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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."
Somehow in my mind Cisco and Oracle are the same company. Maybe I have reached my dotage, but when I see one mentioned the other may as well be there too. They are like Satan had identical twins separated at birth.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I prefer my bits non optimized than someone else deciding how they should be "optimized" for me. Thank you!
Its a shame they don't have a vested interest in hardware capable of making such a thing possible.
Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network,
Do health monitoring devices get priority access to electricity? Does the electric company get to decide which devices will be shut down first? Can they shut down your devices before they shut down your neighbor's, because you bought Sony instead of Samsung? Would it be good for the electric company to be allowed to negotiate priority access to electricity with the appliance manufacturers?
Net neutrality is about protecting the more important free market -- the free market in information -- by requiring the carriers to compete only on price and overall performance of their network.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The internet had, since IPv4, provisions for exactly this, and whole careers have been built by this. It goes by different names, Type of Services, QoS, Traffic Engineering. IPv6 has also provisions for this, so did ATM in its time. MPLS has a HUUUUGE component of this...
Having said that:
Video on Demand traffic from, say comcast, should have the same priority as video on Demand traffic from youtube or netflix (or some future cash strapped start-up).
Videoconferencing traffic from skype should have the same priority as videoconferencing trafffic from google+ o Cisco (or some future cash strapped start-up).
Web traffic from yahoo should have the same (slighty lower) priority as the web traffic from "mom & pop web server".
You get the drift, not because some big company is willing to pay more, or the ISP wants to double dip you can play with the priorities.
And THAT is net neutrality for y'all!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Net neutrality is the idea that data from any provider (rich or poor, powerful company or a single guy, corrupt or honest) is treated the same way on the network.
Cisco's comment concerns the prioritization of data depending on its type. I see nothing wrong with that.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Architecturally, Cisco's point has merit (aside from being purely an excuse to sell higher-margin fancy-shaping hardware, rather than brutally commodified really-fast-switching hardware). Some applications are more latency sensitive than others.
However, there's a serious complication that Cisco is either ignoring or doesn't have any reason to care about: the mechanisms for doling out 'priority access to the network' and 'slight delays' are more or less target agnostic. There is nothing magic about hypothetical VOIP-911, Granny Accelerometer, or whatnot that makes it easy to identify them as "justified" prioritization and leave everything else alone.
If you have the system set up to promote and demote traffic based on type, origin, destination, (or any similar set of parameters sufficient to plausibly identify 'important' traffic, rather than just basic TCP congestion behavior), you can promote and demote whatever you feel like writing rulesets for. Given that the last-mile is pretty much buttoned up by a cozy oligopoly of incumbent telco and cable outfits, does anybody seriously expect the shaping to stop at making sure those 'public safety apps' get the message out in time, rather than paying lip service to ensuring that 911 calls go through and then moving on to the actually profitable business of chopping the internet up and attempting to reach optimum price discrimination and suppress competition?
So, barring major changes in the competitive landscape, or some sort of regulation-indistinguishable-from-magic, agreeing with Cisco on architectural grounds;but still rejecting the idea on the balance, is a perfectly cogent position(you can argue that it isn't correct; but it's not contradictory): Yes, traffic prioritization will allow better performance of latency sensitive applications (if they are in fact prioritized) all else being equal. However, once you have the architecture in place for that, the economic incentives to go nuts with it are absurdly compelling. By comparison, 'just grow your way out of it' isn't architecturally elegant; but it provides a nice, aligned, incentive for ISPs to build out and people who want more performance to buy fatter pipes, rather than for ISPs to let the infrastructure rot and focus on squeezing every penny out of every user.
I'm not sure that I like having my web pages load slowly so that somebody else can watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians jitter-free.
If you're doing anything as critical as home-based life support system monitoring and you're literally trusting your life to your ISP, then you're already well past the point of screwed.
Except that even where U.S. city/suburb densities are as high or higher than said small country, internet access still sucks. This probably accounts for %60-%80 of the U.S. population. (Maybe not E. Asia, but certainly a good chunk of Europe.)
Other things small countries can do that may be more difficult for the U.S. to do:
1 - Have a true national plan for rolling out internet, rather than Country, State, County, Municipality, Neighborhood, and Individual plans. (Individuals in this case being people who object, maybe with some merit, to unsightly telco boxes on or near their property and do something about it, messing up the plan, either requiring the telco box to be moved or for them to go through city planners and/or court to get permission to place the box on the person's property.)
2 - Dictate how the internet is going to be rolled out. Similar to 1, but not quite the same. Possibly have "country wide" municipal broadband, with individual providers riding off of state owned infrastructure.
3 - Not deal with U.S. Corporate lobbyists. It seems we have world class corporate lobbying. Our lobbyists are so strong that they can convince us the price we're paying for Internet, Health Care, Cell Service, pick your overpriced product is as good or better than the rest of the world, that the reduced service we often receive along with the high prices is really better than the rest of the world, and that all the multiple ways we pay our ISPs to improve their infrastructure, through taxes, directly through our internet bills, through "back door deals" like Netflix paying both their ISP and the end user's ISP to deliver content will actually improve much of anything. (The latter seems to have, but only because that one entertainment provider has paid to improve that one service on that one monolithic ISP.)
4 - Laying down new infrastructure rather than dealing with a hodgepodge of existing infrastructure. This one is actually pretty important. Especially since some of that old infrastructure - land lines - are something ISPs/telcos are still federally mandated to maintain. . . unless this has recently changed. Also, they may have more uniform wiring, and access to that wiring, in their larger buildings.
Don't confuse quality-of-service in general for anti-net-neutrality in particular.
Cisco is technically correct in that real-time or near-real-time services need higher priority than data transfers that don't need real-time synchronization or timing. If I'm watching a live TV program I need the network traffic carrying that program to get to me correctly, in real time, or watching the program live doesn't work. If I'm surfing the Internet to use web forums, mild reductions in performance won't really impact my experience. I do not have a problem with an ISP attempting to shape its traffic to give priority to content requiring real-time capability.
Opposing "Net Neutrality" seems to be opposite-ville to me. I see the goal of ending net neutrality being for ISPs to force payment from large real-time content providers in order to keep that content flowing with enough priority to make watching it practical. Even though the customer is already paying for enough bandwidth to receive everything if the ISP doesn't intentionally break it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
Agreed.
QoS = Different types of application/service, with different latency/bandwidth/reliability requirements, being treated differently = Good.
Net Neutrality = Similar applications/services, with identical latency/bandwidth/reliability requirements, being treated equally = Good.
In my view, they're not mutually exclusive.
Before you lose yourself in flights of fancy, consider this. Cisco sells network gear, i.e. the stuff you need to implement multiple tiers of traffic. Only the more advanced, expensive, and high-margin gear will do that of course. Think: deep-packet inspection.
And you were actually wondering why Cisco is in favour of an Internet that needs advanced kit and against an Internet that doesn't need special gear to implement multiple tiers?
A bit slow at arithmetic, are you?.