I have been a consumer of streaming web media almost as soon as it was available. 

The current situation is like shortwave radio.   When it's all tuned into a station you want, it's great...but then there are all these "drifts".   Drifts such as two days ago when I was watching The Simpsons on Hulu.com and 20 minutes into it, my ISP started bandwidth throttling me.   They seem to do this between the hours of 7pm and 1am.  So, if I want to catch up with New Amsterdam, I have to do it on Saturday morning.

It works great -- when it works...but it still works great.  I can't see how anything can beat a WiMax network like Clearwire's.   Case in point.  I subscribe to Rhapsody To Go.  If I want to listen to music in my car, I have to download it to my Sansa, then plug that in to my car radio.

With mobile Clearwire I should be able to stream through a laptop right to my car (as long as they weren't bandwidth throttling me).

Yes, for many years, it's almost, almost been there...complete access to all media on demand...and yet, it's not quite there.   I kind of hope it stays that way, so that I'm continually amazed!

Hi guys,

There's been an interesting discussion developing here. Sorry for chipping in late, but I've a bit busy. Actually most of what I would have replied is already worded by Paul - thanks. 

It's hard to mention 'Liability' and 'Internet Availability' in one sentence, since there are so many parties and factors involved in bringing information or an application to the end user. If a page won't load it may be the user's PC freezing, the web server being overloaded, or anything inbetween.  I've been professionally involved mostly with network infrastructure, so that's what I mainly had in mind when writing the article.

I agree with DennisB that the perceived reliability of existing phone systems may vary significantly with where you live and who your phone provider is. I was indeed referring to land lines when I compared with the 'old days'; mobile telephony has of course a big uncertain factor in radio coverage. That and batteries going dead... Apart from that, I can't remember that I've ever not been able to make a call. 

The main point that I wanted to bring to attention is that there has been a big change in attitude taking place together with the so-called convergence between telecom and datacom that started in the 90s. In the years BC (before convergence) telecom equipment was synonym with telephone switches and transmission systems that were engineered for voice calls. Those were expensive systems, designed for reliability with a lot of built-in redundancy.

Telcos had their monopolies and many were state-owned. Some, like AT&T were building their own equipment, and others usually had a long standing preferred supplier, so there was little competitive pressure on vendors to make cheaper systems.

As deregulation kicked in, operators suddenly had to become competitive. This coincided with the growth of the Internet, requiring only fat dumb pipes, but for which the traditional telcos had to use their expensive voice-targeted SONET/SDH systems. Naturally the telcos were eyeing cheaper datacom equipment and stripped down NextGen SONET/SDH, but they often had rigid procurement processes, allowing nothing but 'carrier grade' equipment in their networks. As a result, around that time - late 90s, early 00s - just about any tinker toy vendor started branding their boxes 'carrier grade', and although some improvements - like redundant power supplies - were made, it just wasn't the same level of designed-in reliability.

The change from a stable, regulated and monopolized market for telecom equipment and services to a deregulated, competitive and sometimes even commoditized industry is of course irreversible, and by all means I agree we're much better off now in terms of choice of providers and cost for bandwidth, but we've sacrified reliability.

We're kinda used to service outages, and by the time my business starts to depend too much on the network to live with my MSOs performance, I can always get a backup DSL line from the phone company. The 'three finger salute' (ctrl-alt-del) has nested itself in our culture, but I dread the moment that my car will tell me to 'please reboot'.

Wait, so you've made millions of cell calls and never had a failed or dropped call? You are one lucky dude. Unless you're just talking about land lines, but who (the hell) uses those anymore?

Why not measure the "reliability" of a telephone network during a blackout, when you get that pesky "all circuits are busy" message. Telcos don't consider that a network failure, but its a much better analogy than during other times. The internet doesn't have the luxury of "more bandwidth than it needs". Telephone networks fail when there are more calls than bandwidth available as well.

Basic queuing theory explains this quite easily. The cost of having an internet network that has no congestion is simply  a higher price than people are willing to pay. In order to have guaranteed low-latency nearing zero congestion, you'd have to have 40% more bandwidth than you need in order to handle bursts of peak usage.  

Additionally, telephony bandwidth requirements can be precisely predicted, whereas internet bandwidth usage is elastic; the more bandwidth you have, the more will be used. The only way to guarantee reliability is at the leaf nodes (ISPs), but its simply not in any ISP's best interest to have more bandwidth than they need. This is precisely why telcos are regulated, or at least were, so that they could be guaranteed a profit rather than trying to make as much as they could with meager infrastructure resources.

I'm also not sure you're correct in your math; I'd be surprised if more than 1 in several million TCP connections failed due to infrastructure failures in the US. Most failures are due to overloaded servers; not failures of the backbone or the network itself. 

The performance of your phone seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Leo was not suggesting that telehony is flawless but they have succeeded over the years to meet the target reliability of five-nines.In the telephone industry, network reliability is measured by Defects per million which is the number of calls per million that did not go through the first time because of a network procedural, hardware or software failure. How many ISPs can boast of even two-nines (99%) reliability?

The individual ISPs can achieve a higher level of reliability but the reliability of end-to-end paths spanning over multiple ISPs is significantly lower.Due to the lack of co-operative mechnasims among ISPs, it becomes difficult to guarantee a higher reliability across ISP boundaries. I think this is the point Leo's post is attempting to address. 

Whether its a legitimate concern or not, my point was that his premise that telephony is somehow flawless is far from the case. Frankly, I find the internet much more reliable than my cell phone in most cases. 

Perhaps I'm not privy to the problems that you have. Whats unreliable about the internet? Maybe you're just doing business with bad vendors or ISPs; in which case you shouldn't be blaming "the inetnet" for a lack or reliability. 

Hi dennisB,

I do share your concern about cost but i think Leo's post raised a legitimate concern about internet reliability especially at a time when we are presently shaping our exixtence on the internet. With the increasing popularity of the Mobile web and other high bandwidth activities that rely on a reliable internet, i think your last statement may be a little bit off the mark. I can agree that end-end reliability may not be possible in either telephone or the internet but to say they are not necessary is to underestimate its significance.

So what will your advice be to those ISPs who will be facing massive reliablity challenges in the near future? Should they just take a passive stance or at least be seen doing something to alleviate the situation. I believe with better innovation, we may see a better reliable internet in the near future which is well position to meet our varying internet needs.

While I do agree that the internet cannot be 100% reliable, I do think we can expect more than what we get. Especially if we're basically being forced (good or bad) in to having to have heavy reliance on it.

 From a consumer's point of view, I think better reliability can be expected if, for nothing else, what people are paying. Especially when you may or may not be able to get a refund credit if something goes wrong.

I guess, cost aside, reliability and what to expect would depend on what you use the internet for. If you're just a casual user, you might not think about it much if you get kicked off or you lose the connection for other reasons. But, if you rely on it for work, a lost connection is something that you cannot afford.

We seem to be focusing on a middle level in these discussions.  There are two other levels of interest: 1) the lower level "on the ground" questions of why sytems fail temporarily. In Paul Whyte's story one presuimes the engine was "flooded" (whatever that means!), in one of mine that there was frost on the circuit board, (but what explains the other instances?) and 2) the higher level "big picture" questions of what randomness really means and whether philosophically we must always expect Determinism in machines and Free Will in human beings.

My writing partner Nikki Olson writes:

"I think it is very interesting to compare random acts of machines to those of humans. For one, the Free Will-Determinism debate rests heavily on to what extent we find human actions 'random'. This becomes very important in political philosophy when we talk about things like rights and responsibility.To a great extent we find humans responsible for their seemingly random acts.  We don't hold computers etc. responsible for their unpleasant random acts, we hold their human creators responsible. However, I will admit that in moments of anger and frustration with my computer my thoughts towards it can resemble thoughts I may have for a person. If I am angry with it for its random behavior, I may click the same button over and over so as to irritate it, give up on it and swear to buy something other than a Dell next time...Ultimately however I don't question whether  its random action is truly random or consider it at all responsible for its random acts as I would another person. With sentient beings we may question something like 'intention', which we do not presently do with AI, but will perhaps be able to in the future."


"A significant question in philosophy, and the heart of the Free Will debate is whether there truly is something we can call random in this world. The word as applied to human behavior is ofter associated with acts of kindness, the mystery that is 'random acts of kindness'. Anyway..."

All the best. - Kim

I think the basic premise of telephony "reliability" is just wrong in modern times. Cell phones have changed that. Dropped calls are almost expected. No bars in not-so-urban places is annoying but hardly a grounds to change vendors. 

 The truth is, that occasional drop-outs or dropped packets is not the end of the world. The internet and telephony are not banking networks where dropped transactions are wholly unacceptable. The trade off of complete security or complete reliability is too high in terms of cost and redundancy.

 My company sells internet appliances, and I often marvel at ISPs who spend a tremendous amount of money on redundancy, which just ends up complicating their network to the point where failures are actually more likely. I don't like it when my internet connection goes down for a few seconds, but I'm also not willing to pay double to avoid the problem. Total reliable is not necessary in either telephony or the internet.

Hi Leo,

Diversification is the key, both for reliability and for safety and security.  The price of devices continues to fall. If you are carrying one or more cell phones which can be used the moment the land line or VOIP phone fails, the absolute reliability of the land line or VOIP phone becomes less important. 

Redundancy, diversification, and fail-proof security are needed, so if you lose one cell phone or other convergent device or it is stolen, you have another containing exactly the same stored information, and each device contain security features ensuring only you can use it.  Multiple options, multiple devices like this is the ideal world, not one perfect device. 

“Backing up” your life would consist of regularly copying the data in the cell phone or convergent device you carry to your backup device.  That is the future we are heading toward, not one is which one device represents your one and only access to the phone system and your personal data.

All the best. - Kim