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Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality
penciling_in writes "CircleID has a post by Richard Bennett, one of the panelists in the recent Innovation forum on open access and net neutrality — where Google announced their upcoming throttling detector. From the article: 'My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed's on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing. I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain ...' This article is great insight for anyone for or against net neutrality."
Since the Google throttling detector does not yet exist, does any bright spark know how to achieve the same result using software that already exists?
My little Linux and tech blog
...or some such. Because those don't work on the scale of an ISP. It's simply much cheaper to add more bandwidth than try to manage things with QoS.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
1) ISPs are simply oversubscribing betting on people not using the bandwidth they are paying for.
2) Throttling is one thing, what Comcast was doing was essentially criminal. They were hijacking the communications and injecting malicious resets or other packets to kill a connection.
3) If they just properly implement QoS then things like VOIP and IPTV would work just fine.
AFAIK services like FiOS and U-verse handle HDTV over IP by making the breakout box an IP multicast client.
He completely ignores multicast in the paragraph about HTDV being trouble for the Internet, and someone should at least explain why it's not relevant. Otherwise it kind of sinks his battleship w/r/t that argument, IMO.
We supposedly have Truth in Advertising laws already on the books, but super-fast, all-you-can-eat, Internet connections are still being advertised. I'd start by applying the existing law to those claims.
I'd like to be sold a truthful amount of bandwidth (DSL tends to be more honest in this area than cable), and not some inflated peak amount that I can only hit when going to the cable sponsored local bandwidth tester site. And when I have that honest amount of bandwidth available to me, I want to be the one to set the QoS levels of my traffic within that bandwidth amount - not the cable company. When I know what I have available to me, then I can best allocate how to use it.
First the cable companies started killing BT, and other filesharing apps to some lesser degree. I believe that to have been a Red Herring. When that was complained loudly about they offered to just cap usage in general, instead of limiting certain bandwidth-intensive applications.
Who does this benefit? The cable companies, of course. Think of the business they're in. They deliver video. But so do a lot of other people on the Internet. Kill everybody else's video feeds because that is the high bandwidth application for the rest of us and pretty soon you'll only be able to receive uninterrupted HD video over your broadband connection from your local cable company. They will become a monopoly in video distribution (and charge every provider for distributing their videos), and all because we insisted that they throttle all traffic equally on their vastly oversold networks.
All they're waiting for is DOCSIS 3.0 to roll out so that they can promise us even more bandwidth that we can't use since they won't even let us used our promised current bandwidth under DOCSIS 2.0. A royal screwing is on its way if your cable ISP in particular isn't clamped down on hard by the federal government by way of the FCC.
And why does it have to be the federal government and the FCC. Because the cable companies have already managed to get all local regulation preempted by the federal government to avoid more stringent local rules, so the feds are the only ones left who are allowed to do it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...let the engineers do their job? He makes no mention of how he thinks it would be best resolved, just that it shouldn't be done via legislation? I agree with his point, but for anyone who knows has even half paid attention to the net neutrality issues, this article holds nothing new.
I think the article has some valid points regarding the technical aspects of the Internet, but I don't understand why those aspects make net neutrality legislation a bad thing. My understanding of net neutrality is that people want the Internet to remain neutral. They do not want providers to charge favorable rates to their friends and extortionist rates to their competitors. They do not want small ISPs forced out of the market. They do not want websites and users to be double-charged for the same use. I don't see how any of these issues are technical. I don't see how legislation that would keep things fair also would eliminate an ISP's ability to improve the performance of jitter sensitive applications as well as jitter insensitive applications. I mean you could argue that it'd be legislated wrong, and you'd probably be right. But from a technical standpoint, assuming it's legislated correctly, why is net neutrality technically impossible? Or am I completely misunderstanding the net neutrality issue?
Probably most of us agree with that statement in principle. The problem is that the various players in this (users, content providers, and network operators) do not have their objectives aligned. Thus, the engineers for the network operator will come up with a solution (e.g. throttling) that solves the network company's problem (users using too much of the bandwidth they (over)sold), but the engineers working for the users (e.g. people writing P2P apps) will engineer for a different objective (maximum transfer rates), and will even engineer workarounds to the 'solutions' being implemented by the network.
The problem is thus that everyone is engineering in a fundamentally adversarial way, and this will continue so long as the objectives of all parties are not aligned. Ideally, legislation would help enforce this alignment: for instance, by legally mandating an objective (e.g. requiring ISPs to be transparent in their throttling and associated advertising), or funding an objective (e.g. "high-speed access for everyone"), or by just making illegal one of the adversarial actions (e.g. source-specific throttling).
This is not purely an engineering question. The networks have control of one of the limited resources in this game (the network of cables already underground; and the rights required to lay/replace cables), and this imbalance in power may require laws to prevent abuse. It's not easy to create (or enforce) the laws... and ideally the laws would be informed by the expertise of engineers (and afford ways for smarter future solutions to be implemented)... but suggesting that we should just let everyone 'engineer' the solution misses the mark. Whose engineers? Optimizing for what goal? Working under what incentives?
Put more simply: engineering is always bound by laws.
Multicast and increase bandwidth. VOIP has been fine as of late. And if it starts breaking again, let the deployers fix thier apps wtihin the parameters of TCP and/or UDP. If we let ISPs throttle, mangle, and sort packets, it will not be to anyone's advantage other than their own.
No net neutrality these past 5 years has meant ... what exactly? What is the horrible problem we've all had to endure because the government hasn't forced ISPs (against their will) to operate in "the preferred way"?
Of course, the "industry" he's talking about are the corporations that control large chunks of the infrastructure. As we've established time and time again, those corporations aren't acting in the public interest. Their only interest is in what makes their corporation the largest profit. To those interests, blocking competing services or forcing popular websites to pay more to stay online are quite reasonable things to do.
This is why net neutrality is such an important idea. Look at what has been accomplished so far with our "ad hoc" arrangement of computers connected to a crazy quilt of networks. All that you see is just the beginning - but a better future will never come to pass if the corporate interests are allowed to filter / segregate / block network traffic.
Think about it for a minute: consider AT&T. They own a substantial amount of internet infrastructure and they're also the major telephone company. When they look at Skype and discuss how to limit the loss of business to this competitor - you'd better believe they consider blocking VOIP on the backbone. Call it a benefit to the customer and put a competitor out of business; another good day in corporate headquarters.
Yes, there are technical reasons to shape traffic to optimize network flow. But the problem is that the large ISPs are using business, not technical, reasons to determine the network traffic policies. If companies like Comcast, Time Warner and Virgin Media could be trusted to base network design on technical issues, that'd be a nice utopia.
But we know these companies are instead targeting packets that they see as business competitors, so they are not making sound technical decisions. I say it's better to make it harder for a perfect network than to allow corporate interests to balkanize the internet for their greedy purposes.
Without, the one with the bigger muscle is right. And that is usually not the customer of an ISP when there is (often) only one left.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This article says a lot of things that I do not disagree with, but I think it failed to make a connection between what it was saying, and net neutrality.
The summary I got was: "The Internet is broken, so we should allow the companies at the last mile to fix it. Except, I'm going to say that it is the engineers driving the show."
Well, Engineers do solve engineering problems. Fine. But the corporations who hire these engineers give them the problems that they want them to work, and point them in the general direction of the solution they want.
One such corporation may say, "Metered broadband for all my users! Engineer it!" Okay. So now you've got an engineering problem. But the talk of engineering problem or not has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. It isn't the engineers pushing against Net Neutrality. It is the organizations that they work for that are pushing against Net Neutrality.
So, you claim that Net Neutrality is needed because 'the Internet is broken'. Well, if the Internet was working well, wouldn't you still rail against Net Neutrality? Perhaps even more so?
So, you say a lot of interesting things, but I just don't think they do anything to sell much of a point about Net Neutrality.
Article summary: "Hello, my name is Richard Bennett, and I'm an industry insider who's been bought off by big money to say net neutrality is bad in the same way climate scientists got bought off by big money to say environmental protection is bad."
I hate printers.
One word: Multicast .
The main issue here is not weather companies double charge for bandwidth or if they charge per use or don't offer this or that service, the issue is that if you allow a situation where a company like AT&T can make a deal with Microsoft to prioritize their traffic, then it will eventually end up in a situation where you get a cartel of companies controlling that keep competing smaller ISPs and content providers out of the market by artificially degrading their connections.
Furthermore because the communications infrastructure is partially government funded, and as the radio frequencies are government controlled through the FCC , the "free market" argument doesn't hold water. There are numerous barriers to entry into the ISP market, both government imposed as well as technical ones, and thus coercive monopolies will be able to form unless actively restrained by the government.
This doesn't necessarily say much about HOW you should regulate the market, but it pretty much implies that simply leaving ISPs to screw over customers and smaller competitors is a big no-no. Completely free unregulated markets only work when there are low barriers to entry, many suppliers, no external costs or benefits, perfect customer insight into the market, completely homogeneous and equivalent services being offered, zero cost of switching supplier, and no barriers to trade. The number of markets in which that applies can be counted on fewer hands than most people have.
In an ideal world, network operators would be required to just pass the traffic, whatever it is. No throttling, no playing favorites for VOIP, etc., just pass whatever it is along.
But, that's not gonna happen. People with dollars make the rules, and they can make more dollars playing favorites. So they're gonna play favorites.
I'm generally a conservative, who believes in as little govt. regulation as possible, but in this case, the private market has demonstrated that they cannot regulate themselves, so the govt. should step in.
Pity that it won't.
No, listen, really, it'll be great. What we need is for ISP to host a single system that stores content. This system then talks to the systems of other ISP's and propagates that data so that it is stored very closely to the user base... solving the Multicast timing issue... Oh, wait... that was Web 0.1 and ISP's are now dropping the protocol because Andrew Cuomo's been wackin' it to 88 kiddy fiddler newsgroups. He feels so guilt ridden about it, he wants the entire Usenet shut down. You know it's true. I'll bet if you searched his computer, he's saving all the 'evidence' just in case he ever needs to refer back to it.
>we've all
We've not all been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. That doesn't mean it's acceptable for anyone to be imprisoned there.
Some of us have been affected by this non-neutral network. I now have the "opportunity" to subscribe to my ISP's (sister division's) offerings (such as "digital home phone"! hah!), since I can no longer VoIP over my internet.
Please also remember that people outside your country, but still within its sphere of direct influence, also get anally raped by proxy when your market fails like this (ie the failure is quickly exported as a "success").
I think this guy is confused over what most net neutrality advocates are trying to achieve. We don't want to say that you can't give voice packets priority. We are trying to ensure that all packet of the same type receive the same quality of service; that certain people don't receive better service while the rest of us get shoved into the slow lane.
Especially offensive is any sort of attempt at frustrating the dissemination of content based on political bias. The cable companies that own most of the broadband ISP's would love to model the Internet after their cable TV business. They have a news product that has done just a terrific job at political neutrality, and they would love to extend that model to Internet services.
Those of us that have been here a while, the people that used to watch the blocks move across the screen at 300 baud, can see a another of many drastic changes coming in the way the huge ISP's will handle content. There was a time when ISP's were everywhere. They were small companies with access to local dial-up node sites. Then AOL had 10 million people convinced that they were actually the whole internet. Today high speed internet has given birth to bohemoth ISPs that were huge cable/telephone/satelite companies years before. These companies may eventually package web access the same way they package movie channels. After a few years of this the smaller ISP's with open access will be back and the cycle will repeat in new and strange ways.
Throttling is one thing, what Comcast was doing was essentially criminal. They were hijacking the communications and injecting malicious resets or other packets to kill a connection.
What concerns me is if governance systems move to the internet. Even if it is just for online voting -- who will keep the ISPs from manipulating the governmental processes?
In any event, it is good to know that open source governance is trying to muscle in on the action. At least the I.T. departments of the ISPs should be in favor of "open sourcing" the government, right?
It wouldn't do any good, because of the weasel words in the advertisements. You see, they don't say you'll get N Mbits/second, they say, "...up to N Mbits/second." And, what they say is true, because your equipment is capable of handling that much bandwidth and your cable connection can carry it if it's provided. Of course, what they don't tell you is that they don't have enough bandwidth available to give every customer a connection like that, so the fact that your equipment could handle it is irrelevant. It's just like a car manufacturer telling you that their newest line can go from 0->150 mph in X seconds, but not reminding you that the legal limit is 65. What they say is true, even though they don't tell you all the truth.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
"I know that's not true. The Internet has some real problems today, such as address exhaustion, the transition to IPv6, support for mobile devices and popular video content, and the financing of capacity increases. Network neutrality isn't one of them."
The effen telcos already got paid 200 billion dollars to do something about getting fiber to the premises and blew it on anything but that. Where's the "political engineering" solution to look into that to determine where the "QOS" broke down at ISP intergalatic central? Where are the ISP and telco fatcats sitting in front of congressional hearings explaining what happened to all that freekin money? Where did it go, real facts, real names, real figures.
And why in the hell does the bulk of the public air wave spectrum only go to the same billion dollar corporations, year after decade after generation, instead of being turned loose for everyone-you know, that "public" guy- to use and develop on? Why the hell do we even *need* ISPs anymore for that matter? This is the 21 st century, there are tons of alternative ways to move data other than running them through ISP and telco profitable choke points, and all I am seeing is them scheming on how to turn the internet into another bastardized combination of the effen telco "plans" and cable TV "plans". Really, what for?
Where's the meshnetworking using long range free wireless and a robust 100% equal client / server model that we could be using instead of being forced through the middle man of isps and telcos for every damn single packet? And what mastermind thought it was a good idea to let them wiggle into the content business? That's a big part of the so called problem there, they want to be the tubes plus be the tube contents, and triple charge everyone, get paid both ends of the connection and a middle man handling fee for..I don't know, but that is what they are on the record wanting, and industry drools like this doofus are providing their excuses. Not content with hijacking all the physical wired reality, for 100 years now, they get to hijack all the useful wireless spectrum, and no, WIFI DOESN'T CUT IT. That's at the big fat joke level in the spectrum for any distance.
Look, the fact is that the telcos are engaged in criminal conspiracy to censor the Internet. Of course tiered rates for bandwidth usage will always be there. Thats been the way of the world since Broadband began. Anti-Net Neutrality is about WHAT you can access, not how fast you can access it, people who advocate against net neutrality are advocating FOR Internet censorship.
The first link above should not have linked to WIkipedia "internet governance" but rather to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy
or perhaps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Government
ISPs have been operating "the preferred way" out of convention, in keeping with the norms of the Internet, for some time now. But they have only recently signaled their intent to deviate from historical principles in order to pursue additional sources of revenue.
Their intended path optimizes the Internet in their own favor, and works against the Internet as a whole. They're saying, "Yes, we like the Internet. But you're going to like our take on the Internet even better, want it or not." They're bundling "their way" over what should be a common carrier type situation.
So, it is like asking, "No net neutrality for telephone calls over the past 5 years has meant... what exactly?" Nothing, because the telephone companies have kept with the status quo, and not introduced 'features' that degrade the overall value of the network. Were they to announce an intent to do this, you'd see telephone neutrality legislation bounced around.
"But we don't need telephone neutrality legislation! If you legislate the telephone system, then it will kill innovation!" See? We're blaming the wrong folks here. It isn't the customers or the legislators. It is the carrier rocking the boat, and then crying foul when people try to address their money making schemes.
Interesting... but isn't what this really means is that we have two arguments here? The first is technical: What can the equipment do? The second is entirely content-driven. Who gets to control the content? I have no trouble with letting the technology determine what can be done with the equipment. If the capacity is there, it will be used. The entire problem, and the whole point of Network Neutrality as far as I'm concerned is that argument over content. I think that it's a matter of Freedom to keep the barriers to being able to place your personal creative content on the Internet. I should not have to contact with, say, Time-Warner to put up a web page. I should be able to use the free market and find a host with terms that I like, where ever said host might be. So maybe what is needed here is a language delineation of the debate. Let's call int "Net Neutral Access", and let the technical problems and engineering work themselves out without laws hindering them.
But, the legal limit of 55, 65, 75, 25, 30, 35, 40, or 45 depending on road IS clearly posted just after many intersections and is common knowledge of the "unwashed masses". The internet is still magic of the second order to them(Vegas is magic of the first order) and while we technical people can see the speed limit signs, the "great unwashed" only see the open road(not even the street signs make it through).
No. Clearly the point is that waiting a few years has caused many/some/zero problems -- depends on the answers to the question.
If there's no problem so far then waiting a few more years might not hurt. And we could have freedom until then and ISPs and taxpayers and governments could use their resources to do something besides maintaining and complying with a regulatory regime.
This guy, Richard Bennett, is referring to "technical" freedoms when he says that protocols such as UDP has way more "freedom" than TCP.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
ISPs haven't tried much yet. You could as easily say "India and Pakistan's nuclear missiles have meant... what exactly? What is the horrible problem anyone has had to endure because they have nukes?"
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His opinion.
Personally, I do not see any problem with modifying traffic for whatever reason THE CUSTOMER WHO IS PAYING THE BILL has.
For the provider to do so smacks of WAY too much power in the hands of a few people to manipulate information.
I mean, look at what they are doing to people now with that power, such as injecting banners and adds into html streams and other extra crap that actually creates MORE problems.
With all due respect, traffic should be managed at the end points by the customer and the ISP's should concentrate on providing as much bandwidth as possible upstream.
Not trying to restrict it so they do not have to be competitive with other providers.
Which, if you live in the US, this whole situation is very dangerous as there are not only a VERY LIMITED choice of ISP's to pick from.
Free markets work when the customer really DOES have a choice.
In the USA anyhow, this is increasingly not the case, and in response the providers are starting to put all sorts of things in the service architecture that businesses do not want, do not need.
This is a dangerous trend, and if it continues the result is going to be exceptionally high prices, very low service quality due to filtering by the ISP to maximize profit.
How can an idiot like this write a response to these issues like this when this stuff is already reality in some areas?
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Comcast and Bittorrent? Deep Packet Inspection commencing by Time Warner and Comcast? And, Today on slashdot, Verizon preventing access to a chunk of usenet?
Either your trolling or live in a cave.
To save time later, I'll assume you think "VoIP" is not being throttled, etc, but merely that this used to be a problem that was "fixed". I assure you the throttling is a new development chosen by my ISP.
Bad analogy. It's more like getting you to pay for a car that can go 0-150 in X seconds, then trying to fob you off with you a bus pass.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
What do we need a new laws for? Most of the existing problems, false advertising or anti-competitive behavior, could be solved with existing laws, if the right people would bother using them. If and only if those attempts fail, will we need new laws.
If all else fails, we simply need competition, look at what Version FiOS has done.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
It's not necessarily that companies can't be trusted, it's that one entity can't be put in charge and trusted to remain true and pure while doing it. We need a checks and balances system in place to ensure that all interests are being met to the best degree they can as a whole. Some kind of Gvt/private sector/user advocacy setup. Maybe Fed/Industry Group/EFF kinda deal? I dunno. Putting one body in charge of this stuff might end one set of problems, but open up new can of worms. I guess the same could be said of any solution.
This is the important distinction. It's not traffic type neutrality that's the essential character of an appropriately neutral net, it's source-destination neutrality.
(A non-type-neutral net has some of its own problems, but not the same ones as a non-source-destination-neutral net, and there's a good argument that the latter is more important.)
Tweet, tweet.
If ISPs offered their true bandwidth limits, latency limits, and so on from the beginning and not false offers like "unlimited".
I have always had throttled connection - I used to throttled at 256kbps down and 56kbps up.
Then I paid more and I with the exact same connection now got 512kbps down and 128kbps up.
Then I got a better service and I with the exact same connection got 2Mbps down and 512kbps up..
They have throttled the connection all the time. The total use is irrelevant. What is is whether all users use the bandwidth at the same time or not.
The providers could simply offer what they not under the assumptions we only will use 0.1% of it, but actually use what we buy.
What is worse for the ISP:
- if you download 2 GB a day (~60 GB a month) spread out evenly (continuously ~90kbps)
- if you download only during peak hours one hour a day 0.5GB (~15GB/month) (continuously 1110 kbps)
What happens if the bandwidth is not used ? Do the ISP loose anything? It is their ability to provide to multiple people at the same time that matters; it is clearly worse for the ISP in the second case were one person downloaded only 15GB a month than in the one with 90GB.
The entire issue could be resolved by ISP's offering the valid numbers for upwards and downwards bandwidth and expected latency for the connection.
Don't blame the customers for using what they paid for.
This sounds an awful lot like regional oil companies and NYMEX oil traders stating demand is up dramatically when in actuality it is not.
Richard and I got into a Net Neutrality 'Discussion' in the comment section of Techdirt last year. I have a feeling he is some how benefits from the Pro Net neutrality side of the debate, although I have no proof. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070319/121200.shtml Judge for yourself. I did turn into a screaming little douche at the end though...but it was for the Love of a Free Internet.
Verizon isn't preventing access to anything, they are only not carrying alt.* themselves - nothing preventing you getting it from another provider.
like this guy, i have been a staunch defender of net neutrality in the small forums i run and in my friend circle, but given the right price, say, like 200 bucks or 250, i can invent many reasons why we should hand the fate of freedom of information for billions to the hands of verizon, comcast, at&t et al. i may be cheap, but i talk much.
NOT.
Read radical news here
Correct, good catch. I should have written "Preventing access to their own customers". The point still remains valid, however.
Net Neutrality Engineer: "HDTV and VOIP can't live together.. the internet is congested.. we need to use smart traffic shaping.."
Lawrence Lessig, 10 years ago: "Install and use fiber optic cable instead of repairing copper core, and your bandwidth problems will disappear.. it will be expensive.."
I do have some old experience, I see some BS in the phrases he uses.
....
/., SecondLife, Wired, PBS ...) providers. Letting either IAP or ISP control everything is corporate-welfare monopolies or worse, and will never provide innovations or QoS improvements. We already pay for bandwidth access and QoS, and don't need more bullshit about what causes (lack of reinvestment) jitter/UDP bullshit.
... for the voice conversation it would be nice, but the answer is bandwidth investment and/or truth in advertising (VoIP and get crappy due to limited bandwidth (or mother nature) problems).
... the content provider/customer is paying for the bandwidth and QoS; So, how/what they use to send and receive content is of no damn business to any Cableco/TelCo/... IAP who are being paid to provide QoS access to bandwidth for the content sharing industry and their home/biz customers.
... if you cannot provide, then content/service providers and their customers can use a different IAP ... if thee is another IAP in their IAP's access area. Stupid IAP investment and poor i
The Internet's traffic system does not gives preferential treatment to short/fast communication paths unless you are stupid enough to configure your network/telecommunications backbone-architecture to the S/FPF rather then route on QoS metrics and implied content criticality. TCP is ignored by the backbone it is part of the package and cannot route, only the IP part is the destination/route information use for packet-switching, ATM cell-switching is another backbone technology and (yes) both are (can be) used at the biz-office LAN/WAN network level.
The technical term is semantics "round-trip time effect." Critical content delivery requires TCP/IP not time and a protocol like UDP is important for real-time/streaming content VoIP/VTC/.... UDP Packets (no need to manage) dropped/corrupt cannot be recovered, but TCP/IP has a process for packet dropped/corrupt recovery. UDP is a good fast protocol on LANs and for multimedia/broadcast (can case jitter/distortion), but UDP is not appropriate for email/downloads of large/critical files across the internet, because the complete email/file would then require another complete send/download. The less your RTT is not always best for TCP/IP (assured content delivery is critical) traffic, the faster UDP speeds, the more traffic you can deliver is great for VoIP, streaming MP* files
IOW: Bandwidth and QoS is best kept net-neutral, and CableCo (or whichever IAP) needs to invest in their infrastructure and innovation not screw their customers with bullshit/legislation. Oh, some folks (like me), consider infrastructure "IAP" access (CableCo/TelCo) providers different from the "ISP" content/services (Google, Yahoo, MSN,
VoIP functions best when it receives a stream of uninterrupted packets, but reality is VoIP was meant to function acceptable for voice communications and when there is adequate bandwidth provided VoIP provides an acceptable phone conversation. VoIP (the protocol) does not (as best I know) give a shit about consistent gaps
File transfer (FTP) applications simply care about the time between the request for the file and the time the last bit is received and if the file is corrupted then you/application make other FTP request for a clean+usable file. In between, it doesn't matter if the packets are timed by a metronome or if they arrive in a specific sequence of clumps when using TFTP. Jitter is the engineering/common term for variations in delay when data is corrupted/unrecoverable causing voice/video/content... distortion.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) (Cell switching) does manage both bandwidth and QoS, far better than packet switching and is great for VoIP/VTC....
The Internet is neutral with respect to applications and to location
The internet is not neutral with respect to QoS bandwidth
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Again, no - their own customers can still go elsewhere to get alt.*, Verizon is not stopping them doing so, they just aren't carrying the branch themselves.
Everything the government touches turns to shit. It's like that guy in the Skittles commercial, but with little rabbit turds instead. If the government had been making technology decisions twenty years ago, we would all be stuck on ISDN. Net Neutrality assumes a static technological world that only changes in predetermined ways.
People like to pretend that the only problem wrong with government is that the right people are not in charge. But that's fantasy. Obama can no more write a routing protocol than McCain. This is the gang of fools that gave us the DMCA, and now you trust them to run the internet? Hah!
I say get the government out of technology. This is a problem we can solve without their help.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Very good points. Unfortunately, the legal reality also keeps plainly false advertisements from being pulled off the air. If you read the laws about false advertising, apparently you can only take a company to court about plainly false advertising if you are a competitor in the same field. In some states, "aggrieved consumers" can bring false advertising claims to court, but that is only if you they dumb enough to buy the false product first, and companies often get around class action suits by satisfying consumers on a one-off basis, or just dominating them each with legal muscle.It wouldn't do any good, because of the weasel words in the advertisements....What they say is true, even though they don't tell you all the truth.
In the case of ISPs, and most modern media industries, consolidation has lead to Trust relationships (we have laws against those too, but our lobby-puppet politicians never enforce them), where "competitors" will rarely sue each other over their lies. You tend to get broadly accepted industry-wide lies, out of the current enforcement system. It gets to the point where the consumers are just expected to know that they are being lied to. The important thing is that you are lied to consistently, by all competitors in a given industry.
"It is the carrier rocking the boat, and then crying foul when people try to address their money making schemes."
Er, what schemes?
Verizon needs to reserve a portion of its FiOS pipe for IP-TV. It does so without violating any "neutrality". There would be no business case for any fibre investment if you allowed Joe Schmoe equal access.
Any ISP that tried to block access to GooTube would have no customers within 12 months.
It sounds like you feel the need bullying someone, and in order to justify the bulling, you need to say you were bullied first.
Also, I thought net neutrality was supposed to treat everyone's comparable traffic that same and not to charge extra for preferred delivery of packets. Is there any evidence that Comcast is treating one type or one company's Bittorrent traffic differently than some other type? Are they charging someone extra for preferred delivery? I have not heard that allegation. Are you making it now?
I'm not sure what you're saying about deep packet inspection other than you seem to be offended that it exists. Does net neutrality prohibit it?
And Verizon has full discretion on what news it stores on its news servers. Are you saying net neutrality governs the precise operation of news servers at an ISP? I don't think it does.
It sounds like "I feel bad, therefore we should pass a law". Shouldn't you have to, at least, show some kind of harm and show precisely how the law would have prevented the specific harm?
If the customers go somewhere else to get it, they most likely are no longer Verizon customers. Plus, you assume that customers *have another alternative*, which is not always the case. Indeed, in some cases Verizon is in fact preventing access to their customers - not all customers "can still go elsewhere to get alt.*".
Regardless, this goes to the heart of net neutrality, and is a argument over technicality at best as it pertains to my original comment. Not to say this argument is not important - competiton or the lack thereof in regions is key to the net neutrality debate.
But, again, going back to my original comment, to say that the lack of legislation on net neutrality over the past five years has had no effect on how corporations has acted is silly at best.
The US is almost dead last in high speed internet access deployed to homes. In Japan they have fibre to the house. There are many third world countries that have better internet access than we do.
This is not a technical debate at all. This is about two issues. GREED and CONTROL.
If the current businesses in the marketplace are too greedy and stupid to provide the product that the market place demands perhaps it is time for some regulation.
This is the USA where most of this technology was invented and still is produced. Why are we lagging behind the rest of the world?
...but net neutrality is really a political matter and not a matter of network efficiency. The motives are political on both sides. Some parties and lobbyists are highly interested in effectively making certain kind of services unusable or infeasible. Decentralized p2p networks, bittorrent, etc. will be crippled. Anything without central control over the content will be crippled. Streaming down TV with lots of advertisements as part of your ISPs "net TV" package will still be possible and you won't have problems with getting Time Warner movies on a pay-per-view basis over "official" channels. It's all about who has the control over the content you get and which network applications you can use effectively---your choice or your ISP's?
ComCast is a cable TV company that supports Net-Nepotism, because they are both an IAP (primary) and ISP (secondary) and ending Net-Neutrality would expand monopoly like powers over the USA Internet by IAPs like ComCast, but not improve QoS bandwidth to urban and rural communities, small-biz, or citizens at home.
... the IAPs do not appear to have any great interest in expensive innovation/infrastructure investments that provide QoS bandwidth increases at capitalist "Open"market competitive prices for every one in the USA.
Innovation requires investment and reinvestment
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
How would you rate ComCast Internet QoS and bandwidth?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I don't have the time to respond to all of your comments, but your limitation of net neutrality to a concept which is "supposed to treat everyone's comparable traffic that same and not to charge extra for preferred delivery of packets" is not only incorrect, but also concurs with the idea that Comcast violated issues of net neutrality.
From Wikipedia (very well cited, check it yourself):
"A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams."
Under this idea of what a neutral network is constructed of, it is the restriction of the "modes of communication allowed" which has violated network neutrality. Even under your own (incorrect) definition, by slowing Bittorent packets, Comcast is charging customers that pay monthly MORE to download the same amount of data over Bittorrent, as they take more time to download. For example:
Customer A downloads music_file.mp3 (3 megs) over HTML. It takes 1 minute, and he is paying $10/month. This means they, in effect, paid ~.0002 cents to download the song (43,200 minutes in 30 days).
Customer B downloads music_file.mp3 (3 megs) over BitTorrent. Because Comcast is slowing this method, it takes 2 minutes to download. They have effectively paid *twice as much* to download the same content.
Just to quickly note, the only purpose for deep packet inspection is *being used for* is to throttle specific types of communications. I don't have a personal vendetta against the technology (though the privacy implications are touchy), but its current use most certainly does violate net neutrality.
For now I'll give you that Verizon can manipulate data stored on its server, simply because I am out of time to construct an argument.
Bah, customer A downloads over FTP. Not HTML. But you get the idea.
Net Neutrality is rubbish, get on my bandwagon and we can make the world better using MY products and MY protocols.
The semantic web (by which I mean Web 3.0) is still a far enough in the future. We could reach it quicker by vesting all control to a small group of people, but we're not stupid.
The above is what I was about to post, right before I actually read TFA. I'm glad I did, because this fellow does not appear to be asking for a monopoly on the Internet at all. He raises some good points, but the problem is that I don't think we've adequately defined what Net Neutrality is, and what it applies to.
Regardless, demand always exceeds tech, we'll get to Web 3.0 when we get there. If difficulty in achieving Net Neutrality is its biggest flaw, then that should be an acceptable flaw.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
The problem with his argument is the statement. Let engineers solve engineering problems. That is not true. Solutions to problems are never just engineering. They are mostly driven by business motives. P2P, VoIP, etc, were developed because they were engineering solutions to problems caused by business.
So if any way of transferring a file takes any more time than another way, Comcast is guilty. It sounds unreasonable.
Also the article talks about this.
If *Comcast is at fault* for *making* the file take longer, yes they are Guilty!
What in the world is unreasonable about that?
NACK/ACK (old S&F/RUID terms) is not an IP responsibility. ACK/NACK for TCP packet delivery failure is only noticeable at the destination client/server computer .... The IP part is the only part used by the IAP (CableCo/TelCo) infrastructure there is no consideration of the content TCP packets, failure to deliver, and/or the order/time of delivery. The TCP origin of an email/file does not need any ACK-confirmation that a packet was received at the intended destination, but the TCP origin does require a NACK-notice (to initiate a resend specific packet) when a specific packet was not received or corrupt (no need to resend the whole email/file); So, in some ways it perhaps prevents a great deal of unnecessary Internet traffic.
Non-neutral network that does proper QOS by throttling bandwidth-heavy protocols that don't behave themselves on the network is acceptable.
Stop getting D/DOS attacks and/or badly configured networks confused with TCP/IP. Yes, TCP/IP is an overhead heavy protocol, but there are legitimate reasons, and a lack of QoS bandwidth is always the problem on the Internet for ISP content/services providers and customers.
Quit listening to IT product marketeers (AKA: vendors with and agenda)
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Consider telecommunications infrastructure "IAP" access (CableCo/TelCo) providers different from the "ISP" content/services (Google, Yahoo, MSN, /., SecondLife, Wired, PBS ...) providers. VoIP is an ISP service that can be problematic when the IAP decides to reduced QoS bandwidth between points A&B.
... if the IAP access QoS/bandwidth is shit, then the ISP will deliver services/content shit to their customers.
IOW: Access ain't Service, services/content (ISP) cannot be delivered without infrastructure access (IAP)
Invest in QoS bandwidth not bullshit excuses for problems, either the IAP can deliver what you need for business and home or (if possible, there may be only one choice in your region/area) you need to find (or pray, typical in USA homes and small-biz) for another IAP.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
"... money making schemes."
Exactly. The ISPs want to drink our milkshake. They are Standard oil. They own the railroads, so they can extort all the oilmen exploiting the folk.
(That's more than 50 per state, so if you don't patronize one, it's not their fault.) That's hardly a duopoly situation. However, independent ISPs often pay more for bandwidth than the cable and telephone monopolies. Some pay as much as $300 per megabit per second per month for their backbone connections. They are thus even more susceptible to being harmed if greedy content providers -- such as Vuze -- siphon off their bandwidth using P2P, or if bandwidth hogs overrun their networks. So, the issue is not one of duopoly, nor is it one of greed on the part of the providers. (Many of them are just scraping by.) Rather, it's greed on the part of some bandwidth hogging users (5% use 80% of the bandwidth) and on the part of content providers which use P2P to avoid paying the freight for delivering their content to users. See http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html for more on this issue.
The ISPs are complaining about over usage of bandwidth, but yet they a mechanism that (potentially) can save bandwidth use. If they don't want to reduce bandwidth then they should charge me more so that you afford to keep your network up. It's one or the other.
I was sold a certain bandwidth for a certain price. Either give it to me or you are in breach of contract. It's that simple.
It's the ISP's responsibility to offer their services at a rate that allows for the profit they want, not mine. Adjust the price or the bandwidth that you sell me (or both).
Like, what? You seriously need to go read up on TCP/IP if you think it sends NACKs and not ACKs. And "TCP origin of an email/file"? TCP does not care what it is transporting.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
LOL Richard Bennett is the guy that repeatedly spammed the wikipedia Network Neutrality article with his garbage, over a long, long period. He tried to rewrite the *definition* of network neutrality about a dozen times maybe in bizarre ways, he repeatedly deleted referenced material (usually describing them as 'lies' in his subject line), rewrote stuff, and in every possible way you can imagine tried to spin reality in ways that were self-evidently harmful to the balance of the wikipedia article.
He even deliberately misquoted another engineer to say the exact opposite of what they said; to the point that they logged onto the wikipedia talk page to complain. This was even after it was pointed out they never said what he wrote them saying and that the references disagreed.
He also thought that it was a good idea to get interviewed in articles in 'The Register' and then quoted himself in the wikipedia to 'prove' his points.
Oh yeah, and he used 'sockpuppets' to continue to also push his point of view while temporarily banned.
I could go on about this sleazebag for quite a while. When you even try to list the stunts he pulled it runs to several pages.
I would also challenge some of his depth of understanding, for example, at least at one point in time he didn't seem to have the slightest clue what a contended service is, which is kinda... basic. Really, really basic.
Really, he's just a bizarre guy, with bizarre views, and personality wise he's a total asshole.
(See wikipedia RFC, which contains references to a small fraction of his 'work' in the wikipedia if you want to get a measure of the man).
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Oops: RFC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/RichardBennett
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"limiting of certain types of traffic or certain pages (like the alt.* section of usenet) is fine.. if the ISP is upfront about it. If they had a cheap plan that limited you like that, and an expensive plan that had no restrictions, I'd be fine with it.
I'd like to add something; they may do this IF I HAVE ANOTHER VIABLE CHOICE. If ISPs didn't operate as minor monopolies, I'd be fine with them doing whatever (if they are honest about it), as long as I can find another service who doesn't.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
> Any ISP that tried to block access to GooTube would
> have no customers within 12 months.
You seem to presume that there's a choice. About the best that most can do is to choose between DSL and cable, and if both pull tricks like this, it's no choice. Many don't even have that choice of 2 for broadband, but get DSL *OR* cable - again, no choice.
This is not a free market, in any way shape, or form.
The real goal of net neutrality is to at least make it act like a common-carrier.
This entire article is a red herring, not on Slashdot's part, but on the part of an industry that wants badly to kill the Internet by turning it into cable-tv-on-steroids. They've found what looks like a valid technical objection to net neutrality and blown that appearance into a foregone conclusion. Then they're using that foregone conclusion to try to convince everyone that net neutrality is a bad thing that hinders innovation.
They belong in the same afterlife as the ??AA!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Unfortunately it IS that companies can't be trusted. We've adopted the meme that companies are responsible ONLY for returning stockholder value, within the framework of the law. If the law doesn't require a common-carrier style Internet - if that law permits them to turn it into cable-tv-on-steroids, extracting maximum value from content providers and shutting small content out, they may well do it. If the extra revenue from the content providers is greater than the revenue loss from the few "net neutrality extremists" that leave, they will do it. Not only will they, but by today's corporate meme they MUST do it, because it makes more money and to maintain a neutral Internet would be fiscally irresponsible. Unless LARGE numbers of people are ready and willing to give up broadband, net neutrality legislation is the only thing that will save the Internet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
they should just quit offering unlimited data plans unless they can actually offer unlimited data. unlimited dialup is easy to provide for, as in a whole month a user can get at best theoretically about 12gb if they are continuously downloading at full speed.
the real problem is the marketing people are defining service options that the networks are not capable of supporting. some services are making a profit to support other services that aren't, which is fine in, for example, pre-packaged computer bundles, but because with internet service this affects everyone, this is the end result - isp's don't have the ability to provide the level of service they advertise so they must resort to throttling, which is of course done arbitrarily to certain kinds of traffic as they are the biggest bandwidth users, rather than doing it generally.
if isp's just didn't spend so much time trying to hook those high bandwidth users up and made the prices of service to them higher, then the isp's could spend more money enhancing their bandwidth capacity instead of ending up having to explain why and what traffic they are shaping to keep use within the parameters of their networks.
there is many factors related to how network applications are written, how various tcp/ip stacks schedule, how effective QoS systems are, and how widely deployed they are, but there is one guaranteed way to ensure networks aren't bogged down by bulk traffic and streaming users - always keep traffic levels below about half of capacity. the line might be rated to transport data at a certain speed but when you fill that pipe past a certain point you wind up with a great deal of turbulence which leads to latency issues.
it's a bit similar to mastering levels in audio engineering - sure, you may have 120 dB of resolution in your recording medium, but the closer you get to filling all that space the less headroom you have for periodic spikes, which has lead in the commercial music engineering to more use of dynamic range compression, which produces a much 'duller' sound with less dynamics (some even say that this compressed dynamics leads to fatigue in the listener) - this problem never happened in cinema sound engineering because someone set a standard for how many dB average power should be targetted in a mix. Similarly, if the network provision industry would set a standard of aiming at around 50-60% utilisation average and accordingly adjusted planning for bandwidth upgrades and market penetration none of this would be a problem.
beancounters see the network capacity specification and expect that they can run the network at that level without any problems. But of course beancounters also rate the potential of a resource according to a percentage of customer turnover below a certain level, meaning they can cheapskate to some degree and of course being that businesses care more about the bottom line than good service, this is the sort of issue that cannot be solved by anything other than legislation.
i believe network neutrality as a concept misses the real point at issue here, which is simply businesses squeezing more money out of their lines than it is possible in real practise to allow, and pushing this limit just short of messing up the whole network. throttling bittorrent and streaming video is all about trying to hold back the flood of bandwidth demand so they can put off the upgrades for longer.
there would not be a problem if they just didn't provide more bandwidth on the local loop than can be carried through the peering connections.
Net neutrality is really 2 problems. One is an engineering problem related to fairly provisioning QoS. The other is a free speech issue. The second problem arises because companies like AT&T, etc, want to be both carrier and content provider - or at least the service provider for the content providers. Naturally, they want to give preferential service to their own content and/or the content of their (business) customers in terms of delivering content to (consumer) customers. This where government policy is needed - and should be narrowly targetted. The first problem is an engineering problem, best left for engineers to solve - and left alone by the politicians.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I consult for the NYC City Council's Technology committee. We ran "Net Neutrality" hearings as a matter of official NYC public policy, as NYC operates a lot of networks, and has a lot of influence over Verizon both here in NYC and nationwide (and around the world), as well as all the other telcos and other networks of every kind.
I interviewed several academic computer scientists (like a PhD CS professor at Columbia University) who have been paid by telcos themselves to research congestion issues. Specifically whether it's more economical to tier services by content (or anything else), or to just build more bandwidth that's content-neutral (and protocol neutral, so email and P2P are the same priority as realtime TV and phone). They compared the economics of the buildout and the management, as well as actually building test labs of each.
They officially reported to the telcos that unequivocally building more bandwidth was better *** FOR THE TELCOS *** .
The telcos know that it's better. They're just lying because they want an excuse to spy on your messages for political purposes (like their FISA violations, which wouldn't look as bad anymore), and to compete with some content of their own (like voice and video). That "technical reality" is a pack of lies, except where it admits that more bandwidth is better for everyone. Everyone, that is, except the execs at telcos hellbent on world domination.
--
make install -not war
This is all simply excuses on the part of the network owners. It is a fact that technology evolves at an exponential rate. This includes network hardware. The internet providers as a whole do not upgrade their networks with the proper technology. Instead they make the minimum upgrades for the maximum profit. I see this every year in the way Charter Communications treats their network and customers. Every year a repair man has to come out to my house and tweak the wires in my house to squeak out just a little bit more signal to get to my cable modem working again. This is an epidemic among service providers in the U.S. They are merely using this as an excuse to justify the restriction on their networks. A network is a collaboration of systems to benefit each other. If ISP's do not want to embrace this definition we as consumers need to tell them to go fuck themselves.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Hi Richard!
I noticed Richard Bennett does not address a couple of things that concerns people who push for net neutrality laws, the throttling of of traffic from some websites but not others even though they the same type of files, such as with political websites or commercial websites. Say a PHB at cableco X doesn't like Daily Kos so s/he has it slowed down whereas PHB at cableco Y doesn't like Free Republic so that company slows it down. With commercial websites cableco X goes into partnership with Amazon and so slows connections to bookpool. The only difference between these websites are the originators, they are in competition with each other.
FalconShould there be a Law?
but here in the UK there's no monopoly (you can switch ISPs fairly quickly and there's maybe a dozen or more to choose from)
In the US people have a choice for dialup speeds but most people don't have a choice for broadband, heck some people can't get broadband. A small number of people are lucky to have both cable and dsl access but if they can get broadband at all it's usually either cable or dsl not both.
falconShould there be a Law?
God damn republicans. Always bringing us down.
(That's more than 50 per state, so if you don't patronize one, it's not their fault.) That's hardly a duopoly situation.
It is a duopoly if you only have 2 choices for broadband, and many don't have 2 choices. If you're lucky you have a choice for cable and dsl, many can't get either, and even if you can sign up with a third party ISP they still use either the cableco's or telco's lines.
Rather, it's greed on the part of some bandwidth hogging users
No it's greed on the part of access providers. Nothing made them offer unlimited access plans, but once people took them up on the offer they are crying. It's nothing more than offering more than they can provide and that's a problem of their own making.
Now, if they want to start charging some people more for using more bandwidth then I want them to pay back the billions of taxpayer dollars they got in subsidies to build out their infrastructure. They took the taxpayers' money and used it to boost their bottom line without doing what they were given the money do to.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The article is right, but I think he's missing the point of network neutrality right now, at least to the general public.
When the general public thinks of net neutrality, they want equally fast access to all websites, they want their streaming video fast, and they don't want their downloads or encrypted data hampered. Whether the internet is engineered correctly or not does not change the fact that the telcos are screwing us on all of these points.
I work for an ISP, and net neutrality scares the hell out of me. We do not want to, and will not throttle back certain sites who won't pay us for premium access, or create a tiered pricing structure for our customers
Ah but that's why some are pushing for net neutrality, so that access providers won't demand either content providers or the ISP's customers pay more not to have the connection slowed down.
The point is content providers should provide their own bandwidth
They do, Google pays for it's own bandwidth as do Amazon, Apple, and eBay.
FalconShould there be a Law?
network
Who? Affected how?
Me. By the government giving broadband providers $200 Billion+ of my tax money to build out broadband which they did not do.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The gov't ought to exercise eminent domain over the entire internet infrastructure and run it as a minimally regulated public service just like they do roads. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of why: it's totally stupid from a technical point of view because different kinds of usage require different kinds of QOS, but it's absolutely necessary from an economic perspective because otherwise the telcos are incented to act in direct opposition to the needs of the consumer.
The "invisible hand" of the free market only works in cases where the market is actually free. The telecommunications industry is bubbling over with natural monopolies and will therefore never, ever, work to benefit consumers as long as it is regulated by the open market.
I know, I know, the government is notoriously bad at running things -- except where the job they do is just fine in which case nobody notices. Again, the system works a lot better when the people doing a job get paid more when they please the end consumer and less when they fail. People who regulate an industry should never be allowed to make money _in_ that industry -- just like we don't allow criminals to become judges.
Anyway, the point is, the free market is the wrong tool for controlling monopolistic enterprises and socialism is the right one. It's not a matter of philosophy, it's more about looking at which direction various forces tend to push things and harnessing the force that pushes in the direction you want to go. In this case our favorite force tends to push in the wrong direction, so we really ought to consider hitching our fate to a different one this time.
I thought net neutrality was supposed to treat everyone's comparable traffic that same and not to charge extra for preferred delivery of packets.
I think that's what Richard Bennett, TFA writer, is missing about net neutrality. Nowhere does he address the possibility of ISPs demanding one content provider, such as Google, pay them not to slow their traffic.
It sounds like "I feel bad, therefore we should pass a law".
Generally I don't like, I actually oppose, new laws however what TFA writer misses besides what I say above is free speech. Say PHB at cableco X is a conservative and hates liberals so he has his engineers slow down connections to Daily Kos whereas PHB at cableco Y hates conservatives and slows down traffic from Free Republic. Both websites deliver html but their politics are different. Another thing he misses is that the government has given more than $200 billion of taxpayer money to buildout the broadband infrastructure, which for the most part they have not done.
Falcon
"Should there be a law?"Should there be a Law?
I understand that there are technical issues revolving around net neutrality. But technical issues are not what most ISP's are looking at. Downloading free movies (and when I type free, I mean FREE as in free to distribute without infringing on copyright), is against an ISP's business. Most ISP's (mine included) offer television across the internet. Why should they allow someone to get something for free when they can throttle bandwidth and then charge for content they provide? Its a no-brainer. They save by offering poorer service, and then gain more revenue by offering net-tv. They are also cheerful to claim there is no bandwidth (although 360 networks and JDS Uniphase both tanked after the .com bubble burst because massive data compression occurred at the same time a huge amount of new fiber went into the ground. Suddenly the speed limit went from 50 miles per hour to 5000 and it happened at the same time the highway went from 2 lanes (1 each way) to 50 (each way). The overcapacity has not been fully utilized as there is still a lot of dark (unused) fiber in the ground. To utter the words 'we don't have the bandwidth' is to utter rubbish.
You seriously need to go read. "NACK/ACK (old S&F/RUID terms)" indicates you are clueless about why I used the terms that were in the post I replied too. NACK/ACK are old terms (pre-Internet) used in messaging and other communications software/documentation for store&forward switches and messaging systems that used RUID (Route User/Unique ID [AKA: R community] ...), all long before the "Internet". Do you know what BBN, stands for what about SUN ... anyway you should read up on many things including TCP/IP.
... I suspect this AC in only capable of bit-bucket-tossing or VBasic coding.
Anyone can toss bit buckets, a few of us can take the trash and make something
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
May be we should invent a new communication channel other than the stone age technology of cables for p2p, For example - GPS uses satellite. Say, a open source Wireless p2p device etc.. and then a p2p only international gateway service provider.
Or, you know...stop building networks for asymmetric connections and overselling like mad. Improve the network and don't promise more bandwidth until you can reasonably handle it. (Why offer more bandwidth constantly? It's not like the major ISPs have any real competition. And certainly not everywhere.)
is that they are trying to put economic penalties on users to curb the bandwidth problem, instead of putting economic incentives into new developments and technologies to solve the bandwidth problem.
Bandwidth problem will not go away, and people will always want more. There are billions to be made for companies who can invent technology to increase it (perhaps even on existing infrastructure) and I believe this is where they should concentrate their efforts on, but as usual that will not happen.
How many times have we seen this, some company trying desperately to stick to old business model and penalizing users to preserve it instead of moving on with the times?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
Read the fine print in your contract. Most contracts promise you something like 64k down, 24k up minimum. Some even go as far as promising you a 128k down, 64k up. Of course you can't hold them responsible if you don't get that at certain points.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
My collegue Alok wrote a fantastic essay on this issue which everyone here should appreciate as it starts with the basic principles of how the internet works and then analyzes a conception of net neutrality and more importantly extends the debate to consider different possibilities for net prejudice i.e. prejudicial packet treatment (also called QoS, etc.). The basic conclusion is that legislation should be enacted (and can be defined and implemented effectively and easily) based on an analysis of technology as well as business motivations of telco.s not to project net neutrality but rather to prevent pernicious types of net prejudice. This would protect best telco., consumer and engineering interests. You can read the essay at scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/938752/Against-FeeBased-and-other-Pernicious-Net-Prejudice-An-Explanation-and-Examination-of-the-Net-Neutrality-Debate Here's Alok's summary of his argument: defining net neutrality as the idea that every packet must be treated equally, there's an alternative, net prejudice, in which packets can be treated prejudicially (or preferentially depending on your perspective!). Through analyzing the kinds of technologies involved in sincere and rent-seeking net prejudice by telco.s, the essay arrives at conclusions that protections are needed (e.g. legislation) not so much to protect net neutrality but rather to protect against pernicious net prejudice, and these protections won't inhibit any technological innovation (e.g. IPv6 which provides for quality of service or net prejudice) nor provide any disincentives to telecommunications infrastructure investment.
Therez light! : aHR0cDovL3hrMGRlci53b3JkcHJlc3MuY29t
Here's how media companies will kill the free internet we all know and love:
The result will look like broadcast media does today, one big corporate billboard, instead of a free press. Just a little censorship is like being just a little pregnant.
twitter and Odder are the same person.
David Reed has a nice collection of open spectrum articles. Of the two experts here, Reed looks real.
I still hope you'll reconsider this behavior.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
See above.
mmmmm.
Yeah, you are right. Given the capability I would strike my Verizon example from my original post. Good points across the board.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On the issue of ACK... give your comment to the person that initially used the terms in their post (NOT me!). I simply used the same terms for their post not yours. IOW: get a real issue.
... I would call that a thrashing/misbehaving/bad (shut it down) TCP application, because it would be as problematic on my network as a thrashing Ethernet card.
TCP applications on local clients/servers can ack/something-worked nak/something-failed with a local mail server all damn day, BFD
There is no need (it is worthless) to confirm each successful packet delivery.
Resend missing/failed/corrupted packets does have value and is required for TCP applications to work properly. If there is a reply-request to confirm successful delivery of all related packets, then an ACK/reply will be sent to the sending TCP application, by the receiving TCP application, confirming complete clean (no errors) reception of all packets associated with the email including all the attachments.
Poor understanding/implementation of TCP/IP appears to be the problem for folks, TCP and IP work very well together on the Internet.
Can we innovate (make things better)...? Always yes, but indicating that a lack of QoS bandwidth is not the root-problem for the Internet in the USA (especially) is pure BS that IAP (CableCo/TelCo) want you and congress/politicians to believe.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Ah, but you lose there because "unlimited" in relation to internet accounts classically means as to connect time, not throughput. This dates back to the time where the scarce resource was time on the IPS's modem farm, not upstream bandwidth. So as long as there isn't a limit on your connection time, they win.
You kids today.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
You are mad, but I would expect no less from an ISP representative. But, let us go over the realities in a calm manner...
1) Content providers have their own contracts with internet service providers. They are not YOUR customers, they are some other companies' customers. They pay that company for the bandwidth use; very popular content can lead to these limits to be exceeded (the famous "Slashdot effect" is an example) thus basically shutting down that content. But them's the breaks.
2) Content is sent to your customers when your customers ask for it. The traffic is thus initiated by your customers. You know, the people you get to charge money because - I will say this again - THEY are your customers. They are the ones you can charge money.
3) Peer to peer is an effective way of distributing popular and large files to multiple recipients compared to the "single source" protocols associated with traditional distribution (FTP, HTTP). The users get content faster, the network is less prone to bottlenecks - everyone wins, except the company charging for use of the now less over-utilized "pipe".
4) Many ISPs are also themselves content providers, so the wailing and crocodile tears over having to transport content that is more popular than their own ring hollow when you start to look more into the real reasons for this twisted "the content providers are leeches" theories ISPs keep churning on.
5) Ask yourself this: Without these content providers you appear to loathe, would you even HAVE customers? Noone wake up one morning and say "Today I will become a customer of Random ISP, because I love giving money to companies just because". No, they wake up and say "Today I will become a custimer of Random ISP because I want to access YouTube and play World of Warcraft". The sooner ISPs realize they need content providers the better.
In conclusion:
As an ISP you have chosen a certain business model where you distribute your need for income on a set of subscribers. If you cannot make money from that model you need to rethink the business model. And begging (or requesting "protection money" which preferred service really is) from other ISPs' customers is NOT a good business model.
Your reply to this post as twitter (and the subsequent one as freenix) could have easily been made here, in a single comment. Why do you insist on shilling your own posts this way?
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
I will take my offtopic moderations just to make sure other people who post legitimate replies to his astroturfing know what they're getting into.
Once he starts replying to himself with multiple accounts, anything he had to say becomes irrelevant.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
why is your name troll account so well moderated? Why do you use fm6, dedazo, mathorpe and other accounts to troll 24/7?
Check out the karma for twitter's accounts. Almost all of them are very low karma. The exceptions seem to be accounts that he hasn't had for very long. If the guy's goal is to steal karma, he's not doing a very good job. In fact, he has an impressive ability to destroy the karma of any account he comments from.
True, he sometimes does get modded up. I think that has less to do with his onanistic conversations with himself than with his ability to spout boilerplate pro-OSS and anti-M$ rants. That sucks, but bad moderation happens a lot around here; this is no worse than most.
And no, he certainly doesn't get any mod points. Nowadays, you have to be in the middle of the bell curve, posting frequency wise. So if you post a lot, you never get mod points (I haven't had any since the new system was put in place 5 years ago). And if you post a little (or distribute your posts between a lot of different accounts), you don't get mod points either.
So please, ignore his bullshit. Because by making noise about it, you're facilitating it.
Need to type accents and special characters in Windows? Use FrKeys
god damn vultures
The experience of Japan and Korea is that simply adding bandwidth, especially symmetrical bandwidth, to first-mile networks doesn't make the congestion problem go away; they're got 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s links, and still have to ration P2P bandwidth to prevent 5% of the users from hogging 75% of network capacity. The problem is that additional bandwidth is instantly consumed by queued-up P2P file transfers. They complete quicker, and the P2P users respond to that by doing even more P2P transfers. So bandwidth, in real networks, is like memory in computers: applications expand to consume it all. That's what they're supposed to do, after all.
The net neutrality fight as a political and economic matter is largely a fight between Big Content (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, et. al.) and the Telcos for who controls the Telco networks. My article doesn't address that, because my main concern is that regardless of who wins in Washington, the challenges of network engineering will continue, and I'd hate to see engineers have their hands tied by well-meaning but misguided prescriptions.
It's good to see so many of the readers getting my analysis of the technical issues affected by the current controversy.
All I'm really trying to say is that we're not done with the technical design of the Internet yet, but if some of these NN laws pass, we damn sure will be.
When you say:
Are you trying to say that people here besides yourself actually read account names and moderate accordingly?
A more likely explanation is that you trolls have an impressive number of modpoints but it still takes you a long time to destroy an account. I'm glad the fm6 account is on a modpoint blacklist but you seem to have the karma farming method down with your other accounts.
I read his post, did you read mine? He said, and I included it, he didn't want to throttle certain websites and I said that's why some people want net neutrality, so their ISP won't throttle websites that won't pay extra.
Logically I think ISPs should be raising prices to their own consumers, because I believe firmly in net-neutrality. And am very much against the sort of double dipping that not having net-neutrality would allow.
Same here, but only after ISPs either build out their network infrastructure or give the subsidies the government gave them to build it out back. The government gave them more than $200 million of taxpayer money. And stop advertizing it as unlimited. They did so to lure customers to sign up with them, and now that people are they are crying.
I am ALSO going to consume considerable EXTRA upload bandwidth to seed that movie to others. And the ISP will be billing ME for that extra upload.
You can't control what programs on your computer has access to the internet? When I used Windows I also used the ZoneAlarm firewall which allowed me to do just that. I didn't get around to installing a firewall on my Linux PC but I have one on my Mac as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
A Review of TCP Performance
Within any packet-switched network, when demand exceeds available capacity, the packet switch will use a queue to hold the excess packets. When this queue fills, the packet switch must drop packets. Any reliable data protocol that operates across such a network must recognize this possibility and take corrective action. TCP is no exception to this constraint. TCP uses data sequence numbering to identify packets, and explicit acknowledgements (ACKs) to allow the sender and receiver to be aware of reliable packet transfer. This form of reliable protocol design is termed "end-to-end" control, because interior switches do not attempt to correct packet drops. Instead, this function is performed through the TCP protocol exchange between sender and receiver. TCP uses >>>cumulative ACKs rather than per-packet ACKs, where an ACK referencing a particular point within the data stream implicitly acknowledges all data with a sequence value less than the ACKed sequence.
>>> TCP also uses ACKs to clock the data flow. ACKs arriving back at the sender arrive at intervals approximately equal to the intervals at which the data packets arrived at the sender. If TCP uses these ACKs to trigger sending further data packets into the network, then the packets will be entered into the network at the same rate as they are arriving at their destination. This mode of operation is termed "ACK clocking."
>>> TCP recovers from packet loss using two mechanisms. The most basic operation is the use of packet timeouts by the sender. If an ACK for a packet fails to arrive within the timeout value, the sender will retransmit the oldest unacknowledged packet. In such a case, TCP assumes that the loss was caused by a network congestion condition, and the sender will enter "Slow Start" mode. This condition causes significant delays within the data transfer, because the sender will be idle during the timeout interval and upon restarting will recommence with a single packet exchange, gradually recovering the data rate that was active prior to the packet loss. Many networks exhibit transient congestion conditions, where a data stream may experience loss of a single packet within a packet train. To address this, TCP introduced the mechanism of "fast recovery." This mechanism is triggered by a sequence of three duplicate ACKS received by the data sender. These duplicate ACKs are generated by the packets that trail the lost packet, where the sender ACKs each of these packets with the ACK sequence value of the lost packet. In this mode the sender immediately retransmits the lost packet and then halves its sending rate, continuing to send additional data as permitted by the current TCP sending window. In this mode of operation, "congestion-avoidance" TCP increases its sending window at a linear rate of one segment per Round-Trip Time (RTT). This mode of operation is referred to as Additive Increase, Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD), where the protocol reacts sharply to signs of network congestion, and gradually increases its sending rate in order to equilibrate with concurrent TCP sessions.
... I can be wrong for folks when it is in my benefit. Also, thanks ... it has been about a decade sense last I looked up some TCP/IP info. I sent my first email in 1984 name5678@IPv4.octet.address.ip (yes, before DNS).
Now, if you still know you're right, then you're right
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The next one to go will be my personal name troll.
You know he's just going to create more, though.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
That's precisely the same problem AOL made of trying to create a Walled Garden. It didn't work for AOL and it won't work for AT&T, but there may be a lot of pain spread around relearning the same lesson over again.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."