Volume the key to cashflow says net pioneer

By ADAM GIFFORD

New Zealand's way of charging for bandwidth has Internet Software Consortium founder Paul Vixie scratching his head.

The problem comes down to the way Telecom is trying to pay for the Southern Cross cable.

"They invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the cable system and we understand they need to recover that, but doing it with artificial price supports such as charging by the 64K (kilobits per second) segment is not the internet way. It is not the way bandwidth is charged for," says Vixie, who is in New Zealand for the Uniforum geek-fest.

"What they should do is fill the cable with as much traffic as it will hold and drive the prices downwards but make it up in volume, so they would be able to pay it off sooner if they take a more internet-like view.

"This whole 64K segment thing is very much a telecom view. [The internet] is not a telecom thing. This is not X.25; this is not leased line; these are IP [internet protocol] packets and if you charge people less money they will use a lot more of it.

"People are perfectly willing to spend quite a lot if they are getting quite a bit for it, but if you make it expensive because you have this investment to recover, people will eke out as little bandwidth as they can."

Charging systems that differentiate between data from New Zealand and sites elsewhere create an artificial barrier to internet use, because internet traffic tends not to stay local.

Vixie says web capacity is a non-issue in North America "because so many dotcoms put so much fibre under the ground before they went under it is now being sold at fire sale prices".

He says Telecom's effort to eke out its copper network with Jetstream DSL (digital subscriber line) technology offers users a fraction of the bandwidth they could get from fibre-optic networks.

"If you remember the Dick Tracy wristwatch with the screen on it, humanity wants that.

"To make that work, we will need ubiquitous high-speed wireless down every street, and that will need a fibre backbone, and that fibre backbone will have to be tied to other network owners throughout the globe."

Vixie has the credentials to chide Telecom on its pricing policies - he wrote or contributed to many of the key pieces of software underlying the internet.

His Internet Software Consortium develops and maintains production-quality, open-source reference implementations of core internet protocols.

His name is most closely associated with Bind (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the most widely used domain name system (DNS) server - a sort of telephone book stored on every internet name server.

Vixie dropped out of high school in San Francisco in the late 1970s when he found his interest in computing was getting in the way of conventional academic progress.

"I left home and joined the circus," is his way of describing it.

He first came across Bind while running a network for Digital Equipment Corporation in 1988.

Digital's DNS software was not good, so Vixie picked up the package originally developed at the University of California Berkeley under a Defence Advanced Research Projects Administration grant.

When Vixie left Digital he kept maintaining Bind, making the software freely available for download under the open-source model. Funding for the Bind project now comes from a consortium of Unix vendors.

Vixie also co-founded the anti-spam Maps (Mail Abuse Prevention System).

Internet Software Consortium

Vixie Enterprises

Uniforum NZ