The impact of rising sea level on Internet infrastructure

A recent study predicts that rising sea level might result in as much as 4,067 miles of fiber conduit being under water and 1,101 nodes (data centers, Internet exchanges, cable landing points, etc.) surrounded by water in U. S. coastal cities in 15 years.

Paul Barford, professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin, and his colleagues have been compiling data on the physical Internet and making it available to the research community at the Internet Atlas Web portal since 2011. The portal includes an interactive visualization tool that can be used to create maps of Internet infrastructure in order to inform the public and guide network architects and policymakers.

Barford and his colleagues have combined their infrastructure data with sea level incursion projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in order to estimate expected damage to U. S. Internet infrastructure due to sea level rise and, as you see below, the NOAA data shows that sea-level has increased relatively rapidly off the U. S. coasts in recent years.

That is history, but NOAA also models future sea level rise and you can see predictions for specific locations using their Sea Level Rise Viewer (SLRV), a cool visualization tool. The SLRV predicts sea level rise through the year 2100 and computes estimates of sea level rise for five different scenarios at a selected location. For example, predictions for Miami, Florida for the year 2030 are: Intermediate Low scenario: 0.49ft, Intermediate: 0.75ft, Intermediate High: 0.98ft, High: 1.21ft and Extreme: 1.35ft. (The assumptions underlying the scenarios are spelled out here)

For this study, Barford and his colleagues used NOAA's Extreme scenario estimate of a global mean sea level rise of one foot per 15 years through 2100 and concluded that in the U. S. 4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101 nodes (e.g., points of presence, Internet exchanges, cable landing points, etc.) will be surrounded by water in the next 15 years.

National outage due to hurricane
Sandy (source)

The study concluded that Miami, New York, and Seattle will be the hardest hit U. S. cities, but don't think you are home free if you live in Kansas -- the Internet is global and we are all affected by outages.

They also noted that since much Internet infrastructure is located near the coast in large cities, much of the future damage will occur fairly soon. Even if we assume the Intermediate Low scenario, Miami sea-level will have risen by a foot by 2015.

Los Angeles in 15 years

You can use the SLRV to check the situation in your local area using the scenario that best fits it. For example, this is what the coastal region of my city, Los Angeles, is projected to look like in 15 years using the Extreme scenario. The blue areas (on a green background) show expected sea level rise inundation and the dark green lines are fiber conduits.

Don't forget that Barford's analysis assumes the most aggressive of NOAA's scenarios and at the historical rate of sea-level rise we would predict less than 2 inches in the next 15 years.

On the other hand, Barford used the mean global extreme scenario estimate and North American cities have historically seen above average sea level increases.

Furthermore, he does not consider storm damage and this report shows that when hurricane Sandy hit the east coast in 2012, outages in New York and New Jersey led to a doubling of the national Internet outage rate. (You can read more on the impact of Hurricane Sandy on the Internet here).

Hurricane Katrina also damaged the Internet when it struck New Orleans in 2005. You can get a feeling for what it was like by listening to Doc Searle's interview of Sigmund Solares, then CEO of the DirectNIC data center. Solares describes the flooding and the extreme effort required to keep DirectNIC online.

(Note that the posts on Sandy and Katrina are at the Internet Archive since the original copies were no longer online).

Some people believe global warming is God's will -- it's good that He also endowed us with free will.

The government role in shaping the Internet in China and the US

The US government invested $124.5 million in building and demonstrating the feasibility and value of the ARPANet, TCP/IP internetworking protocol and subsequent deployment to education and research organizations with the establishment of NSFNet and the NSF developing nations program. That was a pretty good investment. (Government procurement was also important -- for example, lessons learned and programmers trained in building the SAGE early warning defense system played a key role in the progress of networking and computer science in the US).

Internet development timeline

NSFNet was at first the backbone for the international Internet, but the government stepped back once the initial research and development was completed, phasing out the NSFNet subsidies over a four year period. Private telephone and cable companies with local monopolies or oligopolies became Internet service providers and owners of our Internet infrastructure.

In contrast, the market for Internet applications and services was competitive from the start. Private capital has financed and developed our Internet startups and ecosystems of organizations to support them -- incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces, investors, consultants and hackerspaces. The first startup ecosystems were in the Silicon Valley and along Massachusets Route 128, but many, including my home town, Los Angeles, have followed their lead.

1,113 tech startups in Los Angeles

535 startup support organizations

The Chinese have taken a different approach to Internet infrastructure. They established an academic network in 1987, linked it to Stanford University in 1993 and the following year established a full Internet connection. Like all other nations, they began with a slow link to a small academic network, but within a few years, the Chinese had realized the importance of the Internet and had established competing, government-owned national backbone networks.

Unlike the United States, the Chinese government is also playing an active role in support of Internet application and service companies. In his 2016 Report on the Work of the Government, Chinese premier Li Keqiang stated that

Further progress was made in implementing the strategy of innovation-driven development, the penetration of the Internet into all industries picked up the pace, and emerging industries grew rapidly.

The Chinese are funding startup ecosystem organizations like those created by the private sector in the US. For example, 710 subsidized startups are clustered in the Dream Town district of Hangzhou.

Chinese workers remodeling Dream Town spaces

How has it worked out?

The US had a significant lead over the entire world when a small Chinese academic network joined the Internet. One cannot directly compare the US and China -- there are many confounding differences, but we can compare China with India, a nation with some similarities. India's academic networks joined the Internet a little before China, but they essentially started at the same time. By 2002, the Chinese Internet was significantly more advance than that of India.

The International Telecommunication Union's Information and Communication Technology development index (IDI) provides a recent indicator of Chinese progress. The IDI is a function of eleven indicators measuring ICT access, use and skills in a nation. In 2015, China ranked 82nd on the IDI while India ranked 131st. In 2010, China ranked 87th and India ranked 125th.

While China has done better than India to date, their economy is slowing and their program of support for startups can lead to misallocation of resources and cronyism -- as happened in the Chinese construction industry:

The US started at the top, so our infrastructure had no where to go but down relative to other nations. The US ranks 21st in fiber deployment among the 34 OECD nations and our average Internet connection speed ranks 15th among the 74 nations served by Akamai.

Percent of broadband connections with fiber,
OECD, December 2015

Connection speeds, Akamai, Q1 2016

While the US has faltered in infrastructure deployment, we have retained the lead in Internet applications and services. As shown here, the US had 39 of the most popular 100 Web sites as ranked by Alexa in September 2016 while China had only 10.

These rankings should be taken with a grain of salt – SimilarWeb, an Israeli company, rates the US substantially higher with 40 sites in the top 100 as opposed to 10 for China. Chinese sites also focus heavily on China whereas the US sites generally seek a global audience.

It seems that the US private sector has done well in Internet applications and services and not as well in deploying infrastructure. Private companies seek to maximize corporate profit rather than social goals regarding education, the economy, etc. This has contributed to other nations surpassing our infrastructure in spite of our pioneering role.

These are complex issues and I cannot reach definite, generalizable conclusions (nor can anyone else), but, if I had to guess, I would think that China would be better off cutting back on subsidies for Internet application and service companies and the US would be better off with a more competitive Internet service provider market -- discouraging consolidation and "gentleman's agreements" among companies and encouraging ownership of infrastructure by local governments and customers.

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Update 10/16/2016

For teachers or others who might like to present this topic, I have prepared (and used) a nine-slide, one-video annotated PowerPoint presentation.

Google is ready to roll out fiber in Kansas City

A while ago, Google invited cities to apply for subsidized installation of fiber infrastructure, and Kansas City was selected.

They have now completed detailed engineering plans and are ready to begin installing fiber in Kansas City.

There are many models for fiber infrastructure ownership -- a mix of private companies, government agencies, home and building owners, etc. For example, the ownership of a portion of the infrastructure by Swedish government agencies has enabled them (and others) to surpass US Internet service.

Here's to the Google experiment and what we may learn from it!

(This fell through the cracks and was not posted at the time I wrote it -- better late than never).

US Ignite -- can the US develop innovative applications for the coming gigabit network?

In 1986, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) linked a few universities, creating a national network. The initial 56k bps links shown here were soon upgraded to T1s, and people began using applications like email, file transfer and threaded discussion..

As networks spread and increased in speed, new applications were invented. The majority of those applications were developed in the US, because we had more people using state of the art networks than other nations. Most international traffic came to the NSF backbone, where it was terminated or passed through to another nation.

But our infrastructure and connectivity lead has eroded, leaving us a typical developed nation, no longer outstanding. Nations with wide spread high-speed networks are likely to develop applications for the future.

Is there a way for us to regain momentum as we enter the gigabit era? Some US universities and cities and companies like Google have already moved in that direction. Universities are experimenting with high-speed networks and Google is connecting a few cities, but, can those efforts be connected and scaled up?

NSF hopes so. They want to connect the experimental gigabit networks at various universities and cities together to create a large enough user base to justify and spur application innovation.

The USIgnite effort is just getting off the ground -- they are now soliciting white papers and will soon hold a workshop.

For a discussion of US Ignite, check this post on Google Plus.

Own your connection infrastructure, use netBlazr

A while back I wrote an article and blog post stating:

The question is not whether we are going to deploy new infrastructure; the question is “who will own it?”

The article discusses several alternatives to ownership by the current telephone and cable companies: local governments, cooperatives, small ISPs, and home and building owners.

I know of two trials in which home owners purchase their own links to a backhaul point -- similar to what we now do with our sewer and gas lines, and one wireless access company called Fon.

Fon claims 1,726,336 "members." Members purchase an 802.11n base station that is augmented with several application-layer programs for $99 or €79 and share bandwidth with other members. There are eight Fon installations in my zip code, but only two have been active during the last hour. After several years, Fon deployment is not dense enough to provide a viable alternative to the cable and telephone ISPs in my area, and I don't expect it ever will be.

But, technology and business models improve, and a new company, netBlazr, hopes to sell small business owners equipment for forming a network. The $299 equipment package contains three 802.11n radios and a fast router. Fiber backhaul is supplied by netBlazr. The basic service is free, but they also offer a premium service and dedicated circuit plans with guaranteed speed for small businesses.

NetBlazr's technology and business model are different than Fon's. The extra radios and faster router should improve performance in densely populated areas -- the extra routers let netBlazr change the network architecture on the fly if something goes wrong. The network architecture and backhaul provisioning lead them to deploy in highly local areas. They pick a backhaul point then sign up customers they can reach from that location. They started in a small area within Boston, and will expand from there as demand and density allow. If things go well, they will expand to service office buildings in other cities.

Will netBlazr catch on and scale up to provide a viable alternative to the incumbents? It may be a long shot, but companies like Google or Craig's List seemed like long shots at one point. You never know -- improving technology is on their side and their competitors are not used to competition.

Appended link:

Here are the slides from netBlazr founder Brough Turner giving a talk on the advantages of WiFi over Wimax and LTE and introducing netBlazr.

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Update 6/12/2015

Fon announced today that they have over 15 million people sharing Internet access over their personally owned open hotspots. Since WiFi range is limited, the value of a Fon membership increases with dense coverage, and as shown here, most of the "Fonistas" are in Western Europe.

In addition to signing up individual users, Fon is making deals with Internet service providers. In the US, cable companies are rolling out their own versions of shared access as is Google Fiber.

Singapore is installing fiber to every building

This figure is taken from a an ITU study on the Internet in Singapore that I worked on several years ago. It depicts the government role as an equity investor in the ISP industry. (The government has played a similar role in the oil, finance, shipping and biotechnology industries).


Continuing that policy, the government of Singapore is investing in fiber to every home, school, government building, business and hospital. Their Next Generation Plan is for 95 percent of buildings to have access to a 1 Gbps connection by 2012.

They will also follow the model of competitors using open, shared infrastructure, which seems to be working well in Stockholm and other cities.

There are caveats. Singapore is a small, city nation, and a very high percent of the population lives in apartment buildings. That makes this plan relatively cheap. Retail connectivity prices are also a question mark -- will there be sufficient competition over the shared infrastructure to keep them low?

If the network succeeds, and 1 Gbps connectivity becomes ubiquitous, what applications might they develop? What would you use a 1 Gbps link for?

Essential ban on new public power companies and projects barely fails -- will public Internet infrastructure be next?

California voters narrowly rejected proposition 16 yesterday. Had it passed, it would have essentially banned new and expanded municipal power projects, by requiring 2/3 majority support from voters before local governments could form or expand municipal utilities.

Pacific Gas and Electric (the power company portrayed in the movie about Erin Brockovich) spent over $46 million on the campaign.

PG&E's non-stop ads claimed to be protecting our right to vote, but blocking competition from municipal power companies was the clear motive. Had their goal been thoughtful debate on proposed public power projects, they would have said so in their ads, and called for a simple majority rather than a prohibitive 2/3 majority.

This was a close call, and it illustrates the political power of a wealthy corporation.

Large ISPs like Verizon and AT&T fight vigorously against public Internet projects by lobbying at all levels and in court. Might we one day see a proposition on the "right to vote on public Internet projects?"

The FCC and Google want faster Internet access

After a year of public hearings and input via the Internet, the FCC has released their national broadband plan.

The FCC wants to bring 100 Mb/s download and 50 Mb/s upload speed to homes and 1 Gb/s to schools, hospitals and government buildings. They also advocate converting wireless spectrum used for TV broadcast to Internet access, with the goal of giving the US the fastest and most extensive wireless access in the world. They hope competition will lead to relatively cheap Internet access.

To put this in context, relatively low cost 100/50 Mb/s access is available in a number of cities and nations already.

More context -- Google plans to roll out 1 Gb/s fiber to between 50 and 500,000 homes in a test network.

Google hopes their test network will pressure on the FCC and the ISP industry to be more ambitious. Faster speeds mean a better Internet experience, which means more users and more Google ads. One hundred megabits per second sounds pretty good today, but it won't seem so fast in ten years.

They also hope to spur innovation. We have seen that researchers often develop applications for technology they expect to be available in the future. For example, Ivan Sutherland, shown here, built prototype image processing software with a graphical user interface in the early 1960s, using a very expensive computer. It was over twenty years before similar programs like MacDraw and AutoCad became economically viable.

Google hopes that, like Sutherland's expensive computer, their gigabit per second network will be used for new applications. They also hope to develop advanced technology for building fast networks.

How does 100 megabits per second compare to your current home Internet connectivity?

What sorts of applications would a gigabit per second connection enable?

Congress hoped to bring about competition and low prices for Internet access with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Did the act succeed in spurring competition and lowering prices?

Swedish report calls for openness and competition at all network levels

The Swedish Telecoms Regulator has issued a 150 page report (in Swedish) on open networks and services with a two page abstract in English.

The report focuses on the importance of open, competitive markets and networks at five levels:

1. Natural resources (use of and access to land, ducts and spectrum)
2. Infrastructure (passive cables and masts)
3. Transmission (equipment for transportation of bit-streams)
4. IP/Internet (equipment for traffic direction and IP addressing)
5. Content and services (content, services and end user equipment)

This multi-level approach sounds like that presented by Brough Turner, and it has worked well in Stockholm and throughout Sweden, as shown by their high rank on Internet-related indices:

Index	Rater	Rank
Broadband Performance Index	European Community Commission	1
E-readiness rankings	Economist Intelligence Unit	2
Networked Readiness Index	World Economic Forum	2
Broadband Quality Score	Said Business School	4

An FCC workshop on Future Fiber Architectures and Local Deployment Choices. It looks like the FCC gets it.

The FCC just held a Workshop on Future Fiber Architectures and Local Deployment Choices.

The workshop was comprised of two panel sessions featuring a mix of academic, industry, market research and community networking people. Video of the panels and the panelist's presentation slides are available at the workshop Web site.

The range of speakers and their presentations leaves me optimistic that the FCC “gets it” – they are listening to good people with diverse views and no longer define "broadband" as 250 kbps.

I have summarized the workshop by selecting one slide from each presentation and adding a short comment to each. I have not listened to the presentations – the comments are what occurred to me when I selected the slide.

Selecting the slides to include was difficult – I left out some good ones, and would recommend your looking at the rest and listening to the presentations if you are interested in broadband policy.

This is an experiment in how to cover and summarize a conference.

For another excellent summary see this post by Goeff Daily in which he extracts noteworthy quotes from the presentations.

The general public is unaware of Internet policy issues and their impact

Geoff Daily just wrote a blog post explaining most people do not understand broadband or bandwidth. As an example, he told about a friend who did not know how his apartment was connected to the Internet and was

pretty much totally oblivious to this language of bandwidth, bits, and bytes. And he certainly doesn't know anything about bandwidth caps or traffic shaping

His friend had invited a dozen people with laptops to his apartment for an online fantasy football draft -- would there be sufficient bandwidth? Would the extra usage exceed a cap and cause an unexpected jump in his Internet bill?

More important, most of the general public is unaware that US broadband connectivity is slow, asymmetric and falling behind that of other developed nations. As shown below, by last year the US had fallen to 11 th among OECD nations in broadband connectivity per capita, and we had very little fiber installed.



What are the implications of lagging connectivity in the US for our quality of life and economy? If all of the freeways in the US were two lane streets, would that effect the quality of your life? Would it effect the economy?

How fast is your Internet connection at home? To your cell phone? Do you have unlimited usage or does your bill increase when you exceed a cap? Does your connection bog down when more than one person in your home is online? Could two people watch a low-resolution TV show without pauses and glitches? Could you watch an HD movie?

For more on Daily's views on bandwidth and bandwidth requirements, click here.

Open networks benefit both ISPs and the public

We have spoken of the economic inefficiency of the service-oriented business model of the US telephone and cable companies. They see themselves as selling video, telephone, and Internet service -- the so-called "triple play."

We see the social cost of this business model when we compare the US with other nations, where access network operators open their networks to competing service providers. We pay a lot for inferior broadband connectivity.

It is not surprising that the telephone and cable companies are trying to increase their profit at public expense, but there is ironic evidence that this service-oriented business model may also be hurting them. In a nutshell, the argument is that the owner of an access network can make more money by opening it up to all service providers. True, they would forsake the monopoly profits of being the sole supplier of telephony, movies or television on their network, but they would make it up in wholesale and retail sales volume as many companies compete to sell these and other services.

If this is the case, open networks are a win-win proposition. Both the public and the cable and telephone companies win.

Yankee Group analyst Benoit Felten will present a one-hour webinar on this topic on June 30. The presentation will be archived, so you can listen later if you miss it.

For further discussion of this "dumb pipe paradox" see Brough Turner's blog.

Would you like to own and install fiber to your home?

There are many examples of municipal ownership of access networks, but ownership and control could also be pushed out to home and building owners.

Wu and Slater discuss this alternative in a recent paper and a test is underway in downtown Ottawa, Canada, where fiber has been deployed to serve a 400–home neighborhood, but a service provider has not yet signed on.

The Norwegian telecommunication company Lyse Tele reports that 80% of their 130,000 customers have agreed to dig their own trenches and bury their own fiber in exchange for a discount on installation. This has been good for business -- only .2% of customers who have installed their own fiber switch to another service provider.

While this sounds good, there are questions. Who owns the fiber, Lyse Tele or the home owner? Who controls the fiber -- can their customers reach competing services or are they locked in to Lyse Tele?

I have seen estimates that it costs Verizon about $1,000 to connect a home. I would gladly pay that if it meant I owned and controlled the fiber and could get connectivity from competing ISPs over it. I would consider it an investment -- increasing the value of my house -- not an expense.

I own my own sewer, water and gas lines and call a plumber when there is a problem. I would be happy to own my fiber.

Why is connectivty in Stockholm so much faster and cheaper than in US cities?

We've been discussing US broadband policy and the stimulus package, and this table shows the cost of fiber-based, residential Internet service in several cities (Brough Turner provided the European and Asian data):

Where?	Monthly cost	Uplink (Mbps)	Downlink (Mbps)
Stockholm	$11	100	100
Seoul	$24	100	100
Hong Kong	$35	100	100
Tokyo	$61	100	100
Amsterdam	$127	100	100
Lafayette, LA, Municipal	$58	50	50
Lafayette, LA, Cox Cable	$140	5	50
US, where available, Verizon	$145	20	50

Can we explain the large speed and cost differences?

The Cox Cable offering in Lafayette, Louisiana seems to be the worst deal. It is the slowest and only five dollars a month less than the Verizon network. The municipal network in the same city is faster and cheaper. The Cox network reaches more neighborhoods than the municipal network, and they are forced to compete with temporary sale prices.

Stockholm is at the other extreme. They have a municipal network that reaches every block in the city. Unlike Lafayette, they do not offer consumer service over their fiber, but lease network access to anyone who would like to offer service. The Internet service providers, including incumbent telephone and cable companies, compete on an equal footing.

As a result, there are many competing service providers in Stockholm, and, as Turner points out, the city owns the expensive, long-life assets like fiber, rights of way, conduit, and tunnels, and the service providers own the electronic equipment that is relatively cheap and is upgraded frequently as technology improves.

Many factors determine the cost of Internet connectivity, but the ownership model is significant, and it seems the Stockholm model is superior to those in the US.

Note that analysts at the OECD also endorse the Stockholm ownership model, writing that:

Municipal networks can play an important role in enhancing competition in fibre networks. If these develop, governments should encourage them to be open networks, that is providing dark fibre to service providers rather than becoming themselves service providers. Nor should the existence of a municipal network providing dark fibre mean that investment in other fibre networks in that municipality should be prevented.

Should some of our broadband stimulus funds be used for Stockholm-style municipal networks?

Click here for a paper with more on this topic.

Click here for a PowerPoint presentation on this topic.

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Update 11/10/2014

Stockholm reports 19 years of financial and user success. The Stokab report should be required reading for all local government officials.

Let's slow down on broadband stimulus in order to consider ownership alternatives

The economic stimulus package is moving through congress. Republicans are fighting it on the grounds that more tax cuts are needed and we need more time to make sensible investments. I agree that we need to slow down on broadband stimulus to consider ownership alternatives. Here is the "elevator ride" pitch:

• The current strategy of privatization with hope for competition under independent regulation has failed in many developed and developing nations. In the US, regulators have been unable to create competition and our infrastructure has suffered.
  
• The large broadband incumbents have benefited from public subsidy, have failed to live up to commitments, and have used their power to defeat attempts to create competition
  
• The US has little fiber in the access network today, but will have fiber to all urban and many rural homes and buildings in the long run. The question is not whether we are going to deploy new infrastructure; the question is “who will own it?”
  
• We should take the time to evaluate decentralized alternatives to near-total ownership by the incumbents. Local governments, cooperatives, small ISPs, and home and building owners might own parts of our next generation infrastructure.
  
• This evaluation can be fast and cheap. The work of the National Science Foundation in designing and creating NSFNet and connecting universities, colleges and foreign networks provides an excellent example of a small government staff calling on experts from academia and industry to design a network and a strategy for deploying it, followed by procurement via competitive bid.
  
• We need immediate economic stimulus, but that can come from tax cuts and investment in many sectors as well as broadband.
  
• Nobel economist Paul Krugman acknowledges the need for rapid stimulus, but in this article he says we should downplay the “jump start” metaphor and focus on job creation through infrastructure investment over the next four plus years.
  
• We will be living with the fiber and high-speed wireless infrastructure we build today for many decades. We will also be living with its owners.

Click here for a paper with details on the above.

Click here for a PowerPoint presentation on the above.