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UK's Two Biggest ISPs Rip Up Net Neutrality
Barence writes "The UK's two biggest ISPs have openly admitted they'd give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies paid them to do so. Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals. Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC's iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company's executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be 'perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them.' Meanwhile, BT's Simon Milner said: 'We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts,' although he added BT had never received such an approach."
ISP's have long held this rather far fetched belief that both consumers and content providers should be paying to shift data between the two, I'm sure as soon as ISP's got 1 or 2 big players (youtube , facebook etc) they would use it as an excuse to shitlist any non-premium traffic to the extent that you either paid up, or stooped delivering content to that particular ISP's customers and said ISP would throw up it's hands and say "it's not our problem, facebook and youtube are using all our bandwidth and they have paid for priority"
I can see this being an especially attractive prospect considering the looming need for extensive network upgrades as people start to actually make use of their 10+ meg "unlimited" connections for HD content delivery, why upgrade your capacity when you can sell the same bandwidth twice and cut out anyone who's not prepared to pay.
Virgin media has already said it takes a dim view on net neutrality, and most other ISP's are beholden to BT to a greater or lesser extent, truely it is a dark day for British broadband.
Defined as: (n) application, application program, applications programme (a program that gives a computer instructions that provide the user with tools to accomplish a task) "he has tried several different word processing applications"
This was so obvious, I'm sure even the famous british bookers didn't take any bets on it.
Of course a for-profit ISP will gladly take money to slow down the opposition (there's no such thing as speeding up "selected services" if you assume that they are currently delivering packets as quickly as they can). Who would not love a business model that consists of being the middle man in an exchange where you get money from both sides?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
As someone else pointed out last time we had the topic, "let the market sort it out" is (once again) not a valid solution. You can switch your ISP, but you can't choose what route your packets travel and you have no choice in the backbone providers it may travel through. So there simply is no way to vote with your dollars/euros.
We need a law. One that says in no uncertain terms that network neutrality is the law and if you violate it as an ISP you lose your license to operate. Any less and they will tell their lawyers to go find the loopholes.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Having actually been in charge of bandwidth allocation for an ISP I can tell you that no sites for any company have an unlimited fat pipe of bandwidth at their disposal. Even the big boys buy from someone else, and what they buy is closely regulated based on current usage and future potential over a pre-determined period of time (factoring in local growth and competition). The price of bandwidth changes based on the location of the demarc and the quantity purchased, so the higher your population density the more bandwidth you need, but you can buy it cheaper because you can spread that price across more people. Saturation levels of 90% or more are regular during peak hours (6pm-2am) for an ISP (at least one that doesn't lose customers hand over fist) because they run as cheap as possible for as long as possible in order to please management and see better profit numbers. Even when saturation hits 100% you still won't normally 'time out' of anything unless there are very serious issues, but you will likely see higher latency times (which you likely do see regularly during these hours anyway because of saturation). Prioritization of data will cause latency for other things to become higher, sites will seem slower, and it is wrong to do that to customers. If you were right and there was no limit to bandwidth then it wouldn't be wrong at all to use QoS-for-pay (QfP?) but that is definitely not the case. Companies purposely create a scarcity from the top down when it comes to bandwidth in order to give it an artificial value which is then passed on to big ISPs, then to medium ISPs, then to small ones and then to us. The price just gets bigger the farther down the food chain you go.
Dropping packets without thinking much is easy. You can limit the buffer and drop anything that won't fit, or do something like RED. You can do this without looking at the packet itself.
Dropping packets by customer requires examining the packet in detail, and deciding which priority it should have. This costs more effort, which means you need more CPU power to handle it.
The first company who pays will be happy, it will have noticeably better performance.
The second probably as well.
By the 200th or so, there will be so many "priority" customers that the situation will be effectively the same it was before, except they will be paying for that privilege of having any traffic delivered at all. If the link is so busy that priority traffic can take all of it, and it's indeed priority traffic, then everything else is going to get slowed down to a crawl if it gets delivered at all. And guess what, if you have a small website, or work at a small company, that's where your traffic will end up: at the very bottom of the pile.
Think they'll upgrade the pipe? But why would they? There must be congestion for a priority scheme to make sense.
The end state of this is considerably worse than what we have now, and in exchange for it we get no benefits. There is no reason for society to allow it.
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
There are only about 15-20 ISPs who have unbundled services in the entire country, and none have every exchange covered. Even the most heavily unbundled exchange I could find (Battersea) only has equipment from 9 ISPs.
However, it's very common for one ISP to offer their services wholesale to another - so you're paying Company A for broadband, all your bills and technical support queries are directed through Company A, but your actual connection is going over equipment owned by Company B. Several ISPs offer nationwide service by doing just this - if they haven't unbundled your exchange, they will resell you BT's wholesale product.
I think it's all theoretical.
OFCOM said some time ago that ISPs are free to prioritise protocols and such, but if they go so far as giving one company priority over another, they'll step in. They can deprioritise BitTorrent for example, but if they deprioritised BitTorrent for World of Warcraft's updates in favour of some theoretical competitor then they'd fall foul of what OFCOM has declared legitimate for them to do.
I'm not sure the BT execs saying this really know what they're saying, because it puts them in breach of OFCOM's viewpoint on the issue which could see them stuck in an expensive face-off against the industry regulator and I doubt they'd knowingly do that. I think they're just stating what they'd like to do if the opportunity arose, not what they actually do or are actually able to do for the above mentioned reason- it'd get them in shit, unless OFCOM has changed it's stance, but I do not believe it has.