Commercial Internet Service Provider Research Articles

EXO: A commons-based community network Internet Service Provider, description and subscribers usage patterns

The advent of Wi-Fi in the 1990s stimulated the creation of Community networks (CNs), a new networking paradigm deployed and maintained by their users. The non-profit and grassroots self-organization of CNs has shown significant potential in enhancing communication technologies grounded in ethical values, transcending mere Internet expansion to contribute to broader social impacts. Since its conception, hundreds of CNs have been deployed worldwide. However, many have faltered, primarily due to a lack of solid economic models and legal setup. This paper presents Expansió Xarxa Oberta (eXO) association, a commons Internet Service Provider (ISP). In contrast to commercial ISPs, eXO follows the same grassroots principles of CNs. Establishing a commons-based ISP is challenging, yet it is a key component for the sustainability and success of CNs. Therefore, our paper aims to dissect the complexity of a commons ISP by explaining eXO, a pioneering example that has already been in production for more than 14 years. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a commons ISP is described in all its components.To describe eXO, we have proceeded in two parts. In the first one, we delineate the organizational structure, economics, funding mechanisms, activities, legal framework, and infrastructure. To gain more insight on eXO, in the second part, we conduct a technical analysis of traffic data collected from eXO’s core router, elucidating subscriber usage patterns. Our study encompasses various subscriber categories, including regular and financially subsidized users, Wi-Fi and optical fiber access, and traffic characteristics such as volume, TCP/UDP usage, services accessed, and traffic distribution across countries.

Can We Save the Public Internet?

The goal of this short document is to explain why recent developments in the Internet's infrastructure are problematic. As context, we note that the Internet was originally designed to provide a simple universal service - global end-to-end packet delivery - on which a wide variety of end-user applications could be built. The early Internet supported this packet-delivery service via an interconnected collection of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that we will refer to collectively as the "public Internet." The Internet has fulfilled its packet-delivery mission far beyond all expectations and is now the dominant global communications infrastructure. By providing a level playing field on which new applications could be deployed, the Internet has enabled a degree of innovation that no one could have foreseen. To improve performance for some common applications, "enhancements" such as caching (as in content-delivery networks) have been gradually added to the Internet. The resulting performance improvements are so significant that such enhancements are now effectively necessary to meet current content delivery demands. Despite these tangible benefits, this document argues that the way these enhancements are currently deployed seriously undermines the sustainability of the public Internet and could lead to an Internet infrastructure that reaches fewer people and is largely concentrated among only a few large-scale providers. We wrote this document because we fear that these developments are now decidedly tipping the Internet's playing field towards those who can deploy these enhancements at massive scale, which in turn will limit the degree to which the future Internet can support unfettered innovation. This document begins by explaining our concerns but goes on to articulate how this unfortunate fate can be avoided. To provide more depth for those who seek it, we provide a separate addendum with further detail.

DSP-Based Flexible-Waveform and Multi-Application 5G Fiber-Wireless System

This article reports the implementation and experimental performance investigation of a DSP-based flexible-waveform fiber-wireless (FiWi) system for 5G enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and new vertical applications. Our radio over fiber-based fronthaul solution uses a wavelength-division-multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) infrastructure, from a commercial Internet service provider, to enable 5G operation over multiple frequency bands, including: a DSP and flexible waveform-based signal at 788 MHz, which can be set as generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) or filtered orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (F-OFDM); 5G new radio (NR) signals at 3.5 or 26 GHz in accordance to 3GPP Release 15; an additional vector 26 GHz signal with bandwidth of up to 800 MHz. The DSP-based functionality provides digital pre-distortion (DPD), besides the real-time waveform generation. Experimental results demonstrate 4.41 Gbit/s total throughput in the air in accordance to the 3GPP requirements, as well as an innovative low-latency M2M application based on PROFINET standard.

Broadband and narrowband Internet in Nepal

This paper examines the relationship between asymmetric digital subscriber line (broadband) and dial-up (narrowband) Internet subscribers in Nepal. While the number of broadband subscribers is increasing, the number of narrowband subscribers has been decreasing over the last couple of years. As expected, broadband subscribers “Granger cause” narrowband subscribers to decline. This suggests that digital subscriber lines are a superior good that is a substitute and replace dial-up services. This relationship should be stable in the short-run. The public sector incumbent Nepal Telecom provides both digital subscriber lines and dial-up access while commercial Internet Service Providers supply dial-up services. Hence, a large proportion of the revenue of the commercial providers is likely to be eroded compared to the incumbent. Given this context and to ensure that there is free and fair competition to support rapid growth in the Internet sector, the Government of Nepal needs to address important regulatory and policy issues related to this narrowband–broadband transition.

Probabilistic top-k query: Model and application on web traffic analysis

Top-k ranking of websites according to traffic volume is important for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to understand network status and optimize network resources. However, the ranking result always has a big deviation with actual rank for the existence of unknown web traffic, which cannot be identified accurately under current techniques. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to approximate the actual rank. This method associates unknown web traffic with websites according to statistical probabilities. Then, we construct a probabilistic top-k query model to rank websites. We conduct several experiments by using real HTTP traffic traces collected from a commercial ISP covering an entire city in northern China. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques can reduce the deviation existing between the ground truth and the ranking results vastly. In addition, we find that the websites providing video service have higher ratio of unknown IP as well as higher ratio of unknown traffic than the websites providing text web page service. Specifically, we find that the top-3 video websites have more than 90% of unknown web traffic. All these findings are helpful for ISPs understanding network status and deploying Content Distributed Network (CDN).

Workshop on internet economics (WIE2013) report

On December 12-13 2013, CAIDA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted the (invitation-only) 4th interdisciplinary Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center. This workshop series provides a forum for researchers, commercial Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to inform current and emerging regulatory and policy debates. The theme for this year's workshop was the economic health of the Internet ecosystem, including emphasis on the cost of and revenue sources to support content delivery, the quality of user experience, economic and policy influences on and effects of emerging specialized services, and the role of data in evaluating ecosystem health. This report describes the discussions and presents relevant open research questions identified by participants. Slides presented at the workshop and a copy of this final report are available at http://www.caida.org/workshops/wie/1312/.

Characterizing and Modeling Microblog Traffic in Cellular Data Network Based on Massive Data Analysis

In this paper, we present an approach to characterize and model microblog traffic in cellular data network. In contrast to previous methods, our approach is based on the cloud computing platform and the cluster system, including the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the parallel processing software framework MapReduce. Whats more, we focus on the contrast of Sina and Tencent microblogs. We analyze the features of microblog traffic in four aspects of increasing details, which are (i) traffic diurnal pattern, (ii) modeling the traffic distribution, (iii) user distribution, (iv) diversity usage of microblogs. This approach of analyzing microblog traffic comprehensively is probably the most important contribution of this paper. Furthermore, our approach has two important features. First, the massive mobile subscriber data we used in our experiments was collected from a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) covering an entire province in Southern China. Therefore, it ensures the results indicate the true characteristics of microblog traffic in network. Second, we investigate that the microblog traffic fits with the power law distribution. We demonstrate the electiveness of our approach on three real datasets. Our results are important for cellular network operators to learn user behavior and optimize the future microblog application designs.

Workshop on internet economics (WIE2012) report

On December 12-13 2012, CAIDA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted the (invitation-only) 3rd interdisciplinary Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center. The goal of this workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers, commercial Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to empirically inform current and emerging regulatory and policy debates. The theme for this year's workshop was "Definitions and Data". This report describes the discussions and presents relevant open research questions identified by participants. Slides presented at the workshop and a copy of this final report are available at [2]

A Workload Analysis of Live Event Broadcast Service in Cloud

The class of popular Internet live events, such as sports game broadcast services, can greatly benefit from cloud technology that employs resource pooling and rapid elasticity in resource allocation and management. The external demands tend to be unpredictable and exhibit a high degree of burstability. To sustain a good viewing experience for the users, an important QoS support for this class of applications is the peak load management in the presence of unpredictable demand. This relies on a close grasp of the demand behavior characteristics and an accurate prediction model for them. In this paper, we analyze live sports event broadcast service workloads from a commercial Internet service provider. Our results show that popularity follows a 2-mode Zipf distribution. We also observe some significant characteristics of the demand behavior. First, the demand behavior may differ significantly between games. Popular events tend to exhibit highly variable behaviors in time, volume and the change rate during the course. Finally, the demand variation highly correlates with certain event-specific time points. We conclude the paper with a preliminary study that applies three simple statistical models in workload prediction at runtime as an input to dynamic resource resizing in a cloud. The results indicate that more e ective ways are needed to better capture the dynamics and unpredictability of the workload to improve prediction accuracy.

Workshop on internet economics (WIE2009) report

On September 23, 2009, CAIDA hosted a virtual Workshop on Internet Economics [3] to bring together network technology and policy researchers, commercial Internet facilities and service providers, and communications regulators to explore a common goal: framing a concrete agenda for the emerging but empirically stunted field of Internet infrastructure economics. With participants stretching from Washington D.C. to Queensland, Australia, we used the electronic conference hosting facilities supported by the California In stitute of Technology (CalTech) EVO Collaboration Network. This report describes the workshop discussions and presents relevant open research questions identified by participants.

On Metrics to Distinguish Skype Flows from HTTP Traffic

Skype is a Voice over IP (VoIP) Internet application that is gaining huge popularity in recent years. A key point to Skype popularity is its capability to dynamically adapt itself to operate behind firewalls or network proxies. A common way adopted by Skype to delude these network devices is to use port 80, normally expected to comprise HTTP traffic. In this paper, we propose metrics and investigate statistical tests intended to clearly distinguish Skype flows from HTTP traffic. We validate our study using real-world experimental datasets gathered at a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP). Our experimental results suggest that the proposed methodology may be seen as a promising building block towards a system to detect general protocol anomalies in HTTP traffic.

Behind the Scenes with SHAKSPER: The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference

SHAKSPER, founded as an “academic” conference and now in its nineteenth year, is an international “electronic seminar” that enables ongoing discussion of all things Shakespearean. Three extended discussions exemplify SHAKSPER at its best. In the spirit of reasserting SHAKSPER discursive role in the scholarly community, I initiated a new feature on SHAKSPER in January 2007, The SHAKSPER Roundtable. Another Roundtable is planned for spring 2008 and a peer-reviewed Book Review Feature will begin around that time. My hope is that these two changes, my being a more active moderator, as well as the possibility of further new features, will enable SHAKSPER to regain some of the excitement of its earlier years when scholars around the world had an alternative venue to conferences and publications to talk and to explore ideas of interest to Shakespeare studies.

Detecting VoIP calls hidden in web traffic

Peer-to-peer (P2P) voice over IP (VoIP) applications (e.g. Skype or Google Talk) commonly use Web TCP ports (80 or 443) as a fallback mechanism to delude restrictive firewalls. This strategy renders this kind of traffic quite difficult to be detected by network managers. To deal with this issue, we propose and evaluate a method to detect VoIP calls hidden in Web traffic. We validate our proposal considering both Skype and Google Talk generated traffic by using real-world experimental data gathered at a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) and an academic institution. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a performance of around 90% detection rate of VoIP calls hidden in Web traffic with a false positive rate of only 2%, whereas a 100% detection rate is achieved with a false positive rate limited to only 5%. We also evaluate the feasibility of applying our proposal in real-time detection scenarios.

Understanding why universal service obligations may be unnecessary: The private development of local Internet access markets

This study analyzes the geographic spread of commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the leading suppliers of Internet access. The geographic spread of ISPs is a key consideration in US policy for universal access. We examine the Fall of 1998, a time of minimal government subsidy, when inexpensive access was synonymous with a local telephone call to an ISP. Population size and location in a metropolitan statistical area were the single most important determinants of entry, but their effects on national, regional and local firms differed, especially on the margin. The thresholds for entry were remarkably low for local firms. Universal service in less densely-populated areas was largely a function of investment decisions by ISPs with local focus. There was little trace of the early imprint of government subsidies for Internet access at major US universities.

Relevance and Priorities of ICT for Women in Rural Communities: A Case Study from Nigeria

Relevance and Priorities of ICT for Women in Rural Communities: A Case Study from Nigeria

Universal access and local internet markets in the US

Concern over the potential need to redefine universal service to account for Internet-related services motivates this study of the geographic spread of commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), the leading suppliers of Internet access in the US. The paper characterizes the location of 40,000 access points, local phone numbers offered by commercial ISPs, in the Fall of 1997. Markets differ widely in their structure, from competitive to unserved. Over 92% of the US population has easy access to a competitive commercial Internet access market, while approximately 4.5% of the US population has costly access.

Analysis of ISP IP/ATM network traffic measurements

This paper presents network traffic measurements collected from a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) whose traffic is being carried over an ATM backbone network. Much of the aggregate traffic is Web-related, and thus represents a Web/TCP/IP/AAL-5/ATM protocol stack. Four traces have been collected at the AAL-5 frame level, using a NavTel IW95000 ATM test set. These traces provide a detailed look at protocol-level behaviours, but only for rather short time durations (e.g., 30-40 seconds per trace). Analyses focus on aggregate-level traffic characteristics, as well as host-level and TCP connection-level traffic characteristics.The main workload characteristics observed from the measurements are the burstiness of the aggregate and individual traffic flows, a non-uniform distribution of traffic amongst hosts, a trimodal packet size distribution, and the strong presence of network-level effects (e.g., client modem speed, network Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU), network round trip time, TCP slow start) in the traffic structures seen. The workload characteristics are quite consistent across the four traces studied.

Lessons from Haiti's Internet development

Haiti does not appear to be the most fertile ground for Internet growth. It is a poor nation with a low literacy rate, difficult terrain, and few working telephone lines outside the capital city. Despite these impediments, resourceful entrepreneurs have sought to offer and expand Internet services, and have sometimes explored unconventional technical approaches. Haiti now has four commercial Internet service providers (ISPs), and Internet services are available in five Haitian cities. This paper will provide a brief description of today's Haitian Internet sector. The Haitian experience demonstrates that the shortest path to Internet infrastructure in developing countries may be radically different from the paths taken in wealthier nations. It also shows how policies regarding spectrum management, international telephone service, ISP licensing, and resale can impact Internet growth.

Case Studies on Developments of the Internet in Latin America: Unexpected Results

Case Studies on Developments of the Internet in Latin America: Unexpected Results

The changing role of community networks in providing citizen access to the Internet

This article examines the changing role of community network associations or “freenets” in providing Internet access by examining the case of the Calgary Community Network Association (CCNA) located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The changing role of the CCNA is examined against the backdrop of the withdrawal of states from the telecommunications field, the priorities of the Canadian government, and the role of the private sector. Community networks may ultimately focus on persons who do not have computers, while advertising supported services may attract those with computers who may not wish or cannot afford to pay a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP).