ISP Breaking Net Neutrality? The FCC's Got a Complaint Form For That

Presto Vivace writes with news from The Consumerist that the FCC has updated its consumer help center with a revamped form for complaining about an unsatisfactory ISP. From the article: Among the issues concerned consumers can complain about, the form now contains "open internet/net neutrality," right there alphabetically between "interference" and "privacy." So what, specifically, qualifies as a net neutrality violation you can complain about? The FCC has guidance for that, too. In general, paraphrased, it's a problem if there's:

Blocking: ISPs may not block access to any lawful content, apps, services, or devices.
Throttling: ISPs may not slow down or degrade lawful internet traffic from any content, apps, sites, services, or devices.
Paid prioritization: ISPs may not enter into agreements to prioritize and benefit some lawful internet traffic over the rest of it on their networks.

Comments

So is there a form for the ISP

[Revek]

I really want to know so I can get people flagged for making false statements to that effect. We don't have a firewall at all on our internet customers. Its wide open and has been for years. We found throttling ports was self defeating in that the torrent hoarders used encryption and other means to hide their activity anyway. The filter we had was actually causing an additional 30ms of latency and I have missed it at all.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Etherwalk]

"Assume you have more demand for bandwidth than you have bandwidth."

Translation; Company horribly oversold the bandwidth and is too cheap to buy a bigger pipe.

Not necessarily. TCP/IP is designed to do congestion control and bandwidth between providers is expensive. You size your pipes to meet your need, but also so that you're not paying for unused bandwidth all the time. The result is that at peak usage your pipes are full, and how much of the time they're full off-peak depends on how you decided to allocate money. It doesn't necessarily make you cheap, but it does mean yeah, money matters to you.

Re: So is there a form for the ISP

[Bengie]

95th-percentile billing, we have to provision/pay capacity for peak demand

My ISP has roughly 6x peak bandwidth and all traffic is transit via Level 3, no CDNs or peering. 100/100 for $90. No caps, ISP claims you should get 100% of your bandwidth 100% of the time, which is why they have 6x peak. Technically 3x peak as live links and 6x because each of those links has a fail over that can be teamed to double bandwidth on request.

A lot of small ISPs complain about similar things as you. Is it a scale thing or a lack of competition? Maybe my ISP is lucky and has access to several trunk options, even out here in the middle of farm land. our first hop is about 250 miles, but takes a 400 mile route. Do you not have access to a decent hub within 250 miles?

Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[Bengie]

Almost no ISPs use any kind of AQMs. You could do a high sample trace route and watch for jitter and avg ping increases. In general, a health link's avg ping should not be more than 1-5ms over the minimum. If you do enough samples in a trace route, you should be able to see which hops are causing issues. If your ISP is doing high quality shaping along with an AQM, it would be much harder to watch for congestion because latency should be quite stable. Then you need to somehow measure a route's bandwidth.

The good news is most decent traffic shaping algorithms are very CPU intensive relative to the amount of bandwidth an ISP's core network must handle and the algorithms do not scale well with the number isolated groups. In other words, you should be able to detect jitter and avg ping increases.