Shared Interests

The United States faces a worsening broadband crisis.

Over the past half-decade, the United States has fallen behind a growing list of industrialized nations in broadband penetration rates, delivery speeds and price per megabit.

Rural and poor communities are doubly discriminated against, often receiving little or no broadband access and paying higher service rates when they do have access. In addition to other benefits, the Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems (COMMONS) project offers one approach to alleviate the problem.

Initiative History
In December 2006, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) held the North American Strategy Workshop to discuss and launch innovative collaboration among researchers and interested broadband networks from across the continent.

This initiative was developed to solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet service provision industry that poses a severe threat to broadband growth and American competitiveness; a data acquisition crisis that has stunted the field of network science; and a critical dilemma within emerging community, municipal, regional and state networks, who need affordable broadband connectivity but face severely limited service level, usage and provider options.

The COMMONS project is partnering with national backbone providers to interconnect participating community, municipal, regional and state networks to one another, and to the global Internet. COMMONS peering - the voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network - is available to city, county, state and federal government entities; academic institutions; community Internet initiatives (e.g., community wireless networks); and commercial entities based on three conditions.

These three conditions are, first, that networks will make select operational data available to COMMONS researchers under appropriate legal data-sharing and privacy safeguards. Second, the attached networks must agree to develop and abide by COMMONS policies, which will be based on the research results of empirical data analyses of network usage. Third, participating networks must abide by the acceptable use policies (AUP) set by the COMMONS Project Coordination Committee.

The COMMONS project merges representatives from industry, community and municipal networks; regional and state networks; and Internet researchers, community organizers and developers building next-generation data communications technologies.

The initial Strategy Workshop participants also included heads of research, infrastructure, media and policy organizations, and telecommunications lawyers. The diversity of workshop participants helped ensure that major project stakeholders were represented in the proceedings and could provide insights into the potential pitfalls and opportunities the COMMONS Project might face in coming years.

The COMMONS Strategy Workshop report is available at the Web site.

Laying the Groundwork
Charter members of the COMMONS project forged a consensus mission statement for the initiative. This statement of purpose laid the groundwork for future organizing efforts and provides a glimpse of how COMMONS differs from other initiatives to bring affordable broadband to underserved communities.

COMMONS is a community of interest comprising local networks, broadly defined, that seek to utilize an AUP-neutral communications infrastructure; mitigate geographic disparities in the cost of Internet access and wide-area network connectivity; enable competitive environment in the connectivity market; benefit from economies of scale; and realize a vision for ownership in an open, universal and scalable backbone infrastructure.

COMMONS is also a community of network operators who recognize that the future usefulness and security of the Internet depend on the availability of empirical network data; support the availability of that empirical data to the academic research community; and insist that the data collected and utilized be handled in a manner respectful of personal privacy.

In addition, the project is a community of people who