Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)
> You can't do this with electrons.
Huh?! yes, you absolutely can.
We happen to mostly use photons these days, but I'm having a really hard time seeing why this distinction between "you can only use the electron for x,y,z" and "you can only use the photon for x,y,z" is anything but completely arbitrary.
If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations? Thats... rather confusing.
Or, more succinctly, "you can't microwave Netflix(R)-brand Popcorn with bits"
This is certainly true as well. But we've seen with T-Mobile's zero-rating that it's faster and cheaper to acquire/retain new customers through partnering and network management. To your point, and to compete with Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, I believe T-Mobile announced a TV-related acquisition today.
> Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)
Hospitals are already being addressed, as you say, with dedicated lines and VPNs. I'm referring to the millions of device endpoints sitting on consumer-grade (NN limited) wired/wireless networks. Rescinding NN will allow the ISPs to sell premium prioritized QoS to medical and security services companies who can bundle access to their customers. I'm not sure how this will play out in practice though.
> You can't do this with electrons.
The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis. On the contrary, electricity is generic and is (ideally) sourced on a lowest cost basis and QoS is strictly determined on a supply/demand dimension.
> If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations?
I'm not advocating against NN. I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate. I'm also pointing out that the ISPs want to offer premium Qos and, yes, their own content offerings.
I'm very skeptical. This doesn't sound necessary, or in some cases even very smart. An extremely niche use case.
If you want to see what death of NN will mean in practice, look at what companies were willing to do in order to test NN regulations in the past. Hint: it's not prioritizing medical traffic.
> The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis.
The 2015 order may or may not be the best implementation of net neutrality. But I think it's entirely reasonable to have a regulation that says "you can't change what you charge / how you behave based on who is on the other end of the line, but you can -- in a pricing-agnostic way -- prioritize/shape traffic".
> I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate.
I'm still not convinced.
You can equally make the argument that in a brown-out, electricity companies should be able to prioritize consumer-grade medical devices and so on.
The only difference is that it's easier to implement this prioritization.
"because we can" is a really poor justification for doing something.
This is actually allowed under current net neutrality rules. As an ISP I can use QoS to make VoIP more reliable, for example. What I can't do is make one specific VoIP provider more reliable than another. If that's the argument that large ISPs are making then they're not being truthful.
I have worked at small ISPs for the last 15 years or so and worked on systems that did these things. FWIW I strongly support net neutrality and I'm especially annoyed with any rhetoric that suggests net neutrality is bad for small ISPs. It's really not.
Removing net neutrality allows ISPs to make deals with VoIP providers (or anyone, really) so that their VoIP always works the best (or even so other VoIP services work poorly or not at all.)
Really, ISPs don't want to just be a utility. Imagine if instead of having to charge for service provided, they could have large companies like Netflix and Hulu bid for the exclusive privilege among video providers to not be throttled; the profits would start raining in without having to even innovate on actual product or service provided. How wonderful.
As a customer that is not my problem. If I have been sold a 10MB line which has unlimited data then the company doesn't get to complain when I use all of what has been sold to me, the source of the traffic is completely irrelevant.
The issue is that ISPs oversubscribe residential connections massively (say a contention ratio of 50:1) and have done for years, this is now biting them in the ass with high bandwith apps like video streaming becoming the norm.
This doesn't need to be fixed by destroying net neutrality and shaping traffic that they don't get paid for from both ends (the subscriber and content provider), it needs to be fixed by fixing their packages.
But hey, when you can get paid both ways who cares if you're fucking over both parties?
Packets delivered to the ISP at an exchange are equally free. Noone is asking for access providers to collect packets in asia and move them to their customer in the US for free. All this is about is that if I pay a transit provider to move my packets from asia to the US, then the access ISP in the US doesn't get to charge me for actually delivering the packet to their customer, or prioritize someone else's packets over mine. There is nothing wrong with ISPs engineering traffic to be delivered to them via the closest exchange possible, they just don't get to abuse their monopoly over their subscriber's line.
> Bits routed to other networks cost money and are a cost center. With last mile speeds increasing but backbone data rates not dropping fast enough it can be a real problem. People who torrent or run bitcoin full nodes are probably costing ISPs large amounts of money.
Which is solved by discriminating between services how?
If outbound traffic is expensive, you have to charge for outbound traffic, not make youtube free (or whatever).
There is nothing wrong with traffic to on-premises hosted servers being free--if everyone can host servers there under the exact same conditions. The problem is an abuse of a monopoly position, not charging based on costs.
I don't think the ISP's problem (opportunity) resides in the scenario you're describing. The problem is the top .0001% of Internet destinations congest the ISP generic network interconnects. Hence, these larger vendors (Netflix, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc) either pay the ISP for direct network peering or server hosting to sustain acceptable performance. However, this typically leaves the cost of growing internal network backbone capacity on the ISP. I believe the scenario you are describing would allow ISPs to offset this capital cost to both the big content providers and the biggest consumers.
> Which is solved by discriminating between services how?
The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session. As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis. However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.
I really don't understand what your point is ... how does avoding load on the internal backbone leave which costs of growing the backbone to the ISP?!
> The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session.
Uh? How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!
> As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis.
Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.
> However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.
Which isn't necessarily that bad, as long as there is competition among CDNs. A CDN ultimately is just a different kind of transit provider.
I didn't say anything about avoiding load. They don't want to raise capital to build their own backbone - so they want to pass off the cost to the largest traffic sources (Netflix etc) and largest traffic destinations (most oactive consumers).
> How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!
More connection requests means more CPU usage on a router. More open connections means more RAM usage.
> Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.
Non-discriminatory means they offer all content providers the same prices. Now if you're saying that they can overcharge because there's no competition, then I agree. This is a problem in the short term. But if I understand Pai's logic, this gap in the market will spur competition (and solutions) to emerge through innovation. I'm skeptical about this logic but cautiously optimistic.
I grant you that this is not a satisfying answer when you only have one shitty ISP option like Comcast and there's no hope fore a competitor in the short term. But given the growth of fixed residential wireless and new spectrum like White Spaces it's possible that a Comcast/Verizon would be doing more damage to their own brand (and content offerings) in the long term by mistreating their customers.
The actual cost to the ISP of a customer using 100% of their connection the whole month is not very large. If only a small minority do that then the amortized cost per customer is negligible. If everyone starts to do that then the ISP is still fine as long as they price plans appropriately -- a 100Mbit plan costs more than a 20Mbit plan.
Bandwidth caps are ridiculous. It's like saying some people drive more than others so to reduce traffic congestion, after you've driven more than 500 miles in a month you can only drive 8MPH for the rest of the month. What kind of sense does that make unless you have some weird agenda like getting people to take a "free" bus which happens to only travel directly to your own store?
In theory they could charge more for higher usage, except that if they charged their actual cost for additional bandwidth then it would be so close to zero as to make little difference, e.g. an extra $5/month for full 24/7 usage. Passing traffic is really not that expensive. The cost of getting and maintaining a wire into your house to begin with absolutely dwarfs it.
There is no ignoring them, they're just small relative to an ISP's other costs.
It costs millions of dollars to lay and maintain cable. You have to dig up the road. The equipment gets damaged by weather and bad drivers and idiots with backhoes and has to be repaired on a regular basis. You have to staff a call center to provide customer support, pay for all the advertising these companies do, bill customers, process payments, handle delinquent debts, hire a bunch of lawyers, pay all your technical staff to maintain the network, pay rent and utilities, etc. etc.
That's what your monthly bill pays for. Not one of those things costs a penny less if you can convince people to transfer less data. The only thing that changes is that the ISP has to upgrade a switch to one with more or faster ports, which is a fixed cost of tens of dollars per customer per upgrade cycle, and in many cases it happens regardless of usage because the existing equipment has reached end of life or newer equipment uses less power. The added cost is a tiny fraction of the bill. Make it twice as big and it's still negligible.
Electrons are commoditized and generic - and they don't suffer from prioritization issues except during brown-outs/black-outs. When you receive a stream of bits you are routing very specific non-generic packets via various network interconnects from very specific content providers. The routing and interconnect/bandwidth costs will vary significantly depending on the content provider, content type, and consumer usage.
It's my understanding that the ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can offer premium guaranteed/prioritized QoS for specific content types from premium partner providers (e.g. real-time applications such as medical/security devices, VoIP, video conferencing, and streaming audio/video). You can't do this with electrons.