Then they should increase bandwidth in their backbone or reduce latency for everyone.
All that prioritizing real time traffic means is the ISP gets to judge what is important on the wire and what isn't, rather than the consumer. I don't want my ISP going anywhere near my packets.- or anyone, really - except for whoever I am sending them to. All they need to know is the destination address and the fastest way to get it there.
If there were competition in ISPs, you could reasonably argue that ISP's being given sovereignty over the traffic on their lines would be acceptable. But as long as Internet service in the US is the domain of very few regional monopolies, they have too much power over the consumer to be able to mess with such critical infrastructure for their own gain.
Absolutely, the Net Neutrality rules need to be in place, but your parent commentor is right when he says it's not going to be a trivial thing to define.
Genuinely curious.
- With p=0.86 this UDP stream looks like a VoIP traffic and the least latency route would be over this peer.
- And this TCP connection is to the YouTube video servers. No matter what, it's better not route through this peer, because for only $deityName knows why but it doesn't work well and customers complain about random buffering.
- And that is BitTorrent traffic - better feed that info_hash and so the locally-running cache would prefetch the data. Okay, that's probably not possible in the US, lol, but this simple trick significatly lowered upstream utilization, making network perform better for everyone.
That's how it works in a "good ISP" scenario. There's a "bad ISP" scenario though. There, NN prevents those:
- This is Netflix traffic and customer'd better pay for our cable if they want 4K. Shape this down to 5Mbps. Not like that customer has any choice of ISPs in their area.
- That's VoIP and and user's better burn minutes on our telephony services. Add randomized 1-5% packet drop.
- That's BitTorrent and we know it's only for pirates. Block the traffic, no Debian ISOs for you buddy.
So, as far as I get it, NN is unnecessary or even harmful where there's a significant competition (like, no less than 4-5 different ISPs), and may be helpful in case of mono- and duopolies.
If you want to do QoS, you have to do it using a standardized mechanism (such as the qos header in IP) and let the customer control which data streams they want prioritized.
Have you ever saw HLS or DASH HTTPS traffic tagged distinctively from bulk .iso downloads, and all that being distinct from page loads? Does your VoIP client uses DSCP field? Which level does it set? What ISP is to make if some "smart" client marks all their traffic as "critical"? And more importantly - how that's supposed to even work across multiple ASes?
Heuristics is the only way it can be made work in the real world scenarios.
That, or "sorry, we understand that your MMORPG lags terribly since the last week but we can't even try to help you" ISP support replies.
I don't think it would preclude an ISP offering "we'll treat your packets either as high-bandwidth high-latency, or low-bandwidth low-latency, based on tags you set". Which, I think, is preferable anyway, because the user probably has a much better idea of whether they want a little bit of data, reliably fast (voip, video games), or a lot of data, whenever it arrives (netflix, downloads, etc.). If the ISP is trying to guess, based on destination IP, port, or packet inspection, they'll often get it wrong. Especially if the destination IP is a VPN, the port is non-standard, or the packet is encrypted.
I also don't think it precludes an ISP offering better throughput or latency to a directly-connected customer who pays more.
The only thing they can not do is to prioritize your aggregate traffic over a different customer's aggregate traffic on their backbone, or to force prioritization on your link, or to charge differently for different traffic on your link, every bit transmitted has the same price.
If you think that being able to buy prioritization on the backbone would be a good idea, think again: If they sell you a gigabit pipe, and they sell your neighbour a gigabit pipe ... how could the solution to possible saturation of the aggregate uplink be anything but that they need to increase the uplink capacity in order to fulfill their contracts? It's obviously unacceptable to charge you more in order to reduce the quality of the service of your neighbour even more, isn't it? Or to let you decide that your work is more important than their entertainment? Either they have to invest in their infrastructure so they can actually deliver the service that they sold you, or they have to cancel the contracts/decrease the bandwidth of the links (and charge less accordingly).
P.S. I've also confirmed that my contract with my ISP is loaded with caveats about things that may limit my uplink speed, and it sounds to me like my whole neighborhood going to town on P2P file sharing can interfere with that and I can't hold them to it.
Will likely be going to bed before HN lets me reply again...
The ISP decided to make a contract with you that they would provide you with an n Mb/s pipe. And they made a contract with your neighbour to provide you with an m Mb/s pipe. How would it be even remotely reasonable to then give the ISP the option to not fulfill their contract with your neighbour in order to fullfill an additional contract with you that would allow you to make a reliable phone call? Or even if you don't pay extra for the privilege: Why is the fact that you think your phone call is more important than your neighbour's bittorrent in any way a sensible reason for the ISP to then throttle your neighbour? If the neighbour thinks their torrent is more important, shouldn't they rather throttle your phone call? Why do you get to make the decision whose traffic is more important?
When a link is saturated, bandwidth simply should be allocated equally to all customers (or rather, proportionally to their respective link capacity, I guess), don't you think? Why should it matter that you are trying to make a phone call? If the equally divided bandwidth is sufficient to make a phone call, you can make a phone call, if it's not, well, that's not a reason to tell your neighbour that they can't do what they would prefer to do, is it?
But much more importantly, shouldn't it be the responsibility of the ISP to build a network that doesn't normally get saturated? After all, they are selling both you and your neigbour a specific link capacity, so how aren't they responsible for actually providing the bandwidth that they sold you? How is it even remotely reasonable to suggest that they should be allowed to not fulfill one contract in order to fulfill another (while also still charging both of you)?
The whole concept of other customers "hogging resources" is just bullshit IMO. When I order ten books and you order one book from Amazon ... am I "hogging recources"? Should amazon simply just send me only nine books, charge me for all ten, and then send the tenth book to you, and charge you for it as well? People aren't hogging anything, they are simply using a service that the ISP volunarily agreed to provide, and that they are paying for, and it's the ISP's fricking job to make sure that them using what they paid for does not prevent you from using what you paid for, nor the other way around. If your neighbour is ordering tons of stuff from the internet, are they "hogging UPS"? Is that a reason for UPS to throw away some of their packages that they deem unimportant to free some capacity to deliver yours instead? Or isn't it rather UPS's frickin job to deliver all packages that they made contracts to deliver?
All in all, I don't see how any of that justifies prioritizing based on packet contents.
(BTW, consider one other area that is well-known for overbooking: Airlines. Do they just leave you stranded at the airport if too many people actually turn up for the flight, and still get to keep the money ... or isn't it rather completely their own risk, and they have to pay for your hotel stay, and move you to your destination ASAP, and potentially also pay compensation for your lost time? How is it that actually turning up for a flight that you paid for is not considered "hogging the airline"?)
>> The ISP decided to make a contract with you that they would provide you with an n Mb/s pipe.
No, they made a contract with me that they would, on average provide me with an n Mb/s pipe and 6 pages of reasons why it's not their fault if at any point in time that doesn't happen.
>> But much more importantly, shouldn't it be the responsibility of the ISP to build a network that doesn't normally get saturated?
Oh I agree - that's way more important. I'd love it if they could make strong guarantees in that regard. And THAT is a problem I'd like to see the FCC spend more time on than net neutrality. But it's not trivial because it's not just "giving me a pipe". It's giving my a pipe only some of the way and interacting with other pipes (and with the FCC's net neutrality rules, what appears to me to be a poor definition of what a "lawful" destination for the pipe is). Compared to that problem, I just don't see why net neutrality is being treated as the final battlefield for a free and open Internet by everybody. If it came with provisions that guarantee lines aren't oversubscribed and cleared up the wording on lawful destinations, I'd be a lot more for it.
However, I wouldn't dismiss overbooking outright: Overbooking gives you better utilization of resources, and thus has the potential to reduce prices/improve service at a given price point, if there is competition/a functional market. I don't know how big the effect is in the case of flights, but it's certainly considerable in the case of IP connectivity: Having a gigabit link available certainly is useful for large downloads, even if your average bandwidth use is far below that, but actually reserving a gigabit for everyone on the backbone and backhaul lines would be pretty expensive, so it's actually a good idea to overbook links to give you that advantage at a much lower price point.
I think the problem there is more one of transparency and lack of guarantees of mimimum bandwidth. In the case of flights as in the case of IP connectivity, you should have the option to buy "non-overbooked", at whatever the price for that is, and if you buy overbooked, it should be clearly specified what the statistical properties and minimum bandwidth is, so you can actually know in advance that there will always be enough bandwidth for your phone call, if that is what you need. While most people don't really need gigabit 24/7, it is actually important to know whether you get minimum 100 Mbit/s with gigabit available 95% of the time, or minimum 32 kbit/s with gigabit available 1% of the time.
> No, they made a contract with me that they would, on average provide me with an n Mb/s pipe and 6 pages of reasons why it's not their fault if at any point in time that doesn't happen.
Well, yeah, that certainly should be regulated. A market cannot work if, when agreeing to a contract, you can't actually know what you'll be getting.
> It's giving my a pipe only some of the way and interacting with other pipes (and with the FCC's net neutrality rules, what appears to me to be a poor definition of what a "lawful" destination for the pipe is). Compared to that problem, I just don't see why net neutrality is being treated as the final battlefield for a free and open Internet by everybody.
I think all of that pretty much boils down to net neutrality when you think about it.
As explained above, I don't think forbidding oversubscription would actually be a good idea, at least not in the strict sense of requiring fixed reserved bandwidth. As long as it is clear what guaranteed properties the link has, that should be perfectly fine. And I guess you shouldn't be allowed to advertise with some essentially made-up maximum bandwidth, but rather only with values that actually sensibly reflect the actual service that you would get.
But apart from that, the problem is that you probably don't want to have the actual prices regulated if you can avoid it, and you also don't want to regulate what bandwidths ISPs have to provide for the most part, at least as long as there is some competition, because you kindof need the market to discover the products that people actually need and what they are worth.
But especially the problem of defining what a "lawful destination of a pipe" is really is probably best suited for leaving that to the market, and that kindof is what net neutrality is all about. Net neutrality essentially just ensures there actually is a market. There really is no need to specify any particular location or distances or whatever as to where the ISP has to guarantee bandwidth, if you instead specify that the ISP can essentially specify the other end of the pipe arbitrarily, as long as other parties can connect to that other end without buying anything from the ISP. So, they could just define that the "other end" is at their local CO ... but they'd have to allow anyone who wants to to bury a fiber to their CO and to plug it into their router to do so, possibly charging their own costs of doing so, but nothing more.
It's just really not sensible to regulate in detail the bandwidth from any specific point on the internet, and it's also pretty pointless, if you can make sure there are markets everywhere that ensure that monopolistic price gouging doesn't happen, and that customers are informed enough about products to actually make informed choices.
If your pipes are not full QoS doesn't do anything anyway, so it is better to just have enough bandwidth that you don't need QoS.
Why is the above the case?
Regarding the ACA, affordable and expensive aren't necessarily opposites. You could make something more expensive (but still affordable) for those who are well off, but more affordable for those who are poor, and claim a net increase in "affordableness". Anyway, the PATRIOT act seem like a slightly better example of a disingenuous name for a bill IMO.
Here's the definition they provided:
> “Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers providing consumer connection to the Internet should treat all data on the internet the same, not giving specific advantages or penalties in access by user, content, website, platform, or application.”
Doesn't this seem like it makes any sort of QOS prioritization impossible? What if an ISP wanted to prioritize all real time traffic (voip, videogames, streaming video)?