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Net Neutrality Never Really Existed?
dido writes "In his most recent column, Robert X. Cringely observes that network neutrality may have never really existed at all. It appears that some, perhaps all, of the major broadband ISPs have been implementing tiered service levels for a long time. From the article: 'What turns out to be the case is that some ISPs have all along given priorities to different packet types. What AT&T, Comcast and the others were trying to do was to find a way to be paid for priority access — priority access that had long existed but hadn't yet been converted into a revenue stream.'" Cringely comes to this conclusion after being unable to get a fax line working. His assumption that the (Vonage) line's failure to support faxing is due to Comcast packet prioritizing is not really supported or proved. But his main point about the longstanding existence of service tiering will come as no surprise to this community.
The last time I tried to setup something similar, I came to a dead end, find several sources via Google that indicated that the compression used by fax machines was incompatible with the compression used by VOIP. Has the stat of the improved, or is Bob on a goose chase here?
"You can't dissect him, predict him, which of course means he's not a lunatic at all."
I don't know anything about Vonage , but if its like other VOIP systems it'll used lossy compression. Which is death for most kinds of digital to analogue systems running over a phone like using systems such as QAM or PSK since important information will be stripped out. This is why you can't use dial up modems over most (all?) VOIP services (why you'd want to anyway is another matter).
There's a difference between giving priority to different kinds of packets (QoS), and giving priority to packets from different sources, which is what Net Neutrality is all about. QoS is ok, it's encouraged so long as every packet of the same type gets treated the same way. The problem comes when your VoIP packet gets preferential treatment over my VoIP packet.
P.S. Fax is obsolete. Scan and email.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Most transport streams that deliver audio use UDP - it doesn't matter if you lose a few packets here and there because the human hear hears a reasonably good approximation of the original sound. There's no point trying to redeliver packets that get lost, because they will be late anyway by the time you get them there. This scheme will just plain not work with digital data, fax or whatever, if you're losing bits of it here and there. I suppose you could re-implement a reliable TCP-like protocol on top of the unreliable transport stream, but it would be so much easier to take a scan or a photo and email it.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
I use Bellsouth (now ATT). I had some serious issues sending faxes as well. One of the key ways to resolving this problem was to set the error correction levels on my Fax to the highest and to set the fax machine rate to the slowest possible speed. Doing this I was able to send and receive faxes with no trouble. The same worked for Comcast as well. This was also with Vonage. I used it with Comcast and VoIP some time ago, though. Perhaps things have changed in the last year or so.
I don't really know anything about the subject, but it's Cringely, so I'm going to assume that the opposite of whatever he said was true.
Back about 10 years ago when I was a kid hanging out at my dad's office after school or on weekends(usually playing Doom1, the only good computers were at his office and he worked insane hours), he was across the hall from his ISP, and they were a friendly lot so we'd stop over and say hi and go to lunch together and stuff like that.
They would always be telling me about problems, finding people who are using way too much bandwidth, significantly more than usual, and how they'd institute an upper cap on those people to make sure they wern't running their own ISP off of the line that they were provided (back in the day people used to buy T1 lines, and turn their homes into little dial-up ISP services).
So theres always been prioritizing of traffic, even if it wasn't always an automatic process. But, I would like to point out, that this guy sounds more like the crazy dishevled homeless guy on the corner "OMGZORZ, MY FAX NO WORK! CONSPIRACY AND RANTYNESS" than really newsworthy
VOIP uses lossy compression that is heavily tuned for voice. Of course it is going to be lousy for lossless data transmission. If you wound the baudrate down low enough (say 2400baud), you might have some success, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
Man, that takes me back.
Of course, what you are pointing out is the basic flaw with the whole 'net neutrality' argument. It's not a public network, per se. It's owned and opperated by someone. They have the right and privledge to impose what ever restrictions they want on people.
When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their service
1) Dont do anything illegal. We will rat you out.
2) If you want to run an ISP, thats fine, we have special rates for heavy users
3) If your usage for your web host exceedes a reasonable percentage of our available bandwidth, we reserve the right to raise your rate.
No one seemed to have any issues with these simple rules.
Cringly is even getting bitchslaped for being an ignorant dumbass over this on his own website. Serves him right.
other than G.711 (uncompressed PCM), voice codecs will not handle fax or modem calls. The standard method of handling fax calls over IP is T.38.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you get a VoIP adapter and provider that support T.38, you'll have much better luck with faxing over VoIP. As I understand it, T.38 allows your VoIP adapter to emulate G3 fax audio signals of the remote fax machine, and conversely, your service provider emulates your fax machine at the interface with the PSTN.
I use a Linksys SPA-2102 VoIP ATA with Gafachi as my service provider, both of which support T.38. I can report that I haven't had a single problem sending or receiving a fax.
This is a non sequitur. Just because it is an owned network does not mean they have the right to restrict people however they want. I may own a private road, but that does not automatically grant me the right to deny passage to the people that own the mineral rights to that same land. I may own a flower shop, but that does not grant me the right to deny service to blacks, without repercussions.
These privately owned networks were funded largely with our tax dollars, hundreds of billions of them the government provided in subsidies. Many of these privately owned networks run on public right of ways to which the government has granted them an exclusive monopoly. Further, those same private businesses are being granted exemption from obeying the law, namely copyright laws, libel laws, pornography laws, free trade laws, conspiracy laws, etc. Those exemptions from obeying the law are granted under "common carrier" statutes that say impartial carriers goods and information are not held liable for what they carry provided they impartially carry everything. I say it is just fine for these private businesses to decide not to be impartial and to slow down or block traffic from some people to gain a competitive advantage. What I object to is them doing that, and being exempted from punishment for the laws. Common carriers are a public service and that is the only reason they are protected. If you're not serving the common good and are just making money for yourself without benefiting society, why should you be given special privileges?
When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their serviceSo here's the problem... the rules you list have nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality is simply about treating some traffic differently than others not based upon the type, nor the traffic levels, but based upon the person or location from which the traffic is being generated. You can block all users that send more than a gig a day. What you can't do is block just the black users that send more than a gig a day, or just the republican users that use more than a gig a day, or even the users that do business with your competitor and use more than a gig a day... if you still want to be given all the special privileges that are given to common carriers.
Last weekend Verizon took my Boston suburb DSL line out of service several times (Friday night through Sunday). Its too much of coincidence that it started around 11:30 PM Friday night, came back early Saturday morning, then a similar situation Saturday night. Verizon support claimed cluelessness as to the cause (their support technicians admitted to running Windows XP and being able to ping a Verizon router a couple of hops upstream from my local town office -- though they didn't know how to run a TRACERT to the IP address that the Verizon DNS allocators handed out each time I rebooted the in-home Linksys & DSL modem). [I had to check and TRACERT is a standard XP command, presumably they don't educate support technicians how to do anything more than PING.]
/. start at least the opennetstats.org part of this?
At any rate after this outage, I notice that my Google search requrests seem to be taking significantly longer than they used to. Hmmmm.... Now Verizon is in the process of implementing FIOS in many surrounding communities so my suspicions are (a) priority routing may be going to the FIOS customers or (b) requests to google are being down prioritized (in the hopes of being able to extort $$$ for priority routing). I also notice that for several months digital channels on my Comcast Cable TV service it seems to be taking much longer for the TV signal to start after changing channels than it once did.
So my impression is that the local ISPs (Verizon & Comcast) are most likely moving in the direction of prioritization of routing so as to maximize revenue. (In contrast to models like TV where costs are advertiser supported or monopoly telephone companies where a minimal level of service was required.)
I think the only solution to this will be to revisit these issues at the political level (Congress) and/or develop public solutions that eliminate the monopolies. If people are familiar with high speed internet service in countries like Germany, Japan, Korea, etc. it appears that the U.S. is getting a lot less and paying a lot more due to the duopoly positions of companies like Verizon & Comcast.
Towards "taking back the internet", I would argue that we need 2 things.
First, an open source project to use P2P routing statistics to provide an online *free* analysis of where network congestion (or more importantly specific provider) problems may be occurring. I would love to have been able to say to the Verizon support tech, "Well I just used 10 minutes of my "free" AOL service to confirm using www.opennetstats.org that Verizon DSL services in the following communities north of Boston are all down! If the "public" at large can diagnose your network problems then why can't your own support staff do so [1]? I, and I suspect many Linux users, would be happy to run a server which contributed "peer" statistics to a cloud. This could also be used to determine whether services are being degraded to specific providers. If I consistently get high speed access to Stanford's FTP servers but low speed access to Google's servers (Boston to the Bay area) then something is going to be very suspicious in terms of the QoS the middle-cos are providing [2].
Second, communities need to seriously looking at WiMax based public "town" networks based on cheap Linux routers (the poles may belong to the companies but the airwaves belong to *us*). For people who aren't interested in TV on demand (e.g. people whose internet use is still largely base on *reading* and *writing*) there should be a standard high level quality of service which is dictated by the upstream provider (e.g. how many server farms Google wants to build) and not the money sucking, promise you the world and deliver nearly zippo at a decent cost, telcos and cablecos.
So why can't we at
Perhaps people familiar with small community open WiMax type projects can post URLs for those as well.
1. The primary problem here appears to be that the data side of the telephone companies rarely if
ISPs *have* been prioritizing traffic for years -- usually based on packet content-type. I helped install a "packet shaper" when I worked at a mom-and-pop dialup shop in the early 2000s. The thing is, TFA missed a key point about Net Neutrality: proponents aren't fighting QoS type prioritization, they're fighting prioritization based on origin and destination. QoS services organize packets based on their content type -- if you wanted to cut down on illegal downloading but still provide a decent web experience, you would throttle down P2P type packets, but let http packets through. What big ISPs are trying to do is go to major websites and say "hey, we'll give you priority for $x/month. Oh, your competitors? We'll just throttle their bandwidth to nothing. But if they pay the big bucks and you don't, you're screwed." What TFA is complaining about (ignoring the VoIP/Fax compression issue already pointed out) is old-skool QoS, something we've had for years. Net Neutrality is about unfairly shutting out the competition.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I may own a flower shop, but that does not grant me the right to deny service to blacks
I'm confused. Could you rephrase in the form of a car analogy?
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You, and the other posters seem to have missed the one essential hook for net neutrality, indeed the only one that counts; Common Carrier Status. In order for you, and the phone company, and UPS to not be charged with a crime when someone does something illegal via your service you have to be a Common Carrier. Lacking that status you would be charged as an accessory to the crime even if you ratted them out first.
The cost of being a common carrier is having no content-based selection in what you carry. You must be completely neutral and select customers based upon what they are willing to pay not what they want to send. Once you hook things to what they want to send (i.e. content) then you are no longer a common carrier and you are responsible for knowing what is being sent at all times and answering for it if it isn't.
The issue here is twofold. Firstly the status Cringley is looking at might be more aligned to paying extra so the package moves faster type service which doesn't (necessarily) violate common carrier status. However , the argument that many ISP's are making is that they should be able to have their cake and eat it too that is, filter based upon content in order to make more money and stifle competitors while at the same time not being responsible for the legality of any content sent (i.e. child porn). Such a position is basically a whiny monopolists cant that I have no time for.
And yes it is true that the lines are private, in large part, but the service itself is still an infrastructural service and one that, like phone lines, has costs too significant to allow for basic competition. Not anyone can setup their own phonelines. As such that is the legal hook for government regulation and guaranteed fairness. Without it the dominant position of extant carriers (who built their power under the open competition regime but now want to shut the door on other competitors) would become so dominant as to be a monopoly and kill any hope for an open internet market.