New network quality rules will mean more fibre, Canadian IXPs: experts

To meet the CRTC’s basic service standard, internet service providers (ISPs) must provide a service with a latency of 50 milliseconds (ms) between a customer’s modem and an internet exchange point (IXP) in a major Canadian city, and have less than 0.25 per cent packet loss, according to new standards set by the regulator. One consequence of the new standards will be to encourage fibre deployment, according to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority’s (CIRA) chief technical officer Jacques Latour. He pointed out that satellite connections will have the hardest time adhering to these new standards. “To give an example, a satellite connection, going up in the sky and down… is around 700 milliseconds . That is not high speed,” Latour told The Wire Report in a phone interview. “If we want to have high speed broadband in the region up north and with those characteristics, the only way you can do that is through fibre.” When each of the metrics are lower, the speed and responsiveness of the internet improves. They mainly affect the performance of online video games and video conferencing, but will be even more critical for future applications like self-driving cars or telesurgery. Internet groups previously told The Wire Report that these metrics would be a key part of the CRTC’s basic service standard, set in a Dec. 2016 decision. In the Friday decision setting the new standards, the CRTC said the current average latency is 22 ms in Canada, a number which is less than the new required threshold. Latency is the time it takes for a data packet to travel from one point of the network and back. “Latency is a matter of congestion, capacity and distance,” Concordia University assistant professor Fenwick McKelvey said in a phone interview. “So it's: how far is a user from an aggregation point? What technology are they traveling over? Is it copper? Is it fibre? And how oversubscribed are those lines?” The second metric is packet loss, which is when a unit of data sent over the internet does not arrive correctly at its destination. The creation of thresholds on a third metric, jitter, or the rate at which packets arrive to their destination out of the correct order, was also proposed, but the CRTC decided to rule on that at a later date, beginning a public consultation process instead. The deadline for comments in that proceeding is Aug. 13. McKelvey said the CRTC is ahead of its international counterparts, since most other jurisdictions around the world haven’t “ruled on the latency or quality of service metrics.” During its consultation, the CRTC heard differing opinions about what the new standards should be. While a group which included McKelvey and CIRA advocated for a latency threshold between 50 and 100 ms, another group —including BCE Inc. and Quebecor Inc. and Telus Corp. — asked for a more flexible metric which would fluctuate from 200 ms to 750 ms depending on the requirements of the specific online task. The Wire Report reached out to the three major telecoms for comment, but Bell and Rogers Communications Inc. replied that they needed more time to study the new regulations. Telus had not gotten back before the time of publication. “We're satisfied with the round-trip latency of 50 and the packet loss , which are good criteria for a high speed broadband connection,” said Latour about the decision. Recommendations from a group of telecoms also diverged in the way the metrics should be measured. In this case, the CRTC decided to continue using its ongoing Broadband Measurement Project to document and track whether these standards are being achieved on Canadian networks. This leverages a device called a whitebox installed in customers’ homes, developed by U.K.-based company SamKnows Ltd. It can track network speeds as well as network quality. Another part of the discussion was what part of the overall network should be measured. The CRTC settled on measuring the time it takes for a data packet to be sent from an ISP customer’s modem to an IXP in what the regulator calls a tier one city — Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Moncton, Montreal, Ottawa, Saskatoon, Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg — and back again. An internet exchange point is where local ISP connections can send network traffic to the larger internet and each other, according to the CRTC. Latour compared IXPs to traffic roundabouts as an alternative to a city grid. “Instead of having all these streets that crisscross the town, with all the traffic lights… they go on the same roundabout and it's super efficient to exchange traffic,” he said. A key component, according to the proponents of the IXP measurement method, was that it simulated accessing the global internet, having traffic leave the ISP’s internal network or “on-net”. Some of the participating telecoms proposed that the test only reach what is considered an “on-net” endpoint, which, according to the CRTC, would have reduced the cost and effort of testing. The CRTC said in the decision that picking an “off-net” connection would result in more fair measurements because not every internal ISP network is designed the same. McKelvey said the decision should lead to the construction of more IXPs and associated connections in Canada. Currently, ISPs often connect to U.S.-based exchange points, but that has elicited calls for change with an eye to keeping domestic internet traffic in the country for security and privacy reasons. “This also gets into this moment of network sovereignty. How much do we want to make sure that our internet connections are supporting domestic infrastructure or using domestic routes when possible,” said McKelvey. — With reporting by Bryson Masse at bmasse@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

New network quality rules will mean more fibre, Canadian IXPs: experts

News | July 17, 2018

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New network quality rules will mean more fibre, Canadian IXPs: experts

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