of parameters in order that port 25 / 100 is top priority and firewalled to 5 recipients per email and 100 emails an hour, by all means, ship the box with a default set of parameters that limits torrent ports to 10% of my pipe, by all means ship the box so that by default it reports these basic settings and indeed total packets tx/rx once every 48 hours to a central server, by all means, ship the box so it doesn't function at all until a unique admin password has been set.
I'd really like to log onto this box and see a webmin style graphical analysis of each IP address on my subnet and have that boken down into types of traffic, ooh, box #3 is using 45% of my traffic, and 66% of box #3 appears to be port 8080... hmmm
In an ideal world the 21st century ISP will also offer as an option a subsidised Locust Mesh box, with the market penetration an ISP has before you know it you have a cloud of mesh boxes providing a redundant and resilient alternative pipe, actually saving the ISP money, and if it was subsidised I really would not mind default parameters on it that ensured it worked best as a redundant backbone, priority to traffic controlled by the Smart Box.
Of course, what I am describing here has an analogy.
Virgin broadband and the other ISP's have in effect become MicroSoft.
The freaky stuff like smoothwall and locust and so on is Linux, it may be cool but stands zero chance against the MicroSoft in the business and financial real world.
But a Red Hat or Cobalt Raq or suchlike approach could work, the Locust product is *very* neat, the hardware is neat, the software is neat, the only thing missing is the business plan and implementation, there is nobody with any clout behind it.
But mainly, we need a 21st Century ISP, like Mark 14 years ago, he sold connectivity, period, what it said on the tin, period, with the best technology of the day to provide that and nothing else, period.
I'll leave you with a thought. As much as 10% of the UK electricity consumption is absorbed by telecomms networks, and while a redundant cloud of mesh boxes won't be able to compete on bandwidth, every single mesh node could be powered by solar PV and a lead acid battery for the nights.
So the future of computing is the return of the thin client, and that makes it all utterly dependent on the pipes being transparent and of sufficient capacity, and yet every single ISP out there, without exception, is working towards overstuffing the pipes and making them as opaque as possible.
If you thought malware and spam were the big wars on the network, just wait until traffic shaping vs port forwarding / tunneling / encryption starts to take off, you ain't seen nothin yet.