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Cisco Opposes Net Neutrality
angry tapir writes: All bits running over the Internet are not equal and should not be treated that way by broadband providers, despite net neutrality advocates' calls for traffic neutral regulations, Cisco Systems has said. Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network, while others, like most Web browsing and email, may live with slight delays, said Jeff Campbell, Cisco's vice president for government and community relations. "Different bits do matter differently. We need to ensure that we have a system that allows this to occur."
It's a giant sticky mess. Many advocates for net neutrality have only a vague idea of how things work so their proposals are vague. Many with the experience to produce more detailed proposals have ulterior motives.
Anyway, if you assume honoring protocol priorities is OK, then you end up with abusive situations where an ISP that runs video protocol 1 can sink traffic from a competitor based on the fact that they use video protocol 2. Add to that that protocols can be patented, and you'd end up with an incentive to create and patent stupid protocols just to do exactly that.
Also there are services whose availability would benefit the customer/public/economy that involve prioritizing packets between privately administered device networks, and not by protocol, and defining the difference between those services and unfair competitive practices leads us down a road to byzantinism.
Really we need to get to a point where end-users can send ToS bits into the network and have them honored as long as they are below a fair usage level for ToS packets, and a certain percent of the network is kept free for best effort, allowing the consumer some level of live control. Before we even do that, though, we need to just move towards "ISPs and other providers must make X% of all built capacity available at a (possibly tariffed) basic rate for public best effort use" and apply that principle across all areas of bandwidth, pps processing power, and -- the toughest sell but very important -- CDN capacity. The cash flow through CDNs really needs to be further regulated to eliminate the perverse incentive of making money off congested pipes on the back end. The restriction on sales of prioritized services in the other 100-X% part of the pipe would provide appropriate incentive for expansion of the entire pipe, benefiting the basic rate users not just the premium arrangements. The X could be adjusted by policy changes until the sweet spot is found or as the ecosystem changes.
Now if the above was TLDR, a solid proposal would be 100x more complicated.
Someone had to do it.
It is possible because your density story is a lie. It is made up. There is no truth to it. If Ephrata, and even smaller towns in that county, can have gigabit at a reasonable price 14 years ago then we all can now. The tech is 100x cheaper now. There is no excuse for not fibering up the whole country.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Of course a network vendor is going to point out that some packets needs preferential treatment over others. It's something they've worked to engineer into their product lines because their customers demand the capability to do so. For an ISP, 911 VoIP packets are a much higher priority than World of Warcraft packets.
Too many folks are caught up in the idea that prioritization is bad. There's a difference between between the philosophy of Network Neutrality and the operational reality of packet prioritization.
Saying Cisco opposes Net Neutrality just because they're pointing out some simple truths on how network operate today is like saying Glock supports terrorism just because they make guns.
Of course, if the title weren't sensational, no one would probably read it.
It saddens me that Slashdot seems to have decided that they need to resort to the same tactics as the National Enquirer