UK ISP To Prioritize Gaming Traffic

nk497 writes "A UK ISP is now offering a broadband package just for gamers, which will prioritize their traffic to give them an edge over rival players. Demon Internet has also set up direct networks with gaming companies to boost speeds, and is promising lower latency and a higher usage cap than standard packages. 'Looking at the usage of gamers, it's actually more akin to a small business,' the company said. While paying to get specific content streamed more quickly may worry net neutrality campaigners, Demon says it has enough capacity for its own customers and that's who it's looking out for."

Comments

Illegal under Net Neutrality

[commodore64_love]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

You see how seemingly "good" laws can cause unintended and harmful consequences? (Lord save me from do-gooders trying to save my soul, or impose their morals upon me.)

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[hedwards]

LOL wut? Net neutrality would prevent this, yes, but it would also prevent ISPs from holding you hostage for not paying up. I get that you're a Libertarian and it's all ZOMG gubment doin' stuff, but give me a break. The suggestion that what we have now works is as laughable as it is wrong. At bare minimum there needs to be rules to ensure that things are conducted in an above the board fashion.

Additionally, this is in a sense a method of cheating, you're putting down extra money to have an in game advantage, It doesn't take a genius to see that it puts pressure on other players to pony up for it as well, whether it would otherwise be necessary or not.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Generalize QoS, you idiot. If the packet is marked to reduce latency, respect that, out to some cap per month or so. That way, it doesn't matter if it's a game or SSH.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[klingens]

Let's create preferred lanes for Mercedes, Lexus and BMW drivers. After all, these people paid a lot more than Al Bundy for his Dodge and they pay more taxes as well. So it's entirely fair they get preferred treatment and lower driving latency (get to their destination faster). They're businessmen and women, so their needs are different from the normal people. We still have enough other roads for all the other drivers, don't worry.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Rising Ape]

If they had enough capacity on their network to avoid congestion, they wouldn't *need* to prioritise anything. This appears to be running a poor network, then charging more to compensate for it.

Shame, Demon used to be a decent ISP in the 90s.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[squidfood]

Um, despite the "worry over net neutrality" cited in the article, the actual service just looks like they're repackaging a higher speed/business connection as a "gamer" package. Nothing there actually says that your connection will be slower by packet category.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[tepples]

I see it as more of a QOS feature than as a neutrality violation for two reasons:

• The service is between the ISP and its customer, not a bribe paid by a customer to someone else's ISP.
• It's sensitive to protocol (e.g. gaming vs. HTTP/HTTPS/etc), not to the identity of the party on the other end (e.g. MSNBC vs. Fox News or YouTube vs. Dailymotion).

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Nerdfest]

If net neutrality laws were in place they'd still be allowed to prioritise gaming traffic for everyone.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Adrian Lopez]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

Would that be such a bad thing? Instead of prioritizing gaming traffic over other kinds of traffic, or doing the same for VOIP, or YouTube, or whatever else an ISP decides is more important than other protocols, why not adopt a QoS scheme that ensures equitable access to available bandwidth while allowing customers to set their own priorities within those equitable access constraints?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

While you're working on impossible things, you should try and convince the people in Australia who have to pay for lower ping vpn tunnels to WoW servers in the US that it's also cheating.
Seeing as the alternative is 500ms latency vs USA players sub 200ms. :-(

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Adrian Lopez]

Generalize QoS, you idiot. If the packet is marked to reduce latency, respect that, out to some cap per month or so. That way, it doesn't matter if it's a game or SSH.

Exactly. If we let ISPs decide for us which packets are more important than others, what's to stop them from favoring popular games while ignoring the rest? It's not as if all games use the same protocol, so instead of optimizing the network for particular applications or protocols, why not optimize it based on particular needs?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[HungryHobo]

Prioritizing based on source or destination would be a problem under Net Neutrality but prioritizing based on protocol etc isn't necessarily unless it's to try to degrade a competitors products(like a phone company which is also an ISP intentionally degrading VOIP).
NN doesn't stop you pushing VOIP packets through faster than FTP or UDP faster than TCP.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Solandri]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

You see how seemingly "good" laws can cause unintended and harmful consequences?

How do you figure that? You're assuming that the consequences of banning this would be harmful. There are two cases to consider here - one where the ISP is operating at 100% bandwidth, and another where they are operating below that.

If the ISP is operating at 100% bandwidth, then this becomes a zero-sum game. The gamer's packets being prioritized come at the price of other paying customers' packets being de-prioritized. In essence, the other customers are not getting the bandwidth they paid for. The ISP transmits the same number of packets, they collect the same amount of money from regular customers, and they collect more money from the gamers. In other words, the ISP does the exact same amount of work as before, but collects more money.

If the ISP is operating below 100% bandwidth, then the gamer gains nothing. His packets travel out with the same latency as regular customers' packets, so he gains nothing by paying extra. Again, the ISP does the exact same amount of work as before, but collects more money.

So in both cases, the harm comes from offering to prioritize gaming traffic for an extra fee. At its heart, that's what Net Neutrality aims to prevent - ISP using their monopoly position over your network data to extract more money from you while they do the exact same amount of work. Net neutrality encourages ISPs to solve bandwidth problems the correct way - by adding more bandwidth. Except for illegal traffic (spam, copyrighted downloading), prioritization encourages ISPs to solve bandwidth problems the wrong way - by not adding more bandwidth when they obviously need it, and taking bandwidth some customers have legitimately paid for and should get, and giving it to someone else who paid more.

Now, if ISPs wanted to lower prices for people willing to have their bandwidth degraded, while raising prices for people wanting to have their bandwidth prioritized, thus keeping their revenue the same, then there's no problem. But no ISP is going to do that because it involves them doing a whole lot of work implementing all this for no net revenue gain. The whole reason prioritization (of legal traffic) makes economic sense to ISPs is because it's essentially robbing from Peter to pay Paul, without Peter knowing that he's being robbed, and Paul is willing to pay extra for the service.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

With your logic, paying for the best CPU and GPU "is in a sense a method of cheating".

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Gazoogleheimer]

In other news, the used car market for Mercedes, Lexuses, and BMW's is suddenly booming!

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Charliemopps]

Foolish people like you, that have no concept of how networking works, will be the death of net neutrality and it's a shame. This company isn't speeding up the gamers connection... they are slowing down everyone else.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Kjella]

Do you really want to have a gaming fee and a voip fee and a youtube fee and whatever "extra charges" tacked onto your bill for each service you want to work well? The way technology is evolving, you can effectively make gaming worse but not upgrading the normal connections and only upgrade those that pay extra, pretty soon it's almost a requirement. Yes, this is part of delivering an "Internet service", if access to one part of the Internet - in this case game servers - is too poor you must upgrade everyone. You can't charge people extra for getting decent rates to EU or Japan or Australia or the WoW server. They can't say "Well if you want good access to THESE servers you must pay extra."

There should be some room within Net Neutrality legislation to prioritize classes of traffic, I'd say three is sufficient:
1. Realtime (VoIP, gaming etc.)
2. Interactive (Web etc.)
3. Bulk (P2P, FTP etc.)

They should not be able to collect additional fees, but they should be allowed, but not required to prioritize up the first and prioritize down the last. What I am concerned about is that this won't be simply a "gaming" fee, next up it'll be by what game it is. Suddenly you have a "World of Warcraft" fee or "Warhammer online" fee or "Age of Conan" fee. All priced to fit supply and demand so they can profit as much as possible. Would you like that? I wouldn't.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[jc42]

If we let ISPs decide for us which packets are more important than others, what's to stop them from favoring popular games while ignoring the rest?

Hey, that's a nice little MMPORPG you've got there. It'd be too bad if it weren't playable because the players of other games have soaked up all the bandwidth. Y'know, for a small monthly gratuity, we could make sure that didn't happen to your game. Whaddaya say?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Kjella]

Prioritizing based on source or destination would be a problem under Net Neutrality but prioritizing based on protocol etc isn't necessarily

Since most games run their own protocol, it's effectively the same. So the WoW protocol gets prioritized and the Age of Conan protocol does not, it works out to exactly the same as a src/dst filter.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[TrisexualPuppy]

My name is Adrian Lopez. I like tacos y burritos.

tacos! tacos! tacos! burrrrrrritos!!!

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Jurily]

Seeing as the alternative is 500ms latency vs USA players sub 200ms. :-(

Or, you know, an Aussie server.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Grimbleton]

Can my Saab get in on that?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[AaronMK]

"I see it as more of a QOS feature than as a neutrality violation"

I have QOS on my router. Why should I have to pay an extra fee for it. If they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize traffic to get the performance for which they are charging this extra fee. If this stopped at being a service fee for setting QoS on a single customer's connection for the services of their choice, and it did not include peering agreements guided by specific types of services for which they are charging consumers a premium, I might agree.

The service is between the ISP and its customer, not a bribe paid by a customer to someone else's ISP.

I could be "someone else" on the same ISP. So yes, that is "bribing" for priority on "someone else's ISP". Besides, Net Neutrality rules don't distinguish between who is paying, or whether that other network happens to be an ISP, a corporate network, or even someone's home network.

It's sensitive to protocol (e.g. gaming vs. HTTP/HTTPS/etc), not to the identity of the party on the other end (e.g. MSNBC vs. Fox News or YouTube vs. Dailymotion).

Comcast degrading BitTorrent traffic (that's protocol based, not "identity" based) was a Net Neutrality violation. Favoring specific applications IS a Net Neutrality violation, unless it falls under "reasonable network management". As I said before, if they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize. Reasonable network management would be limited to times of unusually high spikes in traffic, and would be a fail-safe for time sensitive or safety critical services, not for people who have paid for some special prioritization.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[netchipguy]

It's not as simple as whether the ISP is running at 100% or not (i.e. your packet will get through, or not). Some apps are very sensitive to latency (voice, gaming, etc) while most are not.
The switches have buffering which gets emptier, fuller, emptier, fuller. When it runs out of buffering, i.e. your 100% situation, packets get dropped, and TCP "backs off" to try to avoid that happening again in the immediate future. In fact, Random Early Discard (RED) protocols will drop the odd random packet, with increasing probability as the buffer fills, to let TCP know to backoff.... before LOTS of packets start getting dropped. If you do get to 100%, it shouldn't last long.
However when your time sensitive packets are in the same queue as it gets emptier, fuller, emptier, fuller, then even if the buffers never fill, you still suffer from increased latency... and also latency variation (jitter), which can be even more problematic (when do you decide the packets never coming and you need to fill in the gap?). Furthermore, you'd like to avoid dropping these time-sensitive packets with RED (which of course would be another "non neutral behavior"). That's because these kinds of apps generally send a steady stream, they will sorely miss the data in that dropped packet, and anyway they won't backoff in the face of drops, defeating the whole purpose of RED.
Enterprises who use IP Telephony will usually put that traffic at a higher priority (and, for that priority, disable RED). Not because their gigabit LANs are at 100%... they do it because it makes the telephone calls almost as robust and low-latency as "fixed lines".
The whole Net Neutrality debate would perhaps get somewhere if people agreed on what they were talking about. There's too many very different ideas bundled into the same name. The version that makes it illegal to willfully delay/block/etc will get 90% support. The version where it's illegal to prioritize ANYTHING is much more debatable. Those who have actually rolled out services over shared medium (IP telephony, video conferencing, etc) will have a lot of information to share on the latter.
Simply throwing bandwidth at the problem is not (yet) a viable solution, since folks are still figuring out ways to use all the bandwidth they can get. It's like saying "I don't need background threads and foreground threads, just treat them all the same and make the CPUs faster". Sounds nice, in theory.
Think of a service like Skype. Assume we want that kind of innovative service to prosper. This absolutely requires that service providers don't block/delay Skype packets. Meanwhile, to hit the quality and reliability of "fixed lines", some way to mark that small number of packets as "important" would help A LOT.
-netchipguy

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[3vi1]

1. QoS doesn't speed up any traffic. It drops un-prioritized traffic in favor of the priority stuff, when the link nears saturation. So, if your neighbor buys into this - it inevitably means slowing down *your* traffic in favor of his (even if you're no where near your speed cap). That's not neutral - it effectively penalizes you for not using the internet in the way your neighbor does.

2. QoS does often involve identifying the other end of a conversation. Sometimes apps will negotiate a random port, or just tunnel traffic over port 80, and there are no PDLM's for most game protocols. Classifying the traffic based on the server endpoint is sometimes the only option.

3. How is an ISP supposed to know about every online game? They may have a list of thousands, but it won't be complete. Games they know about are going to get prioritized over the ones they don't - effectively punishing users of PC games in favor of XBox Live and PSN customers . Again, that's not neutral.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[pspahn]

...not to mention all the schools that can afford nice training facilities. I guess they are cheating because the competition doesn't necessarily have access to the same thing.

Bottom line, if you can afford something better than someone else, you're a cheater.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Rising Ape]

Is that an issue for the big pipes in the core though? I may be misremembering, but I thought the buffers stayed pretty much empty up to a very high % utilisation, as the aggregation of a huge number of independent flows smooths out the fluctuations and jitter associated with any one flow. As long as the capacity in the shared section is much larger than any individual's pipe, this should remain the case.

I guess in a LAN there's still the potential for an individual machine to use up all the capacity, so this could still be an issue.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[pspahn]

I also agree. It seems unfair for people that pay for something to be subject to the same rules as people who didn't pay for it.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[MtHuurne]

Realtime games all use UDP. What they run over UDP is indeed different, but an ISP could just prioritize all UDP packets and gaming performance would improve without violating net neutrality.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[ScrewMaster]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

You see how seemingly "good" laws can cause unintended and harmful consequences? (Lord save me from do-gooders trying to save my soul, or impose their morals upon me.)

Well it depends. It's one thing to say, "well, we're charging you more for a higher level of service" and another to say, "we'll degrade your service until you pay more." ISPs have always offered different classes of service: whether it be speed, maximum transfer, reliability, whatever ... some people are willing to pay more for some things. So, for an ISP to say "we'll reduce your latency by x-percent over our average latency" doesn't seem inherently evil, unless the ISP is deliberately slowing down everyone just to get more out of those who happen to want that.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[vux984]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

No. Actually it isn't necessarily a violation of net neutrality at all.

Net neutrality (as understood by most rational people) is violated when someone who is NOT a customer of the ISP gets charged for better access to the ISPs customers. e.g. throttling google traffic but boosting bing traffic becasue google didn't pay and bing did.

Yes, there are some nitwits who try and conflate net neutrality as being in conflict with QoS or Tiered ISP service levels like offering (slower lite vs regular vs higher speed connections), etc, etc, but that's not the "net neutrality" that net neutrality advocates are interested in.

There is nothing wrong whatsoever with CUSTOMERS paying to have their traffic, or some subset of their traffic given priority. And in fact I EXPECT customers to be able and willing to pay for faster speed for their traffic within their ISP.

You see how seemingly "good" laws can cause unintended and harmful consequences? (Lord save me from do-gooders trying to save my soul, or impose their morals upon me.)

You see how conflating two network management issues that are unrelated creates FUD about the unrelated issue? People like you are as bad as the do-gooders.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[netchipguy]

It's an issue anywhere there is congestion. Which happens anywhere people don't like wasting money.

Buffering versus line utilization is an interesting relationship. You NEED buffering if you want to keep the line highly utilized because data comes in randomly from various places -- if you have small buffers, then the various TCPs will often collide, drop, and backoff even though the line isn't highly utilized. The "right" amount of buffering is a function of how much you want to pay, the utilization you want to achieve, the latency you are willing tolerate, and, assuming an adaptive protocol like TCP, the round trip time of from one endstation to the other (not just on your segment).

In the core, the lines are fast, but also very expensive. Providers want those things well utilized -- a 10Gb pipe which is only running at 20% isn't earning enough money. So the core tends to have deep buffering, lots of simultaneous flows, and hence runs at high utilization. It's not uncommon to have buffers on the order of several megabytes per port (providers often will measure it "milliseconds").

In a LAN, gigabit lines run everywhere, and the wires are short and cheap. They tend to be cheap switches, with shallow buffers. No one cares too much if packets are dropped, there is plenty of bandwidth to resend things. It's not uncommon to have 2-4 megabytes shared for the whole switch (24 ports or whatever).

In the first case, prioritizing helps avoid large latencies, since the core has deep buffers, and enough users to keep the buffers busy.

In the second case, prioritizing helps avoid packet drops, since the LAN has shallow buffers.

-netchipguy

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Matt_R]

Prioritizing based on source or destination would be a problem under Net Neutrality but prioritizing based on protocol etc isn't necessarily unless it's to try to degrade a competitors products(like a phone company which is also an ISP intentionally degrading VOIP).

My ISP prioritises packets from its own SIP server, but don't mess with packets from anywhere else. They do this to make their VoIP service more reliable (so it won't break up if the customer is flooding their DSL with bit torrent).

They don't do the same to 3rd party VoIP providers because it opens it up to abuse. Also a bit impractical to do it for every SIP server on the internet..

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[AK Marc]

You affirmatively assert it would be illegal. Please point to any part of any proposal that would result in this. The last ones I saw all allowed for "enhanced services" to be charged extra, as long as everything was explicit. This allows for buying "dedicated" service vs "best effort" service, but should also include the enhancement you claim would be illegal. I think you are wrong and lying because you have some bone to pick with it and make up things to prove your point. Prove me wrong. It should be easy. Just link any proposal that would make it illegal.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[HungryHobo]

So they're using their position in one market(as an ISP) to give themselves an advantage in another market(VOIP provision)?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[ikkonoishi]

Except they wouldn't be prioritizing all UDP packets. Just the ones from the people who pay extra.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

but an ISP could just prioritize all UDP packets

And that will be the day all torrent software implements a new option: UDP instead of TCP for file transport.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[gilesjuk]

I was on them from about 1995-1998, I remember someone I know leaving them saying that "30%" packet loss isn't worth paying for, that was in the 1990s.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[grainofsand]

Hmmm - chance would be a fine thing. There are no Australian WoW servers. From the official WoW FAQ:

Can players select what realm they play on?

Yes. However, you must choose a realm that is located within your geographical region. For example, North American players must select a North American realm, and European players must select European realms. Some exceptions will exist. Australian and New Zealand players, for example, connect to realms on the U.S. West Coast.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Adrian Lopez]

Yes, there are some nitwits who try and conflate net neutrality as being in conflict with QoS or Tiered ISP service levels like offering (slower lite vs regular vs higher speed connections), etc, etc, but that's not the "net neutrality" that net neutrality advocates are interested in.

Having read an online post where the owner of an ISP bragged about slowing down P2P connections and laughed about customers thinking the problem was on the peer's end rather than on the ISPs end, I tend to take a more expansive view of the concept of net neutrality. Call me a nitwit, if you will, but I think the concept of neutrality should also prohibit those kinds of shady behaviors. Go ahead and use QoS to ensure equitable access to bandwidth for all your customers, but don't cripple certain protocols under the guise of improving quality of service for others.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[ksandom]

If we had enough capacity in our wallets, we wouldn't *need* to prioritize anything. Businesses and people need scarcity to survive. It's gives us something to overcome. Without it, we'd be fat and lazy, and would hardly achieve a fraction of what we do. Managing that scarcity is an essential part of surviving.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

Because some protocols require low latency. Other protocols (such as bittorrent) don't require low latency, but will swallow all the available bandwidth, given the chance & prevent low latency protocols from working as intended, if the low latency traffic isn't prioritised.

Demon is a UK ISP & there's no chance of this net neutrality nonsense happening here, so it's not an issue for them.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

added to that, their connections are contended (50:1 ratio is usual here), all consumer grade connections are contended. so if a few of your neighbours are on bittorrent, you can't play games.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Fnord666]

"In essence, the other customers are not getting the bandwidth they paid for"

The problem with that statement is that you are assuming that these "other" customers were guaranteed something to begin with. They most likely were not. Terms of service vary of course, but every non-commercial account I have ever had uses wording like "up to XX mbps" when describing the service. In other words, there is an upper limit but no lower limit. The ISP could likely get away with actually giving them as low as 128 kbps and still be within the legal bounds of the contract.
If you want guaranteed bandwidth you usually have to step up to business class accounts, often to at least a fractional T1. There is a corresponding leap in price, but that is the cost that comes with the contractual obligation to deliver bandwidth to you.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[tepples]

QoS doesn't speed up any traffic. It drops un-prioritized traffic in favor of the priority stuff, when the link nears saturation.

When an individual subscriber's link nears saturation or when the neighborhood's link nears saturation? Maybe I want to delay or drop web packets when I have VoIP or gaming packets, as long as I don't go over my share of the link. I imagine that everyone would get a "QoS allowance" at some fraction of the non-oversubscribed bandwidth of the neighborhood's link.

Classifying the traffic based on the server endpoint is sometimes the only option.

This works only on games that use servers, such as MMORPGs, not on games that choose one of the client machines to also run the server, such as first-person shooters.

How is an ISP supposed to know about every online game?

Ideally, the end user chooses the ports on which packets are routed with QoS. If it's the VoIP port, so be it. If it's every UDP port used several times in the past ten seconds, so be it. As long as you don't go over your QoS allowance, the packets you want treated fast will be fast.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[tepples]

However to prioritize a protocol IS against net neutrality since it would allow ISPs to force it's consumers to use the protocol they want.

Unless the end user has the power to choose which protocol will use the QoS.

For example, they could slow down secure connections

If cable does this in such a heavy-handed manner that it makes online shopping and banking slower than DSL, people might switch to DSL over this.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[tepples]

If they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize traffic

If they are not overselling their network, then they are selling T1 connections, not residential connections. Imagine an ISP that splits your service into 256 kbps guaranteed and the rest oversold. The protocols you choose would go into the "guaranteed" bin, while things not quite as sensitive to short-term network performance, such as torrenting or someone else's web surfing, would go in the "oversold" bin.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[The Lesser Powered O]

I don't want a neutral network.

I want an ISP that prioritizes traffic in accordance to my desires.

Remember dial-up? If you didn't like the way your ISP treated you, you hung up the phone and called another.
I want that back. Let's make the access lines neutral, not the ISP.

If you had a choice of 24 ISPs on DSL, 13 more via cable, 25 via fiber, and another 16 via wireless, you would likely find an ISP that treated your traffic the way you wanted. And they'd be in a serious state of competition.

That's the "neutral" networking I want in the future. I want to see Demon get all of the gamers, and some other
ISP get all the day-traders. I want Yagoo! subsidizing ISP access for people that chose to use them as their exclusive search engine.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[gad_zuki!]

The law makes 100% sense. I'm not sure why we are defending paying 10 or so dollars a month just to be able to fucking play a game without being put into latency hell. This is a service they should be providing regardless! Its like "protection money" to the local Mafioso. Now we need to pay more just to keep the same level of service. Incredible.

If anything, this "service" is exactly why we need neutrality laws. We're just turning the internet into cable tv. Various packages with premium prices for different types of users. The marketers love this. Why just provide good service at a good cost, when they can constantly upsell us?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[bjartur]

I take you're perfectly fine with ISPs prioritizing traffic to/from certain IP addresses (e.g. throttling access to popular TOR gateways and widening logical pipes to Fox), then?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[suburbanmediocrity]

Bandwidth is not the same as latency. If I push though 1Mb in 1ms and the other 999ms nothing, it can be quite different than 1kb every 1ms. Both users see data throughput of 1Mb/s, the former would experience unacceptable details for gaming.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Adrian Lopez]

Because some protocols require low latency.

That's why I mentioned VOIP as an example of a protocol ISPs would want to prioritize. Since no ISP is likely to keep track of all applications and protocols that call for low latency, giving preferential access on a per-protocol or per-application basis becomes a matter of playing favorites, which is precisely what net neutrality is supposed to prevent.

but will swallow all the available bandwidth, given the chance & prevent low latency protocols from working as intended

Then come up with an application-agnostic QoS scheme that lets the application itself decide whether it needs low latency, and further limit each customer's connection to prevent any one user from hogging the entire pipe. If you can't do that then stop advertising bandwidth you're obviously not equipped to provide.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[smellotron]

...an ISP could just prioritize all UDP packets and gaming performance would improve without violating net neutrality.

Doesn't work that way. See, if the ISP prioritizes all UDP, then latency-insensitive UDP gets prioritized as well, resulting in no net benefit. Effective QoS needs to take into account expected bandwidth, meaning either deep packet inspection (identify common headers for games/VoiP), or averaging out all UDP bandwidth. Unfortunately, net-neutrality does prevent effective QoS, because the Evil Corporations want to look at the same information as the Bountiful ISP of Gaming Awesomeness.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[smellotron]

If they had enough capacity on their network to avoid congestion, they wouldn't *need* to prioritise anything.

Congestion is unavoidable. As soon as the bandwidth appears, some use-case will appear that can suck up all of that bandwidth. A blanket statement of "prioritization = bad, capacity = good" is not productive, because both are important. Or do you think that mankind as a whole will suddenly become more frugal than history suggests?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[smellotron]

I know another ISP that did this sort of thing years ago, but I don't know the ISPs in TFA. Business packages probably don't include QoS for common game packets. Gaming packages probably doesn't include static IPs or multicast routing agreements. VoiP prioritization is common across the two, but I wouldn't expect much more.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[smellotron]

If net neutrality laws were in place they'd still be allowed to prioritise gaming traffic for everyone.

Define "everyone". Every single game may require different mechanisms of packet detection in order to even apply QoS in the first place. Most are port-based, but some may be protocol-based (i.e. deep packet inspection). Are port-based games "more equal" than the others, then? Also, please point me to the nearest lawmaker that knows enough about network infrastructure and software design to manage to craft a law that allows the good (protocol-based QoS) while still denying bad (anti-competitive tactics by middle-tier ISPs that also act as content providers). On this topic, I am as afraid of incompetent lawmakers as I am malicious businesses.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[parliboy]

You mean like a toll road? Oh, wait...

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[AaronMK]

And this is part of what needs to be dealt with, and part what the FCC has been investigating. The actual guarantees (or lack there of) are buried in fine print. Someone is paying extra money to actually get a faster connection, not possibly get a faster connection. You can't just bury anything you want to in the fine print and have it stick. Imagine an ISP has oversold their network, and customers were consistently not achieving the "up to" speeds of even a lower tier as a result. Do you think an ISP would be able to use the fine print to defend that? It would probably fall into false advertising, despite that fine print. (And make some lawyers very rich, while giving each subscriber a $5 settlement for the ISP not having to admit wrong doing.)

Truth in advertising should require the ISP being able to provide the customer with some high probability (high as in at least 95%) of achieving that "up to" speed at any given time. That does not require dedicated lines.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Derosian]

No, because in that case we have competition. It isn't one company putting out multiple GPUs and CPUs we have two companies who put out CPUs and a few companies who put out GPUs. In most areas the ISP has a near monopoly.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[smellotron]

...the owner of an ISP bragged about slowing down P2P connections...I think the concept of neutrality should also prohibit those kinds of shady behaviors.

I fail to see how that is shady behavior. That class of traffic is (1) not latency-sensitive and (2) very high-bandwidth. I would love to see my interactive web traffic, gaming, and video streaming all prioritized above P2P!

Ok, I'll grant you that it's not optimal from a technical standpoint. Best would be applying QoS so that P2P operates at full line speed if nothing else is happening. But that tends to require more people who actually know what they're doing, so that's an education issue rather than a moral issue (to me, at least).

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Dan541]

That's how it's always been. If you know where the game server is located you can sign with an ISP that has better connections to that centre. I generally avoid using overseas servers where possible it's just common sense.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[AaronMK]

I guess in a LAN there's still the potential for an individual machine to use up all the capacity, so this could still be an issue.

How a customer manages utilization of the pipe they purchase is not the business of the ISP. It's not like the ISP is going to let them suck up more total capacity than what they purchased because of that individual machine. If a customer fails to implement QoS on their perimeter for the pipe they buy, it is their problem.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[AaronMK]

Thanks for the insight on the balance of latency and utilization. I think it is safe to say that an when an ISP advertises x Mbps, they should be able to provide that within reason, gauging what they actually need to purchase (both in hardware and backbone connections) based on how people are actually using the network. What gets lost is that even with a high latency, if enough bits are making it through each second, the ISP is fulfilling their end of the bargain.

Quick question. Let's say an ISP purchased JUST enough to accommodate the random, (ie "on/off" when looked at per customer, but probably a consistent throughput when aggregating a lot of customers) requests at the advertised tier speeds on average. I imagine they do that to keep them well utilized. Does that mean that someone deciding to use their connection predominately for latency sensitive traffic actually will achieve faster throughput speeds on this prioritizing network then someone who is not?

Thanks for your further insight!

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[lanswitch]

It's not only about Net Neutrality. QOS for one user means DOS for other users. Do those users get a discount because their traffic is slowed down?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[AaronMK]

In that case, the only net neutral way to do that is to offer this for any given application. At that point, you would just be taking statistics of where those customers paying for lower latency are connecting, and adapting your peering agreements (including construction of links) accordingly.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[mwvdlee]

As a non-gamer, I don't really see how not giving gamers priority would be a bad thing. Do you really need to hear that preteen shouting insults at you a milli-second sooner?

Demon says it has enough capacity for its own customers and that's who it's looking out for.

If they had enough capacity, the "gamer" plan would be identical to every other plan. So either they're lying about the benefits of the "gamer" plan or they're lying about their capacity for all the rest.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[rossdee]

This is the UK. They are not subject to the US constitution, or acts of congress.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Gordonjcp]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

Wrong. It would be illegal, if the law was framed badly. The whole point of "net neutrality" is to prevent ISPs and content providers from banding together to shut out other content providers.

This is more akin to ordering a private wire circuit from your telco.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

So they're using their position in one market(as an ISP) to give themselves an advantage in another market(VOIP provision)?

No, you aren't paying them for a VOIP service, you're paying them for a DATA service. Just because you chose to run a VOIP application over your DATA service doesn't mean they should give your DATA traffic the same priority as a VOIP service which is sold as a VOIP service.
Why should your DATA traffic which you use for a voip phone get any kind of special treatment over the DATA traffic I use, simply because I'm listening to music? That would be a NN violation.

If I want to go to my ISP and ask for a dedicated bandwidth connection, I can pay for one. If I want to ask them for a circuit with a specific maximum latency I can pay for one. Neither one of these ideas violates network neutrality, even if my ISP ends up running those circuits over the same data trunk that 'normal' traffic flows over- but in order to give me what I paid for they will use a combination of traffic prioritization, bandwidth restrictions on VLAN's and LSP's, etc.

Many people don't understand that there is a VERY distinct difference between paying for an "Internet connection" and paying for an actual data circuit, and most people who are bitching about NN being violated are trying to do something (or expecting something) from an "Internet connection" which should really be done with an actual data circuit.

People who don't understand NN properly usually don't understand networking properly to begin with. If we use the (tired) analogy of the "information superhighway", you could consider the average home connection to consist of 3 lanes of traffic that everyone shares. A dedicated connection is like buying your very own lane on the highway. The priority setting as described in the story would be more like a Toll-only lane. In some cases it would be like a Toll-road, where it might take a shorter or faster path to a common destination.
In this analogy, a company violating NN would be stopping or reducing the speed limit for cars in the "everybody" lanes even when they aren't full.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[L0rdJedi]

Additionally, this is in a sense a method of cheating, you're putting down extra money to have an in game advantage, It doesn't take a genius to see that it puts pressure on other players to pony up for it as well, whether it would otherwise be necessary or not.

So you're saying this is no different than the guy that works 60-80 hours a week and buys items off eBay to give himself an advantage in WoW? He ends up with an in game advantage over the people that don't have those items or that have to spend a lot of time earning them because they don't have the cash to outright buy them from someone else.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[L0rdJedi]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

Would that be such a bad thing? Instead of prioritizing gaming traffic over other kinds of traffic, or doing the same for VOIP, or YouTube, or whatever else an ISP decides is more important than other protocols, why not adopt a QoS scheme that ensures equitable access to available bandwidth while allowing customers to set their own priorities within those equitable access constraints?

Yes, it would be a bad thing because they wouldn't do what you're suggesting either.

In just a few posts we're already seeing the differences of opinion as to whether or not this violates net neutrality. Five different people here can't agree on it and you guys all want the government to make a law for it? The ISP simply wouldn't bother with any kind of QoS due to fear of being accused of violating the law and then all traffic would suffer.

Personally, if someone wants to pay more for higher priority gaming traffic (or any kind of traffic), more power to them. A friend of mine use to game on a 56k modem and did better than people on cable and DSL (at the time). Having a higher priority on your traffic won't help you if you still suck.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[L0rdJedi]

Yes, there are some nitwits who try and conflate net neutrality as being in conflict with QoS or Tiered ISP service levels like offering (slower lite vs regular vs higher speed connections), etc, etc, but that's not the "net neutrality" that net neutrality advocates are interested in.

It may not be, but reading the FCCs request for comments on proposed rules seemed to say exactly that.

You see how conflating two network management issues that are unrelated creates FUD about the unrelated issue? People like you are as bad as the do-gooders.

Yes, because a law written by politicians and lawyers (in other words, not network guys) will surely keep the two network management issues separate. Or maybe standard QoS will just end up caught in the "for your own good" law and it'll die a quick painful death.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

I have QOS on my router. Why should I have to pay an extra fee for it.

Because that controls the qos within YOUR network, not other people's networks, and you don't have to pay anybody anything to use it.
  The prioritizing they are speaking of doesn't happen at your router anyhow, it happens once you hand your data to them. NO network on the planet which is worth a crap listens to ANY qos information sent from a 3rd party network- not only would it make no sense & defeat the purpose of qos, it could (in some cases) be an actual security risk.

If they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize traffic to get the performance for which they are charging this extra fee.

Ah, yes. Once again someone paying peanuts for a common "internet connection" style account, who in reality wants a dedicated bandwidth (or possibly even an entire circuit), but doesn't want to pay the price for such a connection, bitching about an ISP "over-selling". Guess what- the road outside your house is "over-sold", and so are the check-out lines in the supermarket. Do you have ANY idea how much your internet would cost a month if your ISP had enough bandwidth to let you run wide-open 24/7? A lot more than anybody would be willing to pay for it, that's how much.

Besides, Net Neutrality rules don't distinguish

Net Neutrality is not defined formally, and so the definition gets changed to suit the rant of whomever is posting at the time. Most people who understand networking will define NN as "Treating everybody with the same type of account equally" and "not intentionally degrading or blocking a competing service" and "not using their position as a means to filter, monitor, or block activity which might be illegal, unsavory, or otherwise undesirable to the ISP for NON-TECHNICAL reasons".

Comcast degrading BitTorrent traffic (that's protocol based, not "identity" based) was a Net Neutrality violation.

Comcast wasn't "degrading BitTorrent" traffic, they were actively hacking the data streams of their customers (and off-network connections as well) and injecting false data. The only reason why the throttling of the bit-torrent protocols was a violation was because they were doing it even when there was not a bandwith crunch.

Favoring specific applications IS a Net Neutrality violation, unless it falls under "reasonable network management".

No, favoring specific applications is NOT a NN violation, especially when it's something the subscriber is paying extra for.... as long as they are not intentionally degrading or throttling those applications for people who don't pay.

As I said before, if they are not overselling their network, they should not need to prioritize.

And as I said before, you obviously have never had to engineer a large-scale network or you'd never make that kind of blanket statement.

Reasonable network management would be limited to times of unusually high spikes in traffic

Right, and since they aren't downgrading or throttling non-paying users' applications, and the prioritization only occurs in times of bandwidth crunch, under your definition what they are doing is 'reasonable'.

and would be a fail-safe for time sensitive or safety critical services, not for people who have paid for some special prioritization.

If you're running a safety-critical service over a residential, best-effort, general Internet connection you deserve to be locked in jail. Safety services should run on dedicated circuits which have redundancy and uptime guarantees, and in the years I've worked in the ISP industry this is pretty much the rule- and yes they pay a premium price for all of that. Much more than you'd be justified paying to get a better gaming connection.
If you need a phone for your elderly mother, buy a fucking phone service, don't buy a best-effort data connection and hook a Magic Jack to it.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Ihmhi]

Additionally, this is in a sense a method of cheating, you're putting down extra money to have an in game advantage, It doesn't take a genius to see that it puts pressure on other players to pony up for it as well, whether it would otherwise be necessary or not.

It's no more a method of cheating than:

• Having a better computer (better FPS, less choke and/or lag)
• Having cable or FIOS instead of DSL
• Being geographically closer to a server than your opponent (and thus having a ping advantage)
• Having a mouse with higher DPS on the laser, therefore affording me greater accuracy

Is it cheating if we're playing on a NYC server, and I live in New Jersey but you live in Illinois?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[GrumblyStuff]

Didn't that happen with the Olympics and the hi-tech swimsuits?

They should just allow spandex and duct tape, IMHO.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Ihmhi]

It's no different than buying a "business class" connection. Here in NJ, you can get a (basic) business connection from Optimum Online for roughly twice the monthly cost. You get twice the bandwidth allocation, less bullshit, and better customer service.

The potential for this disparity *already* exists; the UK ISP is just marketing it very, very intelligently.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Ihmhi]

Logistically it is far easier to tinker with network settings then get laws passed to this effect on public roads.

Honestly, if they could do stuff like this and get away with it they would have already been doing it by now. "This highway sponsored by Mercedes; enjoy your complimentary Mercedes-only express lane!"

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Ihmhi]

That's something that always bothered me about the Star Trek universe. You had, in effect, nothing to really worry about save for the occasional Borg/Klingon/Dominion incursion. You'd never go hungry; hell, thanks to replicators there's pretty much nothing that you couldn't have instantly.

How come they never showed the lazy bums of the future? Surely there were people who thought "Hey, you know... I don't actually *need* a career!" and loafed about for the rest of their lives. There's plenty of people who do that today and we still have to worry about things like rent and food.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Antique Geekmeister]

Time to switch to "Kingdom of Loathing", everyone?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[rasmusneckelmann]

World of Warcraft uses a TCP protocol (would post a link to the reverse engineered protocol information as proof, but Blizzard seem pretty aggressive at hunting such sites down so couldn't find it on Google :P)

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[CaseM]

World of Warcraft

Works Better on Comcast! (TM)

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[yotto]

Tiered service is not a violation of net neutrality. You can pay more for faster speeds, or less for slower speeds.

This is paying more for faster speeds. I don't see the problem.

I also see nowhere in the article that states WHAT is faster. I suspect it's just a faster pipe overall and this entire freakout session is without purpose.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Half-pint HAL]

If they had enough capacity on their network to avoid congestion, they wouldn't *need* to prioritise anything. This appears to be running a poor network, then charging more to compensate for it.

They have enough capacity... on average. The whole point of traffic shaping is to spread the load out.

Even 12 years ago when I was doing the networks module at uni, the future need for traffic shaping was taken as a given. We should have it by now, by rights.

Consider: a gamer or Skype user doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, but that which he uses needs to be quick.

A P2P user downloading warez^H^H^H^H^HLinux ISOs uses a massive amount of bandwidth, but doesn't need an immediate response.

Yet P2P users leave the home PC running during peak time (during work hours), gobbling up bandwidth to no great advantage of their own.

Net neutrality is bad for everyone. In a neutral network, the only way to protect bandwidth is the download limit. It's not very effective, and it's not very popular. But if we prioritise certain traffic, heavy use of batch net use like filesharing no longer gets in the way of real-time net use like gaming and Skype and we no longer need to care about how much any one person downloads.

Each individual gets the net he most needs. Everyone wins.

HAL.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Half-pint HAL]

Except of course that business vs home packages in the UK are not "neutral" -- business packages get lower contention ratios so that when the kids come home from school, home users are slowed down more than business users, because if not, all internet-connected UK businesses would cease to function at 4pm.

Net neutrality has always been a fantasy

HAL.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Rising Ape]

This doesn't buy you much though. IIRC, one study suggested that doing all this fancy QoS may let you provide the same level of service (as perceieved by the users) with half the bandwidth. Given that bandwidth is cheap [1], is it really worth all the extra administrative issues as well as the potential for abuse?

Don't forget - if there's no congestion, QoS does nothing.

But if we prioritise certain traffic, heavy use of batch net use like filesharing no longer gets in the way of real-time net use like gaming and Skype and we no longer need to care about how much any one person downloads.

It would still get in the way of other people's bulk data transfers though, so you would still need to worry about how much.

[1] Unless you're buying from BT Wholesale, which I think is the issue here for Demon.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Rising Ape]

Then please enlighten us with your expert knowledge. If there's no congestion, the buffers never fill up, and every packet gets through quickly. How can prioritising help?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[CastrTroy]

I would think so too. Adding in some intelligence to determine what server the packet is going to, and trying to figure out whether it is a "gaming packet" would take too much time. It may work for games routing to specific servers, but in the case of games where players set up their own servers, or the game uses a peer to peer network, I would think that it would be much to bothersome to try to prioritize traffic. They are probably just using it as a marketing ploy to get a lot of gamers on their network, and thereby make a lot of money off low bandwidth users. That is, games by themselves don't take up that much bandwidth, and most gamers who are worried about latency wouldn't be running high bandwidth things like torrents in the background.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[CastrTroy]

If it's stated in the contract exactly what they are throttling, and what they prioritizing, then I see no problem with that. Maybe some people would rather have faster access to Fox's servers, and they never use bittorrent. I think the problem with net neutrality isn't prioritizing one thing over another. It's prioritizing one thing over another and not letting the person paying for the service know about it. If an ISP wants to sell low latency connections to gamers, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to. A smart ISP would also offer a package with higher throughput to places like NetFlix, iTunes, Hulu, and others, and try to work out a deal with many companies in order to offer some kind of rich media friendly service.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[CastrTroy]

Go back to the old style olympics. Compete nude. It's the only fair way.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[commodore64_love]

>>>I get that you're a Libertarian and it's all ZOMG gubment doin' stuff, but give me a break.

I'd rather give the power to the Citizen to make his own choices (ISP 1 sucks... I'll chose one of the other 10 ISPs), rather than simply hand-over to the Lords in government. It's also worth noting that the monopoly problem is one the government created itself, by locking-out competitors.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[commodore64_love]

>>>they are slowing down everyone else.

Which is under illegal under current (but not yet passed) NN legislation.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[commodore64_love]

>>>Do you really want to have a gaming fee and a voip fee and a youtube fee and whatever "extra charges" tacked onto your bill for each service you want to work well?

Yes. Same as when you buy cable and get basic, extended basic, or digital plus (stuff above channel 100). Same as when you buy a car you pay extra for a Monsoon Sound System or powered mirrors or other luxuries. Same as when you eat at a restaurant you can get the $5 steak or the $15 steak.
.

>>>pretty soon it's almost a requirement.

False. You always have the option to get the basic package. Many would say it's a "requirement" to have megabit internet, but I'm doing just fine with my 750k connection, because I decided I wanted the basic package not a luxury package. (i.e. I'm not spoiled.)

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[TheLink]

WoW uses mainly TCP for game stuff. And no you shouldn't prioritize all UDP packets otherwise some guy will just think it's a great idea to do P2P over UDP.

What ISPs can do is prioritize connections (whether UDP, TCP, GRE or whatever) that consist mainly of small packets, for low latency. Connections that contain a lot of large packets are treated as if they want throughput. A connection in this context would be a TCP/UDP connection or if other protocol whatever goes between a customer IP and a destination IP address.

For example, small packet connections get 256 kbps rates at a higher priority (allowing for short bursts of higher speeds), and the large packet connections get higher Mbps rates but at a lower priority.

Most people don't care if their 1 megabyte webpage or multimegabyte downloads have some packets that get delayed a few hundred milliseconds (or even seconds) as long as the stuff still comes in fast overall.

Whereas gamers don't normally care about getting 10Mbps downloads, they want low latency. Packets that get delayed a few hundred milliseconds (or more) = lose/team-wipe and even if you don't lose/wipe it's usually a bad game experience.

At my previous workplace we did expensive hotel internet (yeah we're evil but hey free hotel internet tends to be crappier, guess why :) ), and the system I helped build was able to give each guest a fair share of the bandwidth so that even if one guest has a slammer-like infection the other guests (and our operations team) can still have decent connections (if only a few guests were using the system they could get higher than the guaranteed minimum). Doing stuff I mentioned would take a bit more work (categorizing small and big streams and shaping them differently), but wouldn't be impossible.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Adrian Lopez]

I fail to see how that is shady behavior.

The ISP guy bragged about slowing down P2P traffic to practically unusable levels, not even taking available bandwidth into account.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[LordLimecat]

This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.

That is FUD. It entirely depends on the type of Net Neutrality legislation that passed, but if it were done in a sane way, QOS to make VOIP higher priority than HTTP is NOT a problem. Giving higher priority to HTTP to certain desinations is what Net Neutrality is designed to fix, not QOS by protocol.

I mean, I dont know of why you would even try to prevent honest-to-goodness by-protocol QOS....

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[LordLimecat]

Comcast degrading BitTorrent traffic (that's protocol based, not "identity" based) was a Net Neutrality violation

Actually, no, they werent, for two reasons...
First, net neutrality isnt a law, or even a real thing yet, so its kind of hard to violate at the moment.
Second, net neutrality ISNT about protocol-- thats called QOS.

All that aside, the Comcast thing was different -- with real QOS,like is being discussed here, youre NOT degrading the speed of certain traffic-- youre just prioritizing. That is, until there is contention for router time, there is no difference between bulk traffic and priority traffic. Comcast was using Sandvine hardware to actually throttle torrent traffic by tampering with connections through the use of phony RST packets. This is COMPLETELY different than QoS, and is very much a problem, since you are paying comcast for a connection, not for them to insert bogus traffic and mess with both your connection and your availability.

Prioritization is not just for overselling your network either, would you want that page request for youtube to be given the same priority as that time-sensitive, connectionless UDP voice packet that MUST arrive within 200ms to be of any use whatsoever?

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Kalriath]

It'd be the only thing.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[LordLimecat]

That's not neutral

That also has NOTHING to do with what the term "Network Neutrality" has come to mean. HINT: the "neutral" refers to how web-destinations are treated.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[LordVader717]

Actually this is exactly the kind of abuse that Net Neutrality laws are trying to tackle. The ISP will try and come up with excuses to make it sound reasonable ("Yeah, our VOIP service is like totally separate from our Internet service." or "It would be super hard for us to do this for competitors), but at the end day your ISP is using the open (and considerably cheaper) infrastructure of the Internet to offer a phone service (which they make a killing on by the way) with a high reliability, yet they deny the same kind of reliability to their unbundled competitors.
This isn't like the plain old telephone service, where voiceband signals are processed by separate infrastructure, this is like having one traffic lane and asking everyone else to pull over as soon as the highway operators taxi service comes down the road at top speed.

The VOIP services of ISP also always happen to be priced totally inappropriately for a VOIP service. They follow the price models of POTS services and even fucking prevent you from connecting to other networks. No sane person or business would ever choose them, only the suckers who don't know any better when they order their internet connection.
So we have:
Bundling
Price Gouging
directly harming competition
It's one of the most extreme examples of anti-competitive behavior we've ever seen.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[LordVader717]

Untrue. Networks can be expanded long before proper uses emerge. Having a 2Mbps connection back in the 90's and early 2000s, you didn't know what to do with all the bandwidth. The best Idea people had was file sharing, but there was still absolutely no way you were going to max out your connection.
These networks had been designed to offer these next-generation video and audio service, but no-one seemed interested.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[LordVader717]

It's sensitive to protocol (e.g. gaming vs. HTTP/HTTPS/etc), not to the identity of the party on the other end (e.g. MSNBC vs. Fox News or YouTube vs. Dailymotion).

Have you got a source for that? They don't seem to want to explain what the premium is exactly for on their site.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[tepples]

First, net neutrality isnt a law

Yet. In the wake of the guidelines published by Google and Verizon, the FCC is looking into ways it can enforce neutrality without overstepping its Congressionally dedicated authority. (This authority is next to impossible to extend now that the opposition party filibusters every substantial bill in the Senate.)

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[tepples]

HINT: the "neutral" refers to how web-destinations are treated.

Be careful. Someone could read your statement to mean "Net neutrality applies to HTTP outgoing connections, possibly to HTTPS outgoing connections, and to no other protocol."

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Nexzus]

My general belief (used with a statement by Picard) with what you describe is that humanity as a whole works to better itself - it's basically ingrained into society.

There's really no excuses in the Roddenbury future: whereas a bum today can say that he lost his job due to the economy, his wife left him and he got cancer, in the future, he wouldn't even need to think about a place to sleep, food to eat, or the cancer. Choice plays more into a person's life than circumstance.

As for how they divvy up the awesome apartments with a view, or the french chateaus or the Louisiana restaurant space, and other actually scarce resources - I don't know.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Lordnerdzrool]

Um... What? This is considered cheating? And this was modded 5 Insightful too.

So is buying a better graphics card than someone else cheating too? After all, by buying a better graphics card than everyone you are playing a game with, you are getting a better FPS than the other players, and thus the computer will draw threats on your screen faster and smoother than it draws threats on your opponent's screen. You put extra money down for a game advantage for that graphics card than your opponent did. Using a high-speed internet service like cable internet or DSL, which also costs more than Dial-up, puts me at a major advantage over Dial-up gamers. Should I be forced to switch over to my old AOL 56k to avoid "cheating" those players? How about if no money is involved? Can we use aimbots if no money is paid? After all, everyone could just go and download the same aimbot for free.

Money has absolutely nothing at all to do with cheating. Whatsoever.

As for the network neutrality issue: Where does this whole "The suggestion that what we have now works is as laughable as it is wrong." thing come from? As far as I have known, we have only been worried about the potential for ISPs to "hold people hostage" and none have done so yet. Even if some have and I'm seemingly unaware of this, as I don't obsessively read about the issue very much, it is likely far from being so broken as to be described as "laughable" as, again, there would be a lot more reports on people being held hostage by their ISPs. On the other hand, actual good intentions and business models run the risk of being harmed from network neutrality, such as this company. Debateably at least, depending on how the legislation is written.

Re:Illegal under Net Neutrality

[Golddess]

It's also worth noting that the monopoly problem is one the government created itself, by locking-out competitors.

It's also worth noting that we wanted the gov't to mandate only a single provider because of the negatives that came with multiple providers back in the day (hundreds of ugly cables littering the city scape for one). I'll grant you though that we may no longer need as much cabling as we used to to enable competition, but gov't regulation of a sort would still be required to force companies to share the few cables that would be put up.

Prioritize?

[garyisabusyguy]

Prolly more like "Not intentionally slowing down"

Re:Prioritize?

[pspahn]

So, ISPs are already doing this to an extent. Additionally, other businesses around the globe do this sort of thing on a regular basis, though, are not attacked the way ISPs are.

• Ski Resorts offer priority to various customers. Some people pay for a regular lift ticket and get to ride a fast chairlift to the top of the mountain. Those who don't buy a lift ticket have to hike. How come the people with money get to buy their way to a faster trip up a mountain that is on public land? Not to mention the people who buy the "fast pass" version of a lift ticket that get to skip the line at the lift altogether.
• Airports now have a similar "fast pass" thing where they can skip the security check lines and get through faster. There is also priority boarding for people who pay for it.
• Toll roads that bypass busy urban corridors allow those willing to pay to avoid heavy traffic and get to work/home faster.
• And then there are those darn people with medical insurance. Hospitals admit them because they can afford to pay their insurance premium, while people without insurance or with incompatible insurance are told to take a hike and find another hospital (happened to me once)
• And what about those snazzy clubs that don't let in the greasy fat guy, but allow sexy women to come and go as they please?
• Retail businesses that deal with regular customers provide better customer service to people who spend more money.
• Web sites that offer members faster shipping for purchases.

What makes NN different than so many other industries? Is it because the vocal proponents of NN fear the ISP is out to get them and will pick on the people who are using the most traffic?

Re:Prioritize?

[ensignyu]

This isn't a net neutrality issue per se (although not everyone agrees on the same definition of net neutrality). Customers should be allowed to buy faster or slower network connections.

The problem that net neutrality tries to address is where ISPs charge *providers* for fast access from customers. It's sort of like an extortion racket -- sorry, we're going to make your website's user experience crappy unless you pay up.

The reason why we want to apply this to the Internet in particular is because it's an essential service with not many ways to get access -- mostly controlled by monopolies.

Driving analogy:

• Buying faster access, e.g. letting drivers bypass traffic by using toll roads is OK. The customer is paying for a better driving experience.
• Charging providers is like there's a Costco next to a highway, but the highway administrator won't let people drive into Costco from the road just off the highway exit -- they have to take a detour instead unless Costco pays them a bunch of money to open a gate. However, Sam's Club does pay up so their highway entrance is open for speedy access.
• The even sillier thing is that on the net, the highway is more or less open to everyone at low cost, and Costco paid money to make sure they're next to a highway. But as soon as you leave your house, someone looks at where you're going and speeds you up or slows you down depending on where you're going.

So while it's true that businesses sometimes make agreements with other businesses that ultimately screw over both the competition and their customers, it's a lot worse when you can't even avoid using their services without living in a cave.

Re:Prioritize?

[HungryHobo]

other businesses around the globe do this sort of thing on a regular basis

*Monopolies which design their systems to run poorly with competitors products.
*Major phone companies which threaten to not allow their customers to call certain businesses (or threatens to make the lines really crackly and poor)who are connected through different phone companies unless the business in question pays them extra as well.
*Manufacturers which pay suppliers to not carry their competitors products or delay their competitors products.

Oh wait.
That sort of thing is generally already illegal.

Ski Resort? equivalent to getting a T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN. If the tour bus driver who brought the customers there insisted that the ski resort pay him or he'd take them elsewhere that would be a better analogy.

Airports? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN. Perhaps if the Airlines expected the hotels near the airports you were going to to pay extra or else they'd take you elsewhere.

Toll roads? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.

medical insurance? makes not even a little sense.

snazzy clubs? can actually be illegal in some countries already, discrimination based on sex.

Retail businesses? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.

Web sites? Again T1 rather than dialup. nothing to do with NN.

Re:Prioritize?

[pspahn]

The problem that net neutrality tries to address is where ISPs charge *providers* for fast access from customers. It's sort of like an extortion racket -- sorry, we're going to make your website's user experience crappy unless you pay up.

Where is this happening? If you tell me that Comcast throttles bittorrent traffic, well, that's a crap example. I like the idea of bittorrent, it's a good way to distribute stuff. Unfortunately, people use it to distribute stuff illegally. Comcast (or others, irrelevant) have every right to make sure illegal activities don't disrupt the network for everyone else. Sure, it may not be popular, but that's just too bad. Don't do illegal stuff if you aren't willing to pay the price.

And yes, there are perfectly legitimate uses for bittorrent. But why should Comcast be regulated so that the minority legitimate users of bittorrent are saved from being unfairly throttled? It seems to me there are better solutions than to blanket regulate everything.

If my ISP is throttling traffic from something I want to use, then I will likely switch service to another. Oh, but everyone says that ISPs are a monopoly, but are they? I have a handful of ISP choices where I live. I know not everyone does, but this isn't because they are monopolies necessarily, it's because it is very expensive to operate an ISP on a scale that is adequate. However, I see that as a short-term problem. Look at how far we have come in just the last 15 years. At one time your choices were limited to AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, and all you had was dial-up for access (reasonably speaking). Look at us today. ISPs are all over at a wide variety of speeds. In another 15 years the issue will probably be moot.

I am saddened!

[The_mad_linguist]

If I had this package, it would be incredibly easy for me to get a first post. Alas, I am outside their service area.

Re:I am saddened!

[TyIzaeL]

Alas, gaming slashdot is not actually a game.

Assuming good faith here

[tepples]

This appears to be running a poor network, then charging more to compensate for it.

Or perhaps running a poor network at first, planning an improvement to the network, and financing the upgrade wiht a premium package targeted at early-adopting gamers.

Fair enough I guess

[airfoobar]

Paying £3 to get something extra doesn't sound too bad. What worries me is that ISPs may quietly start crippling their default packages so they can sell "extras". For example, this ISP could artificially raise the latency of normal users' connections, and when anyone complains they might say "it's because we give priority to the more expensive packages -- if you want better latency you must also pay more". You might say "meh, that'll never happen"... But, this is exactly the sort of thing our ISPs are infamous for doing here in the UK.

Re:Fair enough I guess

[Anaerin]

IIRC, Demon were typically one of the "Good guys", giving so many value-adds to their service, like a dedicated static IP, with a real, customisable subdomain pointed to it properly (So it can be reverse lookup'd), hosting ISP-Local download servers (with massive pipes) for most of the large-bandwidth services (Fileplanet, SunSite, AmiNET, Steam, pretty much every Linux distro out there...) to ensure you got the best transfer performance without contending over the "wild" internet. They had a reputation for not oversubscribing their lines. I personally see this as them giving an option to adjust the QoS on some packet types so they jump the queue, and talking with other hosting companies (especially ones that require low-latency connections, typically gaming sites, but potentially also VoIP services) about how best to route packets to them (so tailoring their connections, rather than relying on BGP explicitly, which sometimes gets it wrong as it assumes "up is best", failing to take into account hops and latency).

Obviously these adjustments won't be needed (or wanted) by everyone, so they offer these changes with a nominal fee (3 quid isn't all that much, after all) which will go towards improving their service even further, and will dissuade customers from blindly opting-in to it ("It's free! Why wouldn't I want it?"), so they can get an idea as to demand for these types of improvements.

Of course, the very best way would be to allow IP-provided QoS settings to determine how the traffic is prioritised, but given the huge potential for abuse of this tactic (Set torrents to "Express", watch everyone else's speed slow) and the current difficulty in defining QoS in operating systems (And the high probability that most systems will be badly/incorrectly configured), doing it this way gives a better customer experience, and higher satisfaction. Those that want it, get it. Those that don't, don't, and are no more worse off because of it.

Re:Fair enough I guess

[thegarbz]

Really though why does this need to go beyond typical QoS type controls. I'll be dammed if I'm going to pay my ISP anything to ensure that for example VoIP traffic gets prioritised. It should already anyway since it's a low bandwidth highly latency critical application. We're talking the same thing here for games. Games are low bandwidth, basic QoS should prioritise their traffic.

What you have just said is you wouldn't mind paying £3 for the privilege of being a customer who uses less of what typically costs an ISP, bandwidth! Only yesterday with the 2.7TB downloads / month article we were talking about a tiered system where you pay to use more data, now we're proposing making users who don't use more data pay?

Re:Fair enough I guess

[airfoobar]

That's the whole point -- without net neutrality (in its theoretical, "untainted" form, at least) the ISPs can manually mess with QoS based on how much you are willing to pay. If a bunch of other users are getting the low latency package and you are getting the normal package, then their traffic will always get priority over yours. Put enough of them in the game and your Skype may start stuttering, while they don't even get a reduction in video quality; in other words you get worse service just because you are not paying more than you are now.

Once everyone has bought the low latency package, everyone will get the same QoS as they did before the ISP started prioritising traffic like this, except the ISP is making more money off everyone: win-win for the ISP, lose-lose for the users.

Not sure what your last paragraph is trying to say, but I envision the future will offer a multi-dimensional tiered system, where users will be able to buy "extra" latency and extra speed and extra quota by paying more. It's a pretty shitty future, tbh, because we'll get a bigger gap between "privileged" internet users who pay a fortune every month to get decent service and "bottom feeders" who pay what we pay now and get what's left. I hope I'm wrong and hope to see ISPs invest in better infrastructure, but I'm afraid this whole net neutrality discussion is getting so much attention simply because they don't want to do that.

Re:Fair enough I guess

[Charcharodon]

I certainly don't miss the overpriced service provided by ISPs in the UK. Unless you were within a few blocks of the highstreet, the bandwidth and latency were horrible (in the several towns and villages I lived in).

I'm certain there is a special place in Hell reserved just for BT employees.

Re:Fair enough I guess

[khchung]

What worries me is that ISPs may quietly start crippling their default packages so they can sell "extras".

You mean like selling games with a 2-page "manual" that just tell you how to start the game, and then selling "strategy guides" that contained stuff that should have been in the manual in the first place?

Re:Fair enough I guess

[thegarbz]

In my last paragraph I was trying to say basically the same thing as you said in your first just now. That QoS is standard, and not a feature that creates additional cost for the ISPs. ISPs are harping about the evil bandwidth hogs who are actually using the service they paid for, but are now proposing charging customers who use services which require less bandwidth more.

You download HD video 24x7 and you use a lot of your ISP's bandwidth. You game 24x7 and you use next to none, but now have to pay a 3pound premium for it?

Re:Fair enough I guess

[airfoobar]

I suppose we should expect a "Mhz war" between the ISPs. You know, lots of false advertising telling people that "more is better, and don't forget to also buy X!" where whoever manages to sell their users the biggest amount of extra crap wins.

Funnily enough, I suspect they'll just take away what we currently have and re-sell it back to us at a higher price.

Re:Fair enough I guess

[SakuraDreams]

Something like this is happening in South Africa. Here one of the biggest ISPs released the first uncapped residential product which was originally not shaped very aggressively. They also released a business product which costs almost 4 times as much, this product was on contract and was totally unshaped. Prior to this residential offerings in SA were mostly capped - at limits ranging from 1 to 10 GB/month. The residential product's shaping increased dramatically as more customers came onto this semi affordable plan. Initially very little was shaped but as time went on all one click hosts, all P2P traffic and all newsgroups traffic became so badly shaped to become dial up at speed during business hours and perhaps up to 80% of line speed at 3-4am. Line speed here is 4 Mb/sec. Gamers also started to complain of poor latency. People who used VPN tunnels were in effect unshaping themselves so the ISP decided to terminate the accounts of those who appeared to download too much over VPN. Finally the ISP offered their business package on a month to month basis at the same price to gamers and heavier downloaders but at about 4 times the cost ($270 per month). In SA the customer also has to pay a $57 line rental fee if you're using the fastest line at the moment, 4Mb/s, whether or not the ISP shapes you or not. The ISP initially offered a rather unshaped experience but now offers a very shaped on and in response provides a solution almost 4 times the price which is out of the league of most gamers.

Demon is not what it used to be

[ed]

I was with Demon from 1996, hen I connected to Newsnet and email on my Amiga 1200, until three years ago when I got 75,000 + emails in a morning in a Joe Job attack

Their response is why I am no longer with Demon, I would not now touch them with a barge pole

Re:Demon is not what it used to be

[TheRaven64]

I left them around 2001. The service was good back then - static IP for modem users, backup MX for your domain so you could run a incoming SMTP server on your dial-up connection and have mail delivered directly to your workstation, decent speeds, and competent technical support. They never quite seemed to work out what they were going to do when they stopped being a dial-up provider.

Back in the day, they used to run their own dedicated servers for a lot of games. You got very low pings (by modem standards) connecting to the Demon-hosted ones. They were usually only one or two hops away from the machine that you were dialing in to.

Citation Needed

[XanC]

Is there any evidence that what would actually be enacted is this way, or are you like most Net Neutrality proponents who make up their own rules and decide that must be what NN means?

Re:Citation Needed

[P0ltergeist333]

Is there any evidence that what would actually be enacted is this way, or are you like most Net Neutrality proponents who make up their own rules and decide that must be what NN means?

It's still very much up for debate, and will be until it get's passed by the Congress, at least in the US. I think there are two pertinent points to be discussed here in regards to NN:

1. Does prioritizing traffic compromise the spirit and principal behind NN if it does not degrade others service?

2. Would it possibly be better to implement a QOS scheme that allows customers to prioritize whichever traffic is most important to them?

My personal answers are:

1. Not necessarily.
2. Yes

I will be contacting my elected representatives and the EFF with my views. I recommend you do the same.

Re:Citation Needed

[sumdumass]

Well, where are the rules for net Neutrality and what are the official definitions of Net Neutrality?

I mean from my stand point, all that needs to be done is ensure that the consumers whether it's the average joe enjoying online gaming, the average sally chatting with her friends, or the average company they want to talk to, gets what they paid for. If they offer this service in a way that doesn't degrade or hamper the services sold to others, then there is no reason for NN to get involved is there?

Re:Citation Needed

[HungryHobo]

What would be enacted under any government bill by that title likely has very little to do with real Net Neutrality.
Lobbyists poison everything.

That doesn't mean people who support net neutrality support everything some shill calls by the same name.
Like how someone who believes in freedom of speech doesn't have to support "Free Speech Zones".

But is there any evidence that real net neutrality is this way or are you like most Net Neutrality opponents who make up their own strawman and then attack that?

Re:Citation Needed

[Ihmhi]

1. Does prioritizing traffic compromise the spirit and principal behind NN if it does not degrade others service?

Wouldn't prioritizing, by definition, degrade someone else's service?

If your packet and my packet are going somewhere at the same time, but yours gets there first because you have priority, than my service is degraded as a result.

It would be admittedly difficult to make a *truly* neutral system, though. I know there's prioritization based on protocol, location, and the customer's net usage for the health of the overall network (and in many cases, for the health of the ISP's bottom line), and I imagine that it would be difficult to make a system which is truly "fair" that will keep everyone from bitching.

Re:Citation Needed

[P0ltergeist333]

Wouldn't prioritizing, by definition, degrade someone else's service?

It's easy to get that impression, but I don't think so. Your question seems very semantic to me.

A major QoS benchmark is latency. Let's say your average latency to a given server is 13ms. As a gamer I want an average latency to my game server of 9ms. As long as your average latency remains at 13ms, while giving me the 9ms I desire, there's no problem. The problem occurs when the content providers (say, Time Warner) prioritize their media content over their network at the expense of their customer's connection to non Time Warner servers.

Re:Citation Needed

[rtb61]

Not if it all just marketing blather. Best gaming experience, your ISP hosts multilayer games on high performance game servers and gives their customers priority over non customers ie. neutrality not infringed as QOS is tied to hosted games.

Lets get real, an ISP that is just prodviding a link to someone else's game servers, often another ISP, is just PR=B$ paying for something because, well, your a gullible teenage jock strap gamer who get's too much pocket money.

Want to find a gamer friendly ISP look for something like this http://games.on.net/, a whole bunch of game servers, games patches and mods, game forums and even game reviews. As a customer your game patch files et al come through at maximum network speed and, that is server priority for their customers not network priority (also doesn't affect data caps).

I am sure their are plenty of other examples where customer services are giving real priority rather than just a likely empty marketing tactic. Just to be clear, as a customer give me game server priority not network delusions.

Re:Citation Needed

[commodore64_love]

>>>1. Does prioritizing traffic compromise the spirit and principal behind NN if it does not degrade others service?
>>>Not necessarily.

Yes. If the ISP gives its own video rental service higher priority than, say, hulu or netflix or itunes, it gives them an unfair advantage. And that leads to the ISP eventually gaining a monopoly. Which ultimately damages the consumer by limiting choice.

Re:Citation Needed

[paeanblack]

"Net Neutrality" is too vague of a term, and it means different things to different people, depending on their agenda.

Car analogy time!

Option 1: All vehicle traffic is treated equally

Option 2: Vehicles are regulated differently based on external characteristics
    -Trucks drive in right lane and pay more tolls based on weight/length/# of axles
    -Emergency vehicles are given priority

Option 3: Vehicles are regulated differently based on traffic-relevant characteristics
    -High-occupancy vehicles are given a private lane

Option 4: Vehicles are regulated differently based on non-traffic-related characteristics
    -Fed-Ex and UPS bid for priority treatment in traffic law
    -Vehicles pay different amounts based on who and what they are carrying and what the owner can afford

On a government-owned road network, Option 2 has the most universal support. We're generally OK with certain private companies (ambulances) getting special treatment. We're also OK with large trucks having to pay more and still get less access. Sometimes we're OK with Option 3, but sometimes not. Option 1 seems silly, and Option 4 is abhorrent.

Unfortunately, "Net Neutrality" refers to everything other than Option 4. That lumps all the most sensible, but still very different, options under the same umbrella, which makes the term completely useless for discussion.

When someone claims that traffic for VOIP, VOD, gaming, etc, should be treated differently than bulk downloads, they get thrown into the same "anti-NN" crowd as someone who claims Time Warner should not have to carry traffic from plannedparenthood.com because they are a private business. That does not help the debate.

Re:Citation Needed

[P0ltergeist333]

Wow. We're usually on opposite sides on this subject, but I still must disagree on this particular point. If a company can give a better service to their customers, they should be able to. I don't buy the slippery slope fallacy. So long as they are not negatively affecting their data customer's ability to access other companies content, there is no problem. If nothing else, it gives their competitors a chance to give similar access to Netflix, and thus brings MORE competition. I don't think we should ever endeavor to prevent companies from giving better products or services customers unless by doing so they are DIRECTLY affecting other companies ability to compete. Despite being fairly anti corporation in market's current state, and even somewhat pro-regulatory, I still think Reardon should not have been forced to share his steel technology with his competitors by the government. Despite what all the free market anarchists would have us believe, there IS a middle ground.

Re:Citation Needed

[LordVader717]

You're ignoring the condition. Net neutrality means that you don't discriminate between identical services.
Prioritizing either gaming or VOIP traffic over video certainly wouldn't be giving anyone an advantage. Only prioritizing certain "business partners" games however would.
The amount of traffic caused by games and VOIP is minimal compared to that of Video.

Re:Citation Needed

[EDinNY]

You are overthinking this. Government and courts are not that smart. We cancel men's sports teams in colleges because there are not enough women to play using the same amount of money.

Re:Citation Needed

[HungryHobo]

if the connection to their own service is better because it's simply located closer to their customers that's fine.
If they have cionfigured their routers to push the packets from their own video service to the top of the queue(meaning if the queue is full they drop some of their competitors packets in favor of their own or if it's not they artificially slow their competitors service in favor of their own) then they're using their position as an ISP to distort the market for video services.

That would be DIRECTLY affecting other companies ability to compete.

Google?

[Bensam123]

I've often wondered after hearing about all the dark fiber google is laying why they don't act like a ISP for gamers? Net neutrality only applies if you're intentionally throttling traffic or messing with it, but what happens if that's all the network is used for? Of course this is extremely niche, but game traffic doesn't take up a lot of bandwidth and you'll never truly get really low latencies with all the crap flying around the normal net. However, if Google just offered a 'gamer package' which would only allow for gaming network traffic, it would hardly even register, and they could charge a modest fee for it all the while profiting off of what they already have laid without really having it interrupted plus creating a new untouched market.

I do think what this ISP is doing is BS unless they have spare lines they're using specifically for it though, which I highly doubt.

Ya I'd be worried too

[Sycraft-fu]

Especially since games don't use much bandwidth. Even a fast paced shooter probably uses 20-30kbytes/second max which is in the 256kbit range. That's nothing for a modern connection. Unless you are slamming your connection with torrent data (and in that case just put a limit in the software) it isn't going to have a problem getting through in a timely fashion.... Unless the ISP slows it down.

Just observing my own connection and pings, there isn't a lot of room for improvement. The latency I get to servers is pretty much as good as it is going to get given all the hops involved. Also it isn't like a few ms improvement would be noticeable at all.

Last-mile prioritization

[Uncle Dazza]

I think this could be the sort of thing that we see a lot more of in the future. But in a more advanced form.

For most people, the bottleneck is the pipe between their premises and their ISP. Anyone can implement QoS for their outbound traffic, and can use any classification and prioritization technique they want. At my office we prioritize VoIP RTP packets and iChat video conferencing streams over (for example) ftp and http transfers. In fact we have 5 separate queues that outbound packets are filtered in to.

But inbound QoS is by and large outside the control of the individual customer. You can do a few crude things by dropping TCP packets, but that's about it. What is really needed is the ability to classify and prioritize packets at the ISP end, before they enter that slow last-mile pipe to the customer premises. Then I can select the prioritization that is right for me. To do this the customer needs their own router at the ISP, or at least the ability to define their own queues and priorities. I have not found an ISP implements such a feature at this time.

I think if the prioritization policy is under control of the paying customer, then ISP's could have an argument for metered billing - where the highest priority packets cost more than the lowest priority ones (which would be very cheap or even free of charge).

Of course QoS setup is technically too advanced for most home customers, but it doesn't really matter - they could be given the option of a few profiles to choose from or just start with a default which is no prioritization at all.

Wait, What

[simondm]

I am with a significantly cheaper isp (BE) and on UK servers i get a ping generally between 15-30. I though ping was pretty much a non issue (with server based games at least) since the proliferation of broadband. I don't even have a bandwidth limit that i'm aware of (i'm sure there probably is but i download my large geeky share and i've never heard anything) What is it exactly they're offering for the extra money? I'm confused.

Stay away

[JSombra]

As a current customer of Demon all i can say is...stay the hell away.

As others have said years ago they used to be one of the best, these days they are one of the worst and charging a premium rate for "the privilege"

Forget customer support, 1st line and 2nd line are outsourced to India (and only work standard "office hours" aka when you, the customer, are likely to be at work) and there is no UK tech staff left (at least ones that will talk to customers) and no matter what their response is always "it must be your equipment/pc/router"

Cannot wait until i move at start of next year so i can dump them

The need for speed

[Wowsers]

Hold one a moment, if Demon are going to offer high speeds for gamers traffic, that means that when they need tech support, it will take even longer to get help? ;)

Already done in Israel by Bezeq International

[eladts]

This is already done in Israel by Bezeq International, the largest ISP in Israel which is owned by the national phone company. It works exactly like people expected here... You pay more, the use KY so it hurts less.

I can kinda see this

[KingAlanI]

Prioritization/deprioritization if it's clear what the facts are before, during and after people sign up. the transparency does seem to help.

Also, reading TFA, this is partially about freeing up capacity on the residential network, and making good nighttime/weekend use of their relatively idle business network.

The point is, you shouldn't notice

[Casandro]

Prioritizing packets only makes any sense in congestion situations, otherwise there is absolutely no effect of it. Today congestion can only happen at the users uplink, and good routers support trafic shaping under user control there for years.

If there is congestion in the backbone, the ISP is not doing it's homework.

'Prioritise their traffic'?

[gidds]

Translation: 'Slow down everyone else's traffic'. Hmmm.

If I were with Demon, I'd be looking to change ISPs about now...

1...2...3.. start to abuse this

[galaad2]

great news for encrypted bittorrent, all you have to do is set your client to only use encrypted udp+tcp transfers on a 'standard' game port, for example 27015 that's used by most steam-based games. :p

Re:woot

[h4rm0ny]

Not very woot, no. Basically, the ISP is sending the message to customers that if you're doing something other than gaming, they're going to treat you like a second class citizen. And the priority you get is only relative to their other traffic so it doesn't mean that their 'first class' is any better than another company's 'standard'.
Sounds like a company I'll avoid.

Re:woot

[dintech]

Not only that but Demon is the very worst ISP I've ever had the misfortune of being stuck in a 1 year contract with. Prioritised speeds on a shitty network wih clueless customer service is worthless.

Re:woot

[halltk1983]

According to TFS: "Demon says it has enough capacity for its own customers and that's who it's looking out for."

While we know that no company would ever lie about something, I have no problem with companies giving precedence to real-time communications, from voice, to video, to gaming, in order to facilitate an improved experience for the users. After all, your browser doesn't care that the next three packets get to it at the same time, instead of in order, but that jitter in a video game or voice conversation could be annoying.

In addition, if they're paying extra for the upgrades needed to carry their real-time traffic, doesn't that benefit the rest of the customers who don't need real-time as much right now?

Re:woot

[h4rm0ny]

In addition, if they're paying extra for the upgrades needed to carry their real-time traffic, doesn't that benefit the rest of the customers who don't need real-time as much right now?

Possibly. I'm just a suspicious sort. This requires further information which no-one outside the company will have, to know whether it is good or bad in practice. It could easily be either.

Another stab on the net neutrality

[VGh0st]

welcomed by applauses by the players/users.

Its a Trap?

[Midnight Thunder]

While this may sound like a tempting proposition, this sounds like a trap. If people sign up for this, then what is stopping the ISP from wanting to do this with other packages and then showing this to the government as a reason against net neutrality.

Great

[HalAtWork]

So now the default ISP package tagline will be: "Most of our users want faster access to mainstream media sites, so as an added value, our default packages emphasize this"

and we'll start hearing more of this: "Our more experienced users really want faster access to niche sites so we have special premium power user packages for that"

Re:woot

[BrokenHalo]

I have no problem with companies giving precedence to real-time communications, from voice, to video, to gaming, in order to facilitate an improved experience for the users.

As a matter which might be of interest to some, my Australian ISP has for a long time offered a scale of connections (within the same ADSL2+ price plan) that is supposed to optimise connections for gamers to give "quickest connection response rather than a faster download speed". However, I haven't run any kind of benchmarks to check up on the validity of this claim, which might be best ingested with NaCl.

AVOID this company like a Biblical plague

[Alexander Sofras]

I was with Demon back when they were good. Unfortunately, I was also with them as they became flat-out the worst ISP you could hope for in the UK - if you can get them, use bethere instead. Here are some of the things I was subjected to when I was with Demon:

1) Exclusively foreign call centre tech support and customer services
2) Customer services and tech support representatives say they will call you back, but won't
3) Tech support will claim they are escalating your call, but disconnect you
4) Reps will say they have made a note of your conversation, but if you call back, no records will be found. Also, no person by that name will be known to the company, and they will tell you that you made a mistake.
5) Tech support are utterly clueless, and refuse to support routers in any way, shape or form.
6) You will be billed by the company after you leave as a customer.
7) The company will claim they will phone you back with your MAC code to migrate providers, claiming it takes 24 hours, but they never do. Eventually, if you persist, they will give it to you immediately on the phone.
8) Representatives will say anything to keep you with the company, telling you they have upgraded you to a zero usage cap service (which in actuality has just 10gb more leeway per month).
9) Representatives will lie about your monthly usage. I have no wireless and am the sole provider, but somehow in a month where I was away for two and a half weeks, and counted my own usage at under 10gb, I was supposed to have downloaded over 50gb, leaving me with a 128kbit service from 7am to midnight.
10) The usage cap (that they lie about) is on a rolling 30 day period, so when they claim you have used 40gb in one day, your service will be crippled for the next 30 days until that one day slips off your account.
11) Representatives are unable to change, reset or even give you a breakdown of your usage. Representatives will not even tell you exactly how much you have used.
12) The service is overpriced and the lines are vastly oversubscribed.

So, in conclusion, avoid them at all costs. In my opinion they are liars and cheats, and the company deserves to go bankrupt.

Re:AVOID this company like a Biblical plague

[MonkeyGrief]

JM2CW..

I was with Demon since '94 and left them last year when service degraded to the point where I was seeing >50 ADSL resynch's per hour.

Whilst trying to resolve the connectivity issues, I experienced all the problems as stated above and received nothing of worth from Demons "helpdesk" for three months. After which, I cancelled my contract and switched to another ISP.

After the switch, with the same equipment on the same phone line, I have a 3x faster service and no disconnects.

I suggest that anyone considering Demon as an ISP first do a search for Demon Internet Review and read the plethora of complaints that are currently associated with this (now) dire company.

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[EDinNY]

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