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Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why
MojoKid writes Net neutrality is an attractive concept, particularly if you've followed the ways the cable and telco companies have gouged customers in recent years, but only to a limited extent. There are two problems with net neutrality as its commonly proposed. First, there's the fact that not all traffic prioritization is bad all of the time. Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly. Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example. Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people, or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency. These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.
> Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly
Very wrong. Horrible latency, 500 ms, will require that the video buffer for half a second. Latency does not matter at all for prerecorded video. Jitter matters some, and sufficient bandwidth matters a lot. When someone doesn't have a basic understanding of the facts, the opinions they come to based on their misunderstanding of the facts are not persuasive.
VoIP is a good example of an application with specific needs, low jitter and low to medium latency, contrasted with Netflix style video, where bandwidth is #1. A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.
Right. I don't think many people would argue with QoS policies being applied uniformly across all providers of similar services. Having all video set to a different QoS than all email isn't a problem. Having one video provider set at high priority and another one set at low is a problem.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
That's not latency, that's a bandwidth issue. Latency is the time one packet takes to arrive. If one packet can throw off your whole video stream then you're not caching. If you're caching, then the bandwidth would have to take a prolonged dip to burn through the cached data and find a point it hadn't downloaded yet.
Exactly. Or rather, "like traffic treated like".
So if you want to throttle Netflix, you can, but everything else video related must be throttled as well - YouTube, Vimeo, your own video service, etc.
Throttle VoIP? Likewise, your VoIP is treated identically.
No fast lanes for your own video service while you throttle Netflix.
That's neutrality - like is treated like.