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Net Neutrality Bill Introduced In Canadian Parliament
FeatherBoa points out that the New Democratic Party in Canada has introduced legislation to limit the amount of control Canadian ISPs can exert over their subscribers. The bill would amend the Telecommunications Act to "prohibit network operators from engaging in network management practices that favour, degrade or prioritize any content, application or service transmitted over a broadband network based on its source, ownership or destination, subject to certain exceptions." Support for net neutrality in Canada has been building for quite a while now. Quoting CBC News:
"'This bill is about fairness to consumers,' said Charlie Angus, the NDP's digital spokesman. It also looks to prohibit 'network operators from preventing a user from attaching any device to their network and requires network operators to make information about the user's access to the internet available to the user.' The proposed bill makes exception for ISPs to manage traffic in reasonable cases, Angus said, such as providing stable speeds for applications such as gaming or video conferencing."
...subject to certain exceptions. Doesn't this one line pretty much negate most of the positive potential in this bill?Um, did somebody say NDP? Well, have the NDP ever got something through? I dunno. I kinda doubt it tho. They have great ideals, but no real way to implement them. At least it seems that way to me.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
What if users could select their own priority settings an a per-application basis? Games, VoIP, video conferencing, etc would be highest priority; web browsing, email, etc would be standard priority; streaming video would be low priority.
In these cases, I don't mean for the actual bandwidth to be reduced. That would not help the network much anyway, since the same amount of data would be transferred eventually. A lower priority flag would just mean that a delay of a few extra ms, maybe even a second, is acceptable. This would enable routers to avoid bottlenecks better and use available capacity more efficiently.
There could also be an (optional) even lower priority option for long, non-urgent downloads that would throttle the speed when there is congestion.
Ideally, ISPs would then bill customers depending on how much bandwidth they use, with the lower priority settings charging less per gb than the higher ones.
Just an idea, not necessarily saying its a good one.
The UK rail system. It is universally acknowledged that privatization was a disaster just to make the fat cats fatter.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
The idea would be that the IAPs should split their bandwidth fairly among all their users. In its bandwidth share, the user should prioritize its outgoing traffic. The IAP should shape the incomming traffic fairly between each of its user. In this scenario, low latency network applications are dead (video conferencing/telephony/video games...): in an home network lan, the momy is watching a HD internet TV channel, the boy can forget playing online its favorite FPS and the girl cannot have a decent IP phone line call. That's why there is a exception to let the IAP to shape further specifically on low lantency protocols... but they will never be able to embrace all past-present-futur low latency protocols on the net. Of course they could favor only the protocols of big bucks corporations. So you could trash any open low latency protocols...
But there is a another way: IPv6. Indeed the protocol does have labels that let you tag traffic. Its means the user network apps can tell the IAP equipement what type of traffic they send. So the IAPs can apply shaping rules based on that type of traffic on cross-user boundaries. Nethertheless in a traffic priority class, the IAP still has to provide fairness among users. Basically, fairness among user is not applied on traffic as a whole but on a per traffic class basis.
Of course in the real world, low latency traffic will have to be shaped to very small bandwidth... smart users would push their P2P traffic on high priority. The idea on high priority traffic classes is to have just enough bandwidth to let signaling, highly compressed voice, intense action FPS game data. Of course, you can have several high priority classes. BUT there is a BIG exception to all of this, emergency services: for instance you want to call from the net the "internet US 911". In this case the IAP equipement will have to know without IPv6 label that you are calling an emergency service (IP based shaping, but amount of IPs must be minimal to avoid overloaded routing tables and increased latency that will degrade internet quality significantly).
I let you imagine what it will be when users will have Fiber To The Home with upload bandwidth on a 100's of Mb scale!
This does mean, rewritting many network applications. Deep IAP topology reconfiguration. More expensive IAP equipements: must be able to perform shaping extremely quickly in order to minimize the latency cost(=forget high level protocol shaping or shaping based on too much data(IPs)).
And the last but not the least... IPv6!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The issue of course, is how you deem a reasonable manner... If for 1 hour of the day, your area is congested, and the other 23 hours of the day, people have a free ride with unrestricted access, and for that hour, a large amount of the congestion is caused by torrent traffic, then I'd say it's reasonable to curb torrents for that hour. on the other hand, oversubscribing an area and having CONSTANT congestion wouldn't fall into this definition. Lets use an analogy to explain in RL
At a border crossing, sometimes changing the direction of a lane at a makes more sense than spending millions of tax dollars to add more lanes. Sure, you may slow down a few people going in the opposite direction, but if most of the time the flow of traffic is even and steady in both directions through the border, and the reduction of lanes in the one direction is temporary, then it's OK. On the other hand, if there's either a low number of cars going through in each direction, or an equally high number of cars going through in BOTH directions, and traffic is reduced on one side to allow more people to arbitrarily go faster in one direction, then this is where it becomes unreasonable to shape the traffic in such a discriminatory way.
As a result, Some ISPs (Comcast, Bell) shape traffic to always hinder file sharing. Other, more responsible ISPs will only shape traffic during peak times, and will upgrade infrastructure when there is uncontrollable growth in an area, or more equal congestion across the network at all times of the day.
I hate net neutrality. Not only in principle, but in practice. I WANT my neighbor's porn-and-bittorrent diet throttled, so that when I use our shared resource (our local chunk of bandwidth), it actually works. "Net neutrality" is just a cry for the bandwidth hogs to screw it up for the rest of us.
Would that not fall under the whole reasonable exception part? Looks to me like the bill allows for QoS and so your VoIP connection could reasonably be prioritised. IANAL though so please correct me if I'm wrong
Silly rabbit
Then they should offer you a router that has that functionality. Or, they can have a recommended list of routers where they'll offer support on how to configure it to do QoS.
I don't mind if my ISPs (in Canada) "manages" my bandwidth as long as they do it in aggregate.
If one person in the house is downloading a Linux ISO, another is streaming video, and a third is gaming, and we're affecting the bandwidth upstream, then the external IP of my router should throttled or RED-enabled; the ISP shouldn't be able to pick out one stream of data and only throttled that. Once my connection is throttled, it is the business of the household to decide who has to stop what they're doing and who gets to continue: I don't want the ISP deciding for me what's important and what's not.
I think this is what heart of net neutrality is about: the ISP can manage the bandwidth of a customer's connection, but they have to do in aggregate, and shouldn't get to choose what is important and what is not. They can say "if you're using more than X KB/s in this time period for more than Y period, we will throttle", and the user can choose what application to use (whether it's gaming, video, BitTorrent, etc.).
Although I completely agree that ISPs are screwing nearly everyone, net neutrality is still unrealistic.
It's better to think of your internet connection like a tolled highway. When you pay $X to get onto the tolled highway, and your car can go 120kmph, thinking that you should rightfully be able to drive at a constant 120kmph is unrealistic. If there's lots of traffic, it doesn't matter what you paid for, you've still got to wait. Yet people seem to accept this, and not accept when their internet connection is slow.
Yes, you do pay for a certain speed with your ISP, and I don't think this business model is correct or even accurate. But the same principles apply.
ISPs should be run more like tolled highways. You pay a certain fee to get access to a range of kbps (like how you pay different fees for access to different highways at 60kmph, 80kmph, 100kmph). You then pay-per-bits downloaded on your connection (like how you pay-per-distance travelled on the highway).
I think this makes perfect sense.