During an eye examination a year or so ago, the doctor mentioned that I am developing cataracts in both eyes. I don’t experience any of the serious typical effects like poor night vision or cloudiness, so it really is not affecting my functioning, but it does mean that I am a legitimate candidate for cataract surgery. This procedure removes the natural lens from the eye and replaces it with a clear artificial lens. It can also correct for near-sightedness, which is why I wore contact lenses in the first place.

So I went onto my doctor’s schedule for cataract surgery, with the target date being April 8. My right eye will be modified on the 8th, and my left eye two weeks later.

The doctor provided several choices in terms of type of implanted lens. (These are generically called Intra Ocular Lens or IOL.) It seemed to me that the most common was to have one eye corrected for a distant version, and the other eye corrected for near vision. The goal there being to get the best possible result for each eye separately by using a monofocal lens in each case. That gives a sharpest correction to vision following surgery.

But he also offered me the option of an IOL specially crafted to provide three ranges of correction — near, medium and distant — all in the same lens. The common trifocal glass lens, which many people wear in their spectacles, is another way to address this. But this IOL, unlike spectacles, doesn’t require moving the head or adjusting eye angles to change its focus. Instead, it uses a ring shaped pattern on the IOL that provides all three ranges or focal lengths to the retina at the same time. The brain deciphers the three incoming images and “sees“ only one distance at a time. My understanding is that the brain learns to ignore the two that are irrelevant and pay attention only to the appropriate distance at any one time. Apparently, the brain and the eye work this way all the time, but it seemed a bit like magic to me and I look forward to exploring it and describing the process.,

Thus, this series of posts about my experience with the Panoptix Pro IOL.

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The post Panoptix – Prelude appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Several hours later, however, they called me and offered a 10:30 arrival. Took it.

On Thursday I arrived at 10:30 bright and shiny, all rested up, and dressed casually. Because it’s just the eye, they suggest comfortable clothing and short sleves (for ease in placing an I.V.). You’ll recall I had bladder cancer in 2016 and many procedures with I.V., so although I still don’t enjoy them, they’re not a terrible experience. The I.V. is necessary because they administer some light anaesthetic… aparently a benzodiazepine (like valium) and a pain-killer (like fentanyl). I have experience with both of those (from other minor surgical procedures). and I know I stay conscious and I remember a little more than expected. So I looked forward to experiencing the procedure and reporting on it.

Close Encounters — So after the I.V. is placed and they give me some time to just cool my jets waiting, they come to take me away. They’ve now put me flat on my back on the gurney and they wheel me like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride down the hall and around a corner (don’t fall off!) to another hall, then left into the procedure room. They station me under the equipment which seems to be mobile on a sturdy “arm” — they bring the arm right over my face, center it over the eye. The business end of the apparatus appears to me a bit like the flying saucer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind with bright lights in a somewhat circular pattern above my face. Down it comes until almost touching. It occurs to me to become claustrophobic, but the medications nicely prevent that. It seems to me I’m remembering every moment.

First they remove my natural lens. I believe they used ultrasound. Looking upward thru the center of the lights, it seems to me like an ink blot appears in the center of my vision and spreads out a bit. Then they “blot” around the edges of that blackness until the center is pretty much darkened out. Then I hear “You’ll feel some pressure“ and yes, indeed I do feel him pressing on my eye. Then a kind of squishy visual moves in as he inserts the new IOL (lens) via a tiny incision. There are some fuzzy images, but quickly those go away as a small surgical dressing and plastic bubble are taped over the eye. To be removed the next day.

Here’s a video from a doc in Austin, Texas, not mine, showing an actual procedure with the type of lens I have. It’s pretty interesting even if you don’t like surgery movies. No blood.

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Typical IOLs (not this one) bring things into focus at a limited distance or range. The natural eye focuses actively on a distance by squeezing the natural lens, changing its shape, changing the focus point. The plastic IOL cannot do that. So an IOL has a corrective prescription (or refraction) built in.

Instead, my IOL will have three distances (thus “trifocal”) it will focus. (Each is actually a range, not just a single distance.) The corrective prescription for my far-vision is built into one of the concentric rings of the lens. The prescription for mid-vision is in the next concentric ring. And for near-vision, into the next ring. Then this far-mid-near ring pattern repeats across the active area of the IOL.

When I’m standing looking at something on the far horizon, only my far-vision rings produce a sharp image. The mid- and near- images of objects on the horizon are not focused on my retina, and my brain will learn to ignore them in favor of the far- image.

When I’m reading something up close, the near-vision rings are providing the sharp image on my retina. The other rings are providing out-of-focus images, and similarly my brain will learn to ignore them when I want to read.

What are those little wings? Apparently they keep the lens in place in the center of the pupil. Who knew?

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The post Panoptix — Theory appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The surgery took about 10 minutes. I pretty much remember the whole process and it was very interesting. At its conclusion they covered my eye with a dressing, which remained the first 24 hours. My first impression was that my eyelashes were kinda stuck and my eyes wanted to open and close together even though the surgeruzed eye felt scratchy due to the dressing and tape. The doctor later told me he expected my eyelid to stay closed, so if something wasn’t quite working as intended, but there seems to have been no ill effect.

Many people say those first 24 hours are really difficult. I found that being mentally “prepared” helped a lot. I just had to be really, really patient and resist any temptation to scratch or pull on the dressing to make it more comfortable.

When my eyelid was open, I could tell there was plenty of light and I could see areas of dark and light thru the dressing – corresponding to what my natural (left) eye was seeing. So it was pretty exciting to know everything worked but no hint yet about clarity of vision.

Let’s call that Day Zero.

Day 1

Next morning I visited the doctor to have then dressing removed and a quick check-up. Sitting in a eye-exam chair with a chart on the far wall, they removed the bandage. It was absolutely astoundingly clear and sharp. I knew immediately this was going to be a good result — maybe an excellent result. The letters on the eye chart were mostly sharp, and I could confidently read down to the 20/30 line. My understanding was that this is pretty good for the first post-surgery day. I found that reflective objects like chrome on the equipment was “delightfully sharp” and sparkly. It was obvious the lens was going to be excellent!

To rest my eyes prior to surgery I had had a pair of glasses made. (I previously wore contacts, not glasses.) But now with an IOL in my right eye those glasses were not going to work for me. So I went to an optometrist who knocked out one prescription lens and replaced it with regular glass. This barely worked, leaving me with dpuble vision (although it was sharp), but was going to only be temporary anyway.

Week 1

During daytime hours I wore the modified glasses at times, but rapidly discovered it was more restful to just leave them off and let the natural eye be extremely blurry — because my vision with the IOL was so good I could do almost any daily activity confidently. At night I wore a transparent plastic eyepatch taped on, to prevent scratching and injuring the eye.

I decided not to drive until both eyes were completed. Good decision.

The trifocal aspect of the IOL was fascinating, and brain adaptation kicked in by about Day 2 or so. I noticed immediately that the best vision was distance vision. This became spectacularly obvois as night fell. From our windows in San Francisco we see a lot of the city as well as distant San Francisco Bay and the Marin and the East Bay hills.

As the sun set on about the second day, I realized I clearly saw every distant window in Salesforce Tower, and even better I saw the decorative lights of the Bay Bridge. On the East Bay hills, about 15 miles away, I could see individual tall trees on that ridge. I was not seeing those with my natural eye and the glasses. The IOL was at times sharper than my natural eye.

The IOL slightly reduces optical contrast, and that was initially obvious to me, though it was only bothersome when I attempted to read grey type against a white background. I would say it was tolerable. This was also more noticeable at night and with low light levels. It did get better as I approached the end of the week. My guess would be that I was adapting to the light curve of the lens.

But by about the 4th day I could already tell that the IOL did not cause me any problem with glare, halos, or rays, around most bright lights at night. This was super exciting because it is one of the more common outcomes for many people, and I had problems only with the most super-bright lights (like a car headlight coming at me on a city street).

The trifocal aspects of this IOL began to become useful by Day 6. I found I could easily focus on a laptop screen and use the computer for a few hours without strain. Couldn’t use both eyes together, but the single IOL eye, as long as I stayed relaxed and didn’t attempt actively to focus, just kind of naturally was working.

I did not have much near vision, however, in that first week. It appears to me that relaxing and letting the eye and brain do their adaptation without straining, may be the trick.

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This time I requested they knock me out a little more, which apparently they did because I remember nothing of the lens implantation procedure.

Immediately thereafter we went for coffee and stickybuns at the nearby Saint Frank’s coffee shop on Polk Street. It’s one of those bright sunny San Francisco days. On the way home., Kathryn asked to be routed past more of the addresses I had lived at in the city in the past, so we went by Jackson Street where I lived for a little longer a year when newly arrived in the city. It was about seven or eight blocks away from Pacific Medical Center (on Buchanan St. in 1976), where I had an office and was working on a distance learning project for medical education.

There was an achy pain in the eye socket this time (unlike right eye two weeks ago), controlled pretty well by 500mg Tylenol. Maybe need to sleep mid-afternoon?

It’s probably obvious to you that my first eye (right eye) is really doing great and it’s easy for me to use the computer right now. This is consistent with my experience the first two weeks, and tomorrow when the eyepatch is removed, I really look forward to testing out full binocular vision and more of the near distance abilities of my new lenses.

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The second eye measured 20/20 vision immediately. It was pretty amazing when they removed the gauze dressing and I could immediately read the eye chart on the wall. They said “Read the top line.” I read the top line, and then the second, and then the third, and then the fourth, and then the fifth line going pretty easily to the 20/20 level. It was also clear that this correction was better than the first eye had been. (And that one was still excellent, at about 20/30.)

The day before this second surgery, wearing glasses over one eye and IOL lens in the other, I was seeing double. Couldn’t get stereoscopic or binocular vision to work — two images most of the time. Without glasses on I had some depth perception, but poor quality because of the one uncorrected eye.

It reminded me that a major reason I had trouble with baseball and basketball in grade school was that I had such poor stereo vision with glasses even at the age of 12 or so. Getting contact lenses as an adult was liberating to me, as it restored that critically-necessary stereoscopic component of my vision. And for 6 weeks, in the run-up to the surgery I had returned to that world of glasses. It had left me in a cranky mood.

Now with the bandage removed, my stereo vision immediately worked perfectly. (Had I been worried? Yes.)  I knew I had been suffering some eye strain from the mismatch and it was really bothering me after two weeks of going around that way. My depth perception with glasses was terrible, and I was on occasion just kind of stumbling around. Never tripped or fell, but was pretty shaky at times because of it. Immediately after the bandage came off, I had no problem with depth. When leaving the clinic I could see steps on the stairway and cracks in the sidewalk. And avoid them, of course.

Within a couple of hours I again noticed a kind of “screen door effect” or moiré pattern in the new eye, on the outer edge of my visual field. I had noticed this after the first IOL implant (on the right eye) and it had become less and less visible over the week. The pattern was more visible in the second eye. At the edge of my vision there is a kind of a flickering screen door effect as I cast my eyes left or right. This is certainly due to the concentric rings of the lens. It kind of causes a bit of what I would call a flicker or stutter as I move my eyes left or right. It is more visible in low light, and I’d guess this is because my pupil opens to a larger size in low light, meaning more of the IOL surface area is involved, and consequently more of the concentric rings. This is just an observation and definitely not a malfunction at all. I think it speaks to the design of the lens and how the brain adapts to it.

Upon returning home from the clinic, I used the prescription eye drops for the very first time in the second eye. Then after taking a shower I noticed that my vision was clouded up like steam on a hot shower door, glass shower door. It was a bit unnerving — maybe some tapwater washed through the eye? Or maybe it was a lot of light scatter that the brain couldn’t yet filter out. But it persisted for a few hours and eventually cleared.

Reading text, and iPhone screen up close, are now absolutely focused and sharp. This had not been easy for me even with contact lenses, and especially in a dark room at night. Now everything is exceptionally clear and easy to focus on, even down to maybe 8 inches in front of my nose.

This is going to be great! Maybe I’ll give this writing thing a rest for a while now and check in after a few days or weeks.

The post Panoptix — Both Eyes, First Impressions appeared first on Sky's Blog.

SFWEM.NET is the San Francisco Wireless Emergency Net, which is a mesh network that’s being built out by amateur radio operators with the intention of being a communications backup in time of emergency — when phone and data networks may be locally overwhelmed or not functional. Beside that, however, it’s an interesting experiment for amateur radio operators seeking to understand the benefits and limitations of “wi-fi” as a long-distance tool.The wi-fi that most people know is range-limited and often flakey.  SFWEM works with directional antennas that have far greater range, and with higher radio power (permitted to amateur radio operators) on a band of radio frequencies not available for public use. So rather than being stuck with a 50-foot maximum range, we can get good connections over distances of 20+ miles. The connections are still line-of-sight, meaning that one antenna must be able to literally “see” the antenna on the other end that it’s connecting to. Any buildings, trees or hills in between the two will reduce or eliminate the signals.

So the idea is to create a mesh or network of interconnected stations to cover the space — in this case the northern end of San Francisco Bay, and soon the southern end of Marin County — with stations that automatically relay communications from one node of the mesh to the next. And as long as even one mesh node has a connection to the Internet, all of the other interconnected mesh nodes can reach the Internet (and each other).

My “interconnection” consists of the packet radio station, which is linked to the amateur packet radio network in the area (in my case to KE6JJJ in Bernal Heights, and to NøARY in the South Bay). And two nodes on the SFWEM mesh. The link between the two is software. A JNOS software system running on a Raspberry Pi4 computer. JNOS can send and receive messages on the packet side, and can send, forward and receive messages using regular Internet-based email.

The whole setup is currently solar powered. Summer in San Francisco is cold, and sometimes foggy, but there are enough sunny days that the batteries can make it. (Winter, with different sun angles, is a bit more challenging.) Currently (May 2021) I’m testing to determine how long the solar powered system can supply both the packet and the SFWEM systems, as well as solving some issues with how many different voltages are required for all of this equipment, and how efficient the whole power supply thing can be.

Lots more to say; enough for now.

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We (the team here) have been struggling with the color on Logitech C920 and C922 webcams recently. We’re preparing for a big international conference in November when the cameras will be in around-the-clock use. Initially each camera had a nice color balance, but after a couple of weeks each of them acquired an “underwater” blueish cast, and things that should have appeared white in the picture turned a spooky underwater blue!

Some of the blueness is due to where we have located our webcams — they’re in rooms with good outdoor light, but no direct sunlight, so the ambient lighting is saturated with blue skylight. But, beyond that, the cameras over-emphasized the blue. They were trying to auto-correct, but slewed way too far blue. Instead of compensating for our blue light, they were over-emphasizing it. Today we solved the problem!

The Camera Settings App

Logitech provides a Camera Settings app (for Mac OS in our case) that you can install to modify the way the camera sees things. (Download from > logitech.com/support/C930c ) Download it and install it on the computer, then connect your camera and fix its settings.

The app exposes five settings under its Advanced tab (see screenshot). The adjustment we needed was to Auto white balance. Turning it off (the little toggle switch), and then adjusting the color temperature (the xxxxK value) fixed our cameras so they produce a pleasing color output under various light conditions. That’s pretty much it.

In our case, I had to turn it all the way to 6500K to get a pleasing effect in daytime lighting conditions. At night, with incandescent (or LED adjusted to incandescent color temperatures) we have to modify it, but honestly it’s so easy to use the Camera Settings app that we can set it once for each online session and let it run.

The other adjustments do what you’d expect, and we have not needed to fiddle with them, as our problem was just the blueish cast — which is now gone!

C920 users

This worked for both our Logitech C920 and our C930 cameras, even though the C920 support page doesn’t give you a path to download this software, and even though Logitech does not list the C920 as a supported camera for this app. So if you’re using a C920, be sure to go to the support page for the C930 to download this software. It won’t let you pan or zoom (features of the C930), but you can fix the color.)

Logitech Brio

Postscript (Dec 7, 2020): We eventually ended up with a Logitech Brio webcam that has maintained its (proper) color balance for weeks. It can also be configured by the Camera Settings app, but it’s a far better camera in the first place.

The post Got the Logitech C920/C922 blues? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Very techie here… For a few months I’ve been operating a packet radio station on a 2-meter radio frequency here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I explored what it would take to make this a full “BBS” (like an online “forum”), and then backed off and let it just hang around n this frequency listening to the other (mostly BBS) stations. A few days ago, I got interested in graphing the data to better understand what stations were using the frequency and when.

The chart is made by this process:

• JNOS (the software that runs the packet radio station) logs all data it hears on the radio;
• A Python script analyzes this log file, keeping track of what stations were heard in each hour;
• The Python creates javascript data in a form acceptable to Google Charts;
• The javascript is transferred to a web server;
• PHP code reads the javascript and inserts it in an HTML page;
• Google Charts javascript fashions the data into the interactive chart.

A “cron” job carries out this process once each hour to keep the chart data current. Because each data bucket spans a whole hour, there’s no need to update more than once an hour.

The post Visualizing packet traffic appeared first on Sky's Blog.

In amateur radio circles there’s much use of digital modes to exchange information. (In olden days it was almost exclusively limited to “chatting” on the air.) At least in the circles I’m running in these days this is true. “Packet radio” involves putting a computer on the front end, which then controls the radio, connecting to other packet radio stations and transferring messages digitally. At the lowest level the software has a command-line interface (accessed via radio), and at its highest level, it is basically supporting programs that exchange email (again, by radio, not thru the Internet).

Later articles:
° Packet and SFWEM Interconnects
° Visualizing Packet Traffic

My packet radio station operates on 145.07 or 145.09 mHz (also known as “2 meters” and mail is exchanged by “connecting to” AA6AX-1 via that radio. If you need to email me about this, please use the email address packet@aa6ax.us.

The station uses a Raspberry Pi 4 as the computer, and I use VNC to view the virtual “screen” of the RasPi and interact with the system. The radio is a cheap 2-meter transceiver, and a circuit board in a box called a “TNC” attaches to the computer and controls the radio. The photo shows the RasPi (about 4 inches wide) on top of the slightly-larger TNC. Plug it all into electrical power, add a radio with an antenna, and it’s on the air.

Read more about this packet radio setup in the PDF file.

(More aa6ax info.)

This diagram shows the components of the packet station. Most notable are the Raspberry Pi computer (the “RasPi”), with the reddish TNC-Pi on the top, connecting it to the radio. The radio has an antenna, and is connected to a power source.

The computer itself is on the local network, and the VNC software lets me view its “screen” on my own computer, and use my mouse and keyboard as if they were directly connected to the RasPi computer. It’s kind of a virtual computer.

The post Packet Radio Notes appeared first on Sky's Blog.

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” — Chuck Close

I refer to (music) composition as “design and engineering” which reflects my experience that ideas are the easy part, but the hard part is then designing and building the product. I say “product” here quite intentionally. As an engineer, I spent many years building software products. In software, the idea may be subtle and tricky, but it’s still the easy part compared to the design and then the hard work of building — which is where the real time is spent.

And to a great extent, if you’ve studied and trained and understand how to use the tools available to you, and if you just show up and start working on your product, you usually (already) have what you need to accomplish your goal.

So for years I did this in software. And then in 2015 I started doing it in music.

Yeah, yeah, sometimes I get inspired and I write and write furiously late into the night. The endorphins tell me it was a great work. And frequently I then put aside my product, take a rest, then pick it up later on and yeegads(!) it sounds terrible to me. (Inspiration can be delusional.) And then there’s just lots more work to do. But that work is required to achieve the payoff. And if I do the work, the piece becomes so much better!

In my days in software I’d have people pitch me software ideas many times a year. My reaction was frequently, “Well, that’s a nice idea, but have you written the program?” I guess I was a bit brash, but many times I’d continue “Your idea is nice, but it probably represents less than 10% of a product, which requires hundreds if not thousands of hours of engineering.”

Another thing I’m fond of saying is “When you have a novel idea, you can bet that 8,000 people got up this morning and had that same idea; then 80 of them did something about it, like pulling together a team; then 8 of them will bring your product to market within the same two weeks.” That’s kind of hard for an inspired ideas person to hear, but it represents the harsh truth of the world of commercial software. Ideas come from lots of experience, and from creative responses, but they’re seldom completely unique.

Chuck Close is quoted in Inside the Painter’s Studio, a book by Joe Fig. A review of this book goes on to say “Inside an art gallery, it is easy to forget that the paintings there are the end products of a process involving not only creative inspiration, but also plenty of physical and logistical details.”

Those of us who do this kind of design and engineering, understand and appreciate the fundamental truth of this statement.

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In the subway stations, an automated display shows commuters the position of trains system-wide. (A “train” is one or two articulated cars coupled together.) Your station is in bright yellow. Trains are represented as little colored balls containing the route designation J, K, L, M, N, T (and at times a shuttle “S” which runs only underground). The other day there was some kind of failure at one station (Van Ness) outbound (toward the left, on the upper line in the photo), causing trains to back up almost nose to nose all the way down the Market Street subway. Stations are the gray rectangles “VAN NESS” etc. and stations are about 4 blocks apart.

There were 24 trains backed up outbound at this time in less than a 3-mile stretch. Just remarking on this because I’ve never seen a backup like this one. Wild!

The post Olympic-size Backup appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] in the United States has voted to nullify the common carrier status of ISPs, and thus to kill net neutrality, but of course other nations may not do so and I think there are customer actions that could make it difficult for carriers to run roughshod over this principle. The FCC calls their own action “Restoring Internet Freedom” and I, along with millions of others, contend that it’s only restoring the freedom for carriers to differentiate and prioritize, and charge as they see fit, making it more difficult for us common folks in the long run.

On the positive side, improved and more timely data service seems really attractive. People want it. Faster and stutter-free movies. Voice-over-IP calls without interruptions. Gaming and hugely-fast downloads. So there is actually some consumer pressure to prioritize.

Personally I think most of this is “entertainment motivated” in that the customers who care will be mostly the “consumers” — not businesses and not nonprofits. That’s because even if ISPs charge businesses more for these premium prioritized services, the big businesses will pony up and pay for it. Small businesses and individuals will be less able to do this, and that’s a big part of the problem.

So here’s how I think things will play out:

Advertising — The first thing that’ll happen, and it will be soon, though it’s not specifically limited by net neutrality, is that ISPs will look at your web usage and keep track of the sites you visit. They’ll make money by selling this data to third parties. Are you visiting Amazon.com a lot? You’re probably shopping. Are you visiting REI.com a lot? You’re shopping for outdoor gear. Visting Toyota.com a lot? Shopping for a new car. This kind of information is of great use and worth money to retailers, advertisers, car manufacturers. This kind of data is already commercially shared from web sites to advertising networks, but when ISPs can gather and sell this information, they’ll make money from it. And what’s more, ISPs can collect the data without your knowledge, and without leaving any evidence that they are doing so. Other web sites and advertisers do not have that advantage.

An ISP can also sniff the content of your (unencrypted) email, or your file downloads, which is something a web site cannot do. In other words, the ISP can create an open book full of information it can sell, because it is capable of monitoring every unencrypted communication you make through its connection. You may know that Google’s gmail can sniff your gmail traffic and will present advertising based on the contents of your mail — the ISPs would be able to do this regardless of where your email is held, if the connections are unencrypted.

The Let’s Encrypt project, which has ramped up mightily in the past year, aims to make it easier to protect traffic between you and the web sites you use, by making web site content unreadable by ISPs. The ISPs can still see which sites you use and how long you’re using each site, but when a web site is encrypted (HTTPS) the ISP can’t see which pages you’re viewing, nor what content you’ve viewed or submitted. (And you can also protect all of your network traffic from your ISP using a VPN, which I’ll discuss later.)

So here’s how I think this is all going to play out over a time period of one to three years (2018 to 2020):

The Inspection Scenario — To shape and prioritize your traffic, the ISP wants to understand (and prioritize) the type of data packets you’re sending. In theory and as far as the technology is concerned, all packets are just binary data, but in practice an ISP can look inside those packets (see deep packet inspection) and make conjectures about which ones are video, or audio, or gaming, or file transfers, and could treat them differently. Such as giving them higher or lower priority. Or charging more for some kinds of data. And because the carrier knows where your packets are going (meaning Disney, or YouTube or Netflix), it can differentiate and then prioritize based on financial agreements it may have (or interests) in those endpoints. So I predict that ISPs, who already have the capability to examine content, will be differentiating in some way based on your content as early as 2018.

Premium Services Plan — If the network manager has the capacity to examine your data, it could charge more for certain types of data — for the data that has more value to you. In other words, the carrier might “take a cut” of the economic value of the packets. This would be a lot like your phone company charging you more money to call a bank than to call a barbershop. Doesn’t happen to phone calls because the phone company (in the US) is a common carrier and regulated thus by the FCC. But that’s what Net Neutrality did for data carriers — and that’s now been rescinded by the FCC. I predict that ISPs will announce premium pricing for some types of content by 2019 — starting with voice-over-IP or video — and will promise to prioritize such types of traffic, for that price.

Transfer of costs to the supplier — Using a process we call zero-rating, an ISP may make certain types of content effectively free to its customers. They could make web access free, but inject advertising. They could make music “free” as T-Mobile has (meaning certain sites are free). Or throttle the delivery of (low-quality) video as Verizon has. Zero-rating has the effect of making other content more expensive, and of excluding content or providers based on criteria invisible to the customer. I predict that during 2018 more ISPs will first offer to accelerate certain content (such as video) for a price to the customer, then begin soliciting suppliers themselves to underwrite this, and eventually contend that this saves the end user from having to bear this cost.

Premium Sites Plan — The network manager could also charge customers more, or give more reliable or faster service, for traffic from specific providers. “Get your Disney movies faster and without glitches – $19.95 a month” is what I’d expect to hear within a few years. This would be done by prioritizing all traffic from Disney to you. Or any set of providers. Web sites. Email. And so forth. Any service the ISP thinks it can charge extra for, it will. I predict that by 2019 we will see Top-100 Premium Sites Plans from ISPs. Something that would have been illegal under the Obama-era FCC rules of net neutrality.

HTTPS (web) encryption — We’ve already reached the point where around half of web sites use HTTPS encryption to keep pages and submitted forms private. This will increase to 90% by 2020 and will frustrate the ISPs ability to look inside your interaction with these web sites.

Encrypted email — Here I’m pessimistic. People using standalone email, such as Apple Mail or Entourage, Outlook, Thunderbird apps on computers, have had encryption available for 20 years, though it hasn’t been easy to use until the last year or two. I predict email encryption will only slightly increase by 2020. However, more and more customers use outlook.com and gmail.com and services that use HTTPS encryption on their webmail interfaces, which renders email contents opaque to ISPs. This is a mitigating factor that will continue to improve the privacy of email, except that the email hosting company can, of course, still read your mail.

The Resistance — How could you prevent this kind of predatory behavior? Well even today, you could use a Virtual Private Network [VPN] to encrypt everything between your computer and the net. The encrypted packets are tunneled to another location (beyond your ISP), where they emerge onto the public Internet. For example, if you’re in San Francisco using “BigBad ISP” as your ISP, your computer might encrypt everything and send it to New York City, where it might emerge on a “GoodGuy ISP” network. BigBadISP would lose the ability to examine your data, and consequently could only charge you one rate for all traffic. That wouldn’t prohibit GoodGuy from doing something on its end, of course, but presumably you’d choose to emerge in friendly territory. I predict that by 2018 VPNs will be used by 20% of individuals and that ISPs will discourage their use by limiting VPN traffic. I predict that by 2019 ISPs will differentially charge more for VPN traffic from non-business customers or will require that customers upgrade to more expensive business or “Pro” plans in order to use a VPN. And I think that by 2020 ISPs will block VPN traffic from consumer accounts.

Higher Priced Privacy — And with VPNs blocked, ISPs will offer “Privacy services” for an additional price. In other words, if your ISP can’t see and make money off your traffic, they’ll charge you more to pay for the difference.

So the bottom line here is that businesses are in the business of making money by offering services. ISPs have offered connectivity for many years. That connectivity was priced initially based on bandwidth, then on data volume (particularly for mobile data), and now ISPs want to price their service on the value of the data. They’ll attempt to charge both their customers and the businesses who want to interact with their customers. They’ll offer “prioritized” services for an extra fee where there was no fee before. They’ll throttle services that don’t comply.

Because they can inspect customer behavior and data, they’ll profit by monetizing the value of the information about their own consumer customers. If that becomes difficult because of encryption, they’ll charge the customer an extra fee to protect his own data, under the guise that this is an improvement.

Net neutrality, and its interpretation under law, has largely protected consumers from this scenario for years. Now you have my predictions about how it could all unravel in just a few years.

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The Role of the ISP — Individuals and companies who have their own networks interconnect those nets by plugging in through Internet Service Providers [ISPs]. And in turn, each ISP is linked to “upstream” network providers, and through those to a group of very large carriers who form what’s called the Internet backbone. It’s not just a two-dimensional backbone, but itself is a distributed network of very-high-speed carriers with real-world physical interconnection points. There are many possible routes from an end user to another end user through this backbone. The big providers do what is called peering at these interchange points, where they are all peers, handing off traffic from one to the other with the flow based, of course, on how much traffic is going in any given direction, but otherwise “equally” in terms of priority.

There is, of course, nothing to prevent companies from creating their own private networks to route their traffic faster or more directly than the Internet can route it, but the flexibility and particularly the ubiquity of the Internet makes it ferociously attractive even for private data exchanges.

Each ISP collects fees from its customers, and it then purchases its upstream connections (meaning connections “closer to the backbone”), paying more or less based on the bandwidth of those connections. That’s how upstream ISPs make their money. And they pay the backbone providers for connections. And so forth.

Bandwidth — From the earliest days of the Internet, ISPs have provided service based primarily on the bandwidth (bits per seconds) provided to customers.

In the 1980s, a regular guy like me might buy dial-up service, which could run at maybe 1,200 bits per second [bps]. My blue graph illustrates relative speeds from dial-up on the bottom to T1 dedicated service on the top. Dial-up services (which includes ISDN)  reached higher speeds with better equipment (called modems – which connected a computer to a phone line). Even higher speeds could be achieved with dedicated lines rather than dial-up. ISDN reached 64,000 bps, but required two dedicated pairs of copper wires. The “T1” line, spoken of in hushed reverent tones in the 1990s, was a repurposing of the phone company’s internal T1 lines, which bundled 24 basic lines together into a single channel at about 1.5 million bits per second [mbps].

As digital services proliferated, the T1 became less useful, with DSL and ADSL speeds several times faster, and consumer cable Internet going up to nearly 80 mbps at the fast end of that spectrum. My red graph shows the T1 at the bottom end of the data services at 1.5mbps, and cable Internet at the top with around 80mbps. There are also fibre services where the speed of cable is kind of the low starting point, and service may reach 1,000 mbps (1gbps) at the top end.

Ah, but my point is that ISPs used to really sell bandwidth and your monthly price would be linked to the speed of your connection to your ISP.

• If you multiply out the bandwidth times the number of seconds a month, it would give you a theoretical maximum amount of data your ISP might be carrying in a time period. A phone line running at 1,200 bps would carry a max of about 30 billion bits (about 3 gigabytes) in a month, for example, though typically you’d be using only a fraction of that.
• As data services developed, businesses bought “T1” and higher-speed lines from their ISPs. Today’s DSL services at 6 mbps theoretically could carry about 15 terabytes [TB] in a month (15,000 gigabytes). And consumer cable data services could carry more than 10 times that amount of data, or more than 200 TB in a month.

Bandwidth and Capacity — As with any network that carries traffic — think interstate roadways, for example — a network is built with enough capacity to handle only a small percentage of the total possible traffic. Otherwise, the vast majority of routes would remain almost empty most of the time.

Engineering a Network’s Capacity — So there’s an “engineering” problem that always has to be solved — deciding how much capacity to actually build or turn on (to “provision”). (But look up the term dark fibre sometime if you want to know more.) Carriers need to be able to handle realistic peak traffic, but not maintain excess and therefore unused capacity.

Managing Network Traffic — And when a network gets close to capacity, the network manager wants to manage traffic in some way to avoid complete gridlock. In fact, large network managers claim that this is the primary reason to eliminate net neutrality – because they claim it hampers their ability to shape traffic when it peaks.

Why Limited Bandwidth and Net Neutrality are enemies — So carriers want to be able to prioritize (”shape”) traffic (and presumably charge someone more for priority traffic). Makes sense, huh? If the network is clogged, wouldn’t you as customer want your real-time video or audio calls to get through. And wouldn’t you agree to postpone delivery of spam, or delivery of traffic that’s not time-critical? That’s the genesis of the term Quality of Service [QoS], which deals with finding ways to ensure the delivery of high-value communications. But the question is who sets the priorities. Certainly one user would like to prioritize his video or audio. And another might prioritize her online real-time gaming. So here is the one crucial sentence in my argument:

In other words, to belabor my point, if there were no principle of net neutrality the carrier could prioritize and give more timely delivery to the prioritized traffic.

And to belabor my further point, if prioritization is allowed, carriers can and will charge more for it, will make special rules that benefit themselves (and their associated companies and services), and will begin restricting other traffic. This is the origin of today’s whole hullabaloo about net neutrality. (And with which I am in agreement, as you can see.)

So in a nutshell, this is why carriers don’t like net neutrality:

1. ISPs and other carriers already build out (or “provision”) less capacity than they sell to their users. For statistical reasons, this generally works out just fine.
2. They have to carefully engineer their capacity, and when it fills up, net neutrality (all bits being the same) leads to all traffic, including videos, audio, and real-time communications, get gummed up.
3. They would prefer to be able to de-prioritize some traffic so the special traffic could get through the jams, but net neutrality prevents this. (They’d also like to charge more for this special traffic.)
4. They could build out more capacity, or could “light up” unused lines, to relieve the problem, but that costs them more.
5. Therefore carriers in general will argue against net neutrality.

This leads me to predict some pretty clear scenarios for the future — some Post- Net Neutrality scenarios. You can envision your own, then read on in my next article.

The post Net Neutrality — The Issue is Bandwidth appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Net Neutrality — Its core is that 1. all bits/packets on the Internet have equal priority; and 2. all endpoints on the Internet are interconnected and traffic is accepted and delivered without prejudice to and from each and all of these endpoints.

The network operators (as data carriers) find better and better ways to carry traffic faster and cheaper (and perhaps more profitably overall), but to date it has been Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, commerce, media, news and online services who have created new uses of this Internet platform, not the traffic carriers themselves.

The opponents of net neutrality want to eliminate the neutrality principles.

They tell us this is so the carriers can innovate and develop new services, and better manage their own networks. I’d say there’s some value in the management issue, but since the 1990s, carriers have been developing new capabilities, higher speeds, and the ability to handle more traffic even with net neutrality in place. What the elimination of net neutrality would allow them to do is charge based on type or origin of traffic — in other words, the carriers would presumably charge more for traffic that’s more valuable to the user, participating more directly in the profitability of every new service innovated by any entrepreneur. And also “calling the shots” on which services may have to pay the carriers more to prioritize, or even handle their type of traffic in the first place.

How do I know this? From conversations and news reports in the mid-1990s.

Net Neutrality has, so far, prohibited this kind of behavior and left the networks as essentially common carriers carrying all data without discrimination.

Legislation and the Internet — Legislation passed in the US, or China, or Iran or Brazil has localized effect for the most part. But legislation in the US, in the case of neutrality at least, will affect vast amounts of global Internet traffic, and the elimination of Net Neutrality in US law, followed by its elimination in practice by network managers, will have global effects.

Political Questions — This is not a “political” question. It is an economic question. Carriers would like to benefit more from the data they carry — currently they carry all traffic uniformly regardless of its content or economic value. Every bit costs the same as the next bit to carry, though some services use more bits. But financial data doesn’t cost any more to carry bit-for-bit than a Disney movie. Although Dems and GOP in Congress are coming down on pro- and con- sides of Net Neutrality, in real life it affects all of us equally. Seeing that Dems are more pro-neutrality, they are attempting to save neutrality which will benefit Republicans every bit as much. The political arguments are really based on taking sides for or against the large network operators, and for or against live citizens.

Why it’s Important — Neutrality permits netizens to build platforms (software, hardware) without regard for whether their traffic will be speeded, blocked or slowed by communication providers. That’s just it in a nutshell. It has been an essential part of net life for many years.

It also permits “anyone” to connect to the net. There are no special fees based on type of business or type of content. Instead they’re based on volume or speed. Fairly and equally. Some content may be blocked legally, but this is rather narrow in scope, and is determined in law, not by network carriers.

As a fundamental principle of the Internet, Net Neutrality is essential to openness and innovation.

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