With the heavy coverage of the Democratic Convention in Denver, I’ve read a few stories that talk about how viewership of the event is off.

For example, there is a chart in the Washington Post today entitled “TV Ratings Drop.” But they mean “network television ratings,” by which they mean ABC, NBC, CBS.  But that’s completely the wrong metric.  In addition to the Big Three and PBS, you can watch convention coverage on C-SPAN, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and even BET and TV One.

Here’s the story in TV Week: Cable News Networks Reap Political Ratings. In B&C: Cable Adds Viewers on Day Two. This AP story notes that CNN beat ABC and CBS during the broadcast of Michelle Obama’s speech during the 10:00 p.m. slot. And cable news viewership was way up over 2004, according to TV by the Numbers.

I mentioned this in July, during a discussion of the Emmy nominations,  but it’s always worth noting that people now turn to cable television very frequently to serve their needs for entertainment and information.

When it comes to politics and cable, I don’t think anyone would disagree that C-SPAN is the jewel in the crown. I mean no disrespect to the fine work done by the various cable news networks, but C-SPAN started their coverage of this election (“Road to the White House 2008“) in December of 2004 and has shown somewhere around 5,000 hours of coverage so far.

C-SPAN has been advertised as “Cable’s Gift to America,” since it was created by cable companies as a public service in 1979 (contrary to the mistaken belief by some that C-SPAN is the Government Channel). Over the last three decades, “the political network of record” has now grown to three public affairs television networks, a radio station (also available on XM), and a website — all provided for through the support of the cable industry.

(Let’s recall that, in most instances, your local cable company pays a carriage fee to the programmer in order to bring you your favorite channel. Cable programmers have dual revenue streams — carriage fees & advertising — which is one of the reasons that a la carte would be harmful to them.)

C-SPAN, like other cable programmers, has been moving into the digital arena. As we enter the Academy Awards seasons of politics, with the Democratic Convention starting on Monday and the Republican Convention following the week after, C-SPAN has unveiled the Convention Hub.

This pair of portals (one for Denver and one for Minneapolis) includes a variety of features:

• Real-time tracking of credentialed state and national political bloggers, aggregated on the websites, to enable users to follow the latest online convention news and analysis;
• Video clips from the network’s convention coverage, embeddable, to facilitate use by political bloggers and other convention watchers;
• Linkable access to the complete C-SPAN Video Library, allowing interested users to fully search all C-SPAN video content;
• Live coverage of C-SPAN television and radio networks;
• Blogger Tips and Online Convention Video Finder tools;
• Real-time feeds from Twitter users using the hash-tags #RNC08 and #DNC08

New Media Strategies (NMS), an Arlington-based online intelligence and marketing firm, was brought on to design proprietary software technology for Convention Hub. C-SPAN maintains editorial control.

All this is on top of C-SPAN’s usual excellent election coverage, which will begin each morning with Washington Journal at 7:00 AM (ET) and run through the closing of each day’s floor proceedings. In addition, C-SPAN 2 will bring you events like live coverage of the Republican Platform Meetings and Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic.

C-SPAN has expanded its traditional television coverage with the technological approaches in order to attract new viewers. C-SPAN’s loosening of copyright restriction over the past few months (embeddable video is new for the conventions) is enabling bloggers to use C-SPAN content in creative ways and helps to expand C-SPAN’s core mission to educate and inform the American populace.

But it’s important to realize that all this coverage may be a gift, but it ain’t free. It costs money to run C-SPAN’s operations and the support of cable operators is a critical part of the network’s success. Despite some criticism (like this), it’s important to remember that C-SPAN is a business, not a government program. This NY Times story makes the case:

In May, C-Span said that it had for first time asserted its copyright against a video-clip site, ordering YouTube to take down copies of Stephen Colbert’s pointed speech in front of President Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Clips of the speech had been viewed 2.7 million times on YouTube in the 48 hours before it was taken down.

“What I think a lot of people don’t understand — C-Span is a business, just like CNN is,” [C-SPAN Corporate Vice President & General Counsel Bruce] Collins said. “If we don’t have a revenue stream, we wouldn’t have six crews ready to cover Congressional hearings.”

Robb Topolski recently penned a critique of metered pricing in which he takes issue with Internet connection speeds in an argument based on Moore’s Law. His thesis:

Moore’s Law, and its corollaries, all indicate that technology grows cheaper, or its capability increases, by a factor of two every 24 months or so. Networking technology is no different. Has your broadband bill gone down by half? Is your ISP bringing you about twice the speed and capacity than it brought to you two years ago? If not, then its a good bet that your ISP’s costs of delivering the same level of service to you have dropped during this time and they simply would rather not increase the network’s capacity as fast as you would like them to.

Moore’s Law, by way of background, has nothing to do with broadband connection speeds. It isn’t even a "law" as much as a collection of articles dating back to 1965 that taken together form "the law”.  The closest thing to a concrete statement of the principle comes from an April 1965 Electronics Magazine article:

For simple circuits, the cost per component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of components, the result of the equivalent piece of semiconductor in the equivalent package containing more components. But as components are added, decreased yields more than compensate for the increased complexity, tending to raise the cost per component. Thus, there is a minimum cost at any given time in the evolution of the technology. … The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.

In 1975, Moore changed his theory from one year to two years. However, he never attempted to apply it to networks. While some technologists have since attempted to apply "Moore’s Law" to just about everything (the "corollaries" Topolski mentions), there is no accepted "law" that dictates the doubling of broadband speeds every two years.

In other words, Topolski is attempting to make up a new theory to justify his policy positions.

However, even if Moore’s Law did apply to Internet connection speed, Topolski would still be wrong. He falls victim to the same arguments that cripple anti-global warming arguments – it takes one data point in a series and attempts to extrapolate it to a larger trend.

You can’t say global warming doesn’t exist just because it’s particularly cool today. It just doesn’t pass the smell test. Topolski’s theory, however, attempts to do just that.

If you look at the larger history of Internet connection speeds – rather than one two-year period – you’ll see that they have steadily increased. Rather than looking at one data point as Toploski suggests, you should view Internet connection speeds over time.

Verizon illustrated this point with a recent post on their site that looked at the history of capacity and speed development in internet connections. I have borrowed for the table below, their starting point of 300 baud modems in 1979. I think that is a reasonable point at which we can begin our discussion.

Using Topolski’s “Law” of Doubled Internet Connection Speeds, I will fill in, starting in 1979, what the "doubled" speeds would be equal to, and the commercially available speeds (either based on early modem speeds or offered broadband speed) over that same period of time.

If you look at the increase in capacity at the consumer level over the last 29 years, you’ll see that Topolski’s argument is in error. In fact, Internet connection speeds in the US have kept pace with the upward projection over the past three decades.

Will that trend continue? That’s difficult to say. If you assume that Internet connection speed as a broad category is the appropriate metric to use (as opposed to a particular type of connection) it’s likely that advances in technology will continue. Whether a particular technology scales up is a different question. The telephone companies found that they could increase the capacity of DSL lines only to a certain point due to the capacity of twisted pair copper wire. They began fiber deployments to increase their speeds and are currently offering 20Mbps connections where they have upgraded their capability.

Cable companies have begun the rollout of wideband modems with speeds up to 50 Mbps (a speed Topolski’s imaginary law dictates should not be achieved until 2014-2016.) Further, the channel bonding technology that enables those speeds is not limited to 50Mbps. Channel bonding can provide speeds well in excess of 50 Mbps because each bound channel is the equivalent of roughly 40 Mbps. The speed limit announcement at last years Cable Show was 160Mbps.

Under Topolski’s "Law", we should not achieve 160 Mbps until 2017-2018.

Does everyone have access to a 20 Mbps or 50 Mbps connection today? No. But Moore’s Law also never claimed that the moment a capacity doubled it would be instantly available to everyone.

As an example, not everyone had a 56k modem the moment they were available. In fact, at the time 56k modems were rolled out, the capacity had increased, but a fight over the modem standard that should be adopted delayed widespread adoption for some time. In other words, real world business decisions impacted the adoption despite the availability. Early adopters paid a premium and settled for modems that were often incompatible with their ISP until the v.90 standard was announced.

Similarly, there is not a single cable infrastructure. Different companies run on different networks and prioritize investments in those networks based on usage and cost. Business decisions still drive availability and adoption regardless of what may be technologically possible. Are most cable customers able to access the Internet at 5 Mbps (the Topolski’s "Law" suggestion for where we should be today). For the most part, yes. Again, though, different companies invest in upgrades to their network at different rates.

The fact is Internet connection speeds are increasing, prices are generally flat or declining, and all of this is being done despite what Topolski’s improper application of Moore’s Law would suggest should be the case.

Earlier this week, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf said something that brightened my day.

…the real question for today’s broadband networks is not whether they need to be managed, but rather how.

We couldn’t agree more, since I’ve expressed that same sentiment once or twice or thrice. Network managers know that networks need to be managed. Cerf even explained why:

Network capacity (bits per second or data rate) is a limiting factor in all communications networks. Users cannot send traffic faster than the amount of network capacity available to them. But when users’ aggregate demand exceeds the available capacity of the network, network operators naturally seek to manage the traffic loads… The end result is the potential for traffic congestion, leading to service delays and even outages for consumers.

Cerf then goes on to discuss various methods, such as transmission rate caps, low latency prioritization and bandwidth constraints, but they’re all based on that phrase: “…not whether [networks] need to be managed, but rather how.” [Emphasis added.] I take great interest in these remarks, because I’ve been following his arguments over the last couple years.

For example, back on June 13 of 2006, he appeared on Public Radio’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show. You can find that episode online; if you skip ahead to about 23 minutes in, you can hear Cerf speak of net neutrality for a few minutes. At that time, he argued that innovation will be stifled and users will not be able to freely access content unless the Internet is kept “open and neutral.” He said that the government may need to provide protection. Two years later, it’s unclear what innovation was stifled.

By October of 2007, Cerf was speaking of other concerns, such as at his address at the WebbyConnect conference, which I attended. He said in his speech that “net neutrality” as a phrase has been distorted and that he would clarify what Google was asking for.

• It’s okay to charge for higher capacity.
• It’s okay to address denial of service attacks, viruses and so on.
• It’s okay to provide low latency services.
• As long as all of these practices are done in a non-discriminatory fashion.

Even at this point, Cerf was arguing that network management was necessary, but he had his opinion about what methods ought to be used.  That approach is much better than comments (like this one) that argue that the “management” argument is a scare tactic. There are those who would claim we should just build a bigger pipe. But then you read this quote from a Singapore ISP executive: “Even buying more bandwidth will not work since stuff like BitTorrent is designed to gobble whatever extra bandwidth we buy.”

Cerf specifically mentions that conversations with Comcast engineers have led him to a better understanding of the underlying motivation and rationale for that company’s network management decisions. As we often see, when people examine the capacity constraints we face and the unique challenges of running cable systems, it can contribute to the conversation.

Now that Cerf has confirmed that network management is a fact and a necessity, we can begin to have the broader dialogue about the network management that needs to take place. Cerf argues the “how” of network management is the important piece of the puzzle, but I would suggest the “who” is even more critical – as in, “Who decides what network management practices are reasonable?”

Cerf argues that government should. I think that is the wrong approach. I think it makes more sense for engineers and companies to make those decisions, not government bureaucrats. Those decisions should be based on what methods of network management might be most efficient and which ones would provide the best experience for the largest number of their customers. They should not be based on the dreams and schemes of politicians.

I recently heard one of these people describe network congestion as akin to a mail truck being full. This kind of talk makes my head hurt.

I shudder to think of the regulations that would be dreamed up by the US Department of Network Management.

There’s an interesting little item up today over at the FreeStateFoundation Blog.  It’s been giving us all a little chuckle, and we thought we’d share it.

 The FCC’s website contains the following statement: “The FCC does not regulate the Internet or Internet Service Providers (ISP).” Check it out for yourself here.

While the import of this statement has been “degraded” and “impaired” in various ways over the last couple of years, the FCC’s action last week sanctioning Comcast in the BitTorrent affair certainly now renders the statement, to put it nicely, inoperative. Or you could say inaccurate or false. You could find other similar declarations, but this one in the Commission’s news release indicates the extent to which the agency’s website statement is inaccurate: “The Commission announced its intention to exercise its authority to oversee federal Internet policy in adjudicating this and other disputes regarding discriminatory network management practices with dispatch…”

In the interest of accurate disclosure, I assume the FCC fairly promptly will correct the website statement. Perhaps in the interest of the fullest possible disclosure it will even provide a link to the Comcast order.

According to a note at the bottom, the page which disclaims the FCC’s non-involvement was last updated on July 10, 2008.  If nothing else, the dramatic reversal in position over the last 27 days should demonstrate how fast technology moves.

A tip of the hat to the FreeState gang for pointing this one out…