Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

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c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
You connect it to your home switch, which is connected to the modem of your ISP.
Your contract, which ensures connection and data transport, guarantees a 3 Mb/s 2
connection — enough to see on uninterrupted streaming mode a high definition
movie (H.264 720p) on your new HDTV. You get to solve somehow the barrier
of iTunes service contract, which does not accept credit cards from Brazil; you turn
your device on and choose, let’s say, the latest episode of your favorite TV series,
which will be shown in Brazil only on cable TV a few months later.
It doesn’t work. The connection of transit, you discover, is not running at 3
Mb/s. “But how, if I have no problems watching all the videos from the content
provider associated with my ISP?” The answer is that your connection to your ISP
is not a connection of transit — it is a peer-to-peer connection with the provider’s
network. The traffic between your ISP network and the rest of the Internet is determined
by bandwidth control systems, which selectively define at what speed and
with what regularity or rhythm (all essential properties for video streaming, VoIP
and other real-time data transfer services) will the transit between your Apple TV
and Apple’s iTunes servers in Northern California occur.
Why? Because the traditional model of commercializing Internet access in Brazil
(a country where the regulatory body is not impartial and some legislators do not
understand a word of what I’m trying to say) is to “underbuy” transit of major international
suppliers, the owners of the main backbones of the worldwide Internet,
and to “oversell” that transit to customers at the end of the road — that is us, who
are on the “last mile” (that should actually be considered the first mile).
As an example, suppose a larger access provider — let’s call it TeleVirtua —
which also owns a major content portal, GloboTerra 3 , has a large optic fiber network
across the country and maintains a transit contract with the global Internet through
Global Crossing (this operator actually exists). TeleVirtua, in our example, has five
2. Megabits per second. The data transmission over Internet is codified in a sequence of pulses which
are called bits. Each 10 bits compose a character or octet called byte (made of eight bits that make up
the character, and two more control bits). The octets are first grouped into datagrams (“packets”) of
standardized but variable size, and then transmitted in a sequence of bits. That is why, according to a
rough calculation, 1 megabit per second corresponds to 100,000 characters per second, or 100 kB. In
this article, we use the International System of Units (SI) notation, adopted in Brazil: Mb/s instead of
Mbps, as an example.
3. Translator’s note: Telefonica, Virtua, Globo and Terra are real Brazilian ISP and content portals,
whose names were mixed up and used by the author to create a random example.
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