The service you get from European ISPs depends on more than bandwidth.
Valerie Thompson
The key to good response times on today's Internet is your Internet service provider's IP experience and the line capacity and throughput rates the ISP offers you. But capacity is not all. When traffic moves out of the local hop into the Internet backbone, it's the ISP's connectivity to the backbone that counts.
Today more than 600 ISPs rival for customers in Europe. Half of these providers have been on the scene for less than a year. To the home or small-office user, retail ISPs may more or less look the same and differ just by prici
ng structure. However, for corporate users, the quality of service and the overall data throug
hput vary greatly.
Don't think that just because an ISP is small it cannot offer good performance. One of the neat things about the Net is that a small ISP with a 64-Kbps line to the Internet can still provide speedy response because most of its subscribers are "low-power" users. A big ISP might have a 2-Mbps line to the Internet, but it may also have a lot of subscribers plus a few real power users who clog the link to the backbone. That's why you should look beyond just the links.
At its most basic level an ISP is nothing more than a rack of modems or ISDN boards, a server, a router, and some communications and billing software. The ISP typically connects all this equipment to the Internet with a leased line. That link into the Internet is crucial to the service the ISP's customers are going to get.
The connection to the Internet might involve a hop (routing point) to a regional IS wholesaler. From that point the ISP links to one of the European Internet backbones. Knowing how I
SPs are connected gives you an idea of the performance you can expect. That's where CyberRoadMaps, such as the one provided by market researcher EuroInternet, can help (for more information, see
http://www.marktplatz.ch/eurointernet
). These maps show how more than 2000 ISPs in various countries in Europe, as well as providers in North America, Japan, and Australia, connect to Internet backbones.
World Wide Wait
The ad hoc nature of the Internet more than often converts the World Wide Web into the World Wide Wait. Data packets sometimes travel around the world once or twice before they find their destination. This may even be the case if the server you need to locate is in a neighboring city.
This situation is prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic; however, the European
Internet backbone is by far not as efficient as the North American. "Europe has 20 to 30 percent of the Internet's traffic, but it produces 80 percent of people's [Internet] nightmares," as a manager of a European ISP recently put it.
The main bottlenecks in the European portion of the Net, according to a recent analysis done by EuroInternet, occur at three points: country-to-country, backbone-to-backbone, and Europe-to-U.S. links. At these key points, insufficient bandwidth slows down the traffic. One reason for this unfortunate situation is the high cost of international and transatlantic leased lines in Europe, further aggravated by fluctuating and unfair prices between the U.S. and Europe. In many cases, European backbone providers have to pay an additional fee to connect to the States, whereas U.S. providers can link to the European backbone for free.
Unlike the U.S. portion of the Internet, where tariffs are based only on distance, European backbone providers have to deal with prohibitive intern
ational tariffs whenever the network crosses the border from one country to another. Steep prices of leased lines supplied by Europe's PTTs are the main culprit. "We remain heavily penalized by monopoly tariffs for leased lines as well as ATM [asynchronous transfer mode] connections," says Brian Carpenter, group leader of Communications Systems at the CERN research center in Geneva, Switzerland, and chair of the Internet Architecture board.
Backbone Bottlenecks
After 1998, tariffs for leased lines will drop as a result of increased competition fostered by a more liberalized European telecommunications market. But one Internet analyst says the transatlantic and cross-border links are not being used optimally. "International backbone providers are often reluctant to interconnect because of competitive pressures," says Jim Romaguera, principal consultant at EuroInternet. "They fear that smaller ISPs could be able to offer better services for lower prices to their customer base."
It i
s the nature of today's Internet that two ISPs in the same country often are not connected to each other. The result: Data sent from one ISP to another in the same region travels via the U.S. These expensive Europe/U.S. links carry traffic that actually should remain in Europe.
What is required is that more ISPs connect via commercial Internet exchanges (CIXes) to relieve the intercontinental traffic jams. CIXes were originally set up to free commercial service providers from the policies that were restricting use of the Internet to educational and research purposes only. The development of CIX points is crucial to the European Internet infrastructure because it will avoid routing data over the already congested and expensive transatlantic links. The six major European CIX points today are in Helsinki, Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva (CERN), London, and Stockholm (see
http://www.isi.edu:80/div7/ra/eu.html
).
The original idea behind CIXes was simple: Commercial ISPs would agree to route traffic over each other's networks without restriction or additional charges. However, because CIXes deploy sophisticated communications protocols and global guidelines, some CIXes don't accept interconnection with smaller commercial ISPs.
site.
Trace the Route
For its report "The Global Internet -- Featuring CyberRoadMaps," EuroInternet surveyed data packets traveling on the Internet and calculated the number of different ISP subnetworks they visited on their odyssey. EuroInternet consultant Romaguera says this is the best way to locate bottlenecks and measure the performance of ISPs.
The most recent analysis from EuroInternet identifies nine Pan-European backbone providers and another nine organizations for the U.S. backbone. The regional and national providers connect to the backbone and act as Internet wholesalers. Some also offer retail services. Local or retail ISPs connect with one or two lines to the regional providers.
An example of an Internet wholesaler is the
SWITCH network
in Zurich. It connects more than 100 sites consisting of universities, engineering schools, R&D institutions, companies, and regional ISPs. A leased-line network links all organizations to other providers (E
Unet, Unisource Business Networks) and to backbone networks (EuropaNET, EBONE). Two T1 links connect directly to the ANS network in New York.
SWITCH publishes statistics that show the link utilization at the three key points of the network (see
http://www.switch.ch/switch/lan/SWITCHlan-map.html
). For the customer this is an excellent service because it shows exactly the performance the ISP is able to provide.
To cope with the increasing demand for bandwidth, many backbone providers are developing a new infrastructure. Unisource Internet Access Services, one of the European backbone providers, for example, confirmed the establishment of a premium service network with hubs in Amsterdam, Stockholm, London, Zurich, and Madrid, and with interconnections at all the CIX points in Europe
. IBM and EUnet are currently at work on similar projects.
As the Internet continues to expand, peer-to-peer networks are expanding as well. These private networks offer added value such as roaming agreements or data-interchange services to large businesses. But it's important to remember that the public access an ISP can offer is directly tied to its amount of bandwidth and type of connectivity to the global backbone. When it comes to these factors, Europe's local ISPs are far from equal.
Where to Find
EuroInternet
Bern, Switzerland
Phone: +41 31 998 4331
Fax: +41 31 998 4103
E-Mail:
eurointernet@thenet.ch
Internet:
http://www.marktplatz.ch/eurointerne
t
HotBYTEs
- information on products covered or advertised in BYTE
It's not just price that makes for a quality Internet service
provider. To help find the appropriate ISP:
- Ask for network utilization data.
- Check the ISP's connectivity to the backbone and
watch the number of hops to the backbone.
- Ask for the number of users per modem line.
- Evaluate the competence of the help-desk staff
and the cost of support.
- Look for roaming services in other regions and
countries.
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Valerie Thompson, based in Zurich, tracks telecommunications developments. You can reach her at 100271.257 @compuserve.com.
Europe's Internet Infrastructure
