This Is Why The Internet Is Broken: A Technical Perspective on Net-Neutrality

January 15th, 2017

Anyone with hands-on experience setting up long-haul VPNs over the Internet knows it’s not a pleasant exercise. Even factoring out the complexity of appliances and the need to work with old relics like IPSEC, managing latency, packet loss and high availability remain huge problems. Service providers also know this — and make billions on MPLS.

The bad news is, it doesn’t matter that available capacity has gone up. The problem is twofold: the way providers are interconnected and mismanagement of global routes. The same architecture that allowed the Internet to cost-effectively scale to billions of devices also set its limits.

Addressing these challenges requires a deep restructuring in the fabric of the Internet and core routing – and should form the foundation for possible solutions.