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

Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[sdw]

What is the best list of ISP monitoring software, services, or related techniques to detect, collect information on, and work around these kinds of problems?

Has anyone created an automated test, detection, and complain system that uses minimal resources?

Re: Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[bemymonkey]

The problem with having a single such tool is that the ISPs will prioritize traffic generated by it, just like they do with speedtest.net etc.

How would you work around that without implementing measures that make the measurement of net neutrality related parameters impossible? VPN, for instance, would stop the ISP from prioritizing the measurement tool's data, but it would also prevent any of the potentially Net Neutrality threatening QoS/Blocking you're trying to measure in the first place. Any ideas?

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.

Re:Best list of ISP monitoring SW / services?

[Bengie]

4% on revenues included TV services, which make up a huge portion of the overall revenue and are incredibly small margins. ISPs make decent margins, TV providers do not. The only reason Verizon is selling off is because they want to liquidate a reliable 4% income so they can dump that money into wifi and make much higher revenues. Remember when text messaging costed more per byte than renting time from the Hubble Telescope? There is a lot of money to be made in price gouging mobile data.

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

[SeaFox]

Why would you be throttling ports? There's nothing illegal about using torrents.
Sounds like these people are simply using the service they paid for.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Etherwalk]

Why would you be throttling ports? There's nothing illegal about using torrents.
Sounds like these people are simply using the service they paid for.

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

Now assume person A is trying to look up the calendar at the local courthouse and person B is downloading an iso.

Person A should be prioritized over person B both on a theoretical shortest-job-first basis and on a human court-is-more-important-than-porn level.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Then Maybe you shouldn't have Oversold your Capacity?

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Lumpy]

"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.

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

[Etherwalk]

Um... no.

If bandwidth is contended, then you should just use fair queuing. If you have N customers, everyone gets at least 1/N of the total, what's left over is shared equally, repeat until it's all used.

You shouldn't get to decide that one customer's usage is more "important" than another's. If the customer thinks their usage is more important, they should upgrade their plan.

Remember: the internet is based around IP, which doesn't have "ports". TCP and UDP only exist if you're an endpoint, otherwise everything past the IP header is just "payload".

I disagree. I think a system like what you describe is mostly appropriate *after* you provide a certain base level of service to everyone. The person with very-low-bandwidth need should rarely if ever have to wait for the person with the very-high-bandwidth-need, because otherwise you have two people paying the same absolute amount for a service but the one who is using it more is being prioritized. If I pay $20 for as many bagels a week as I want and you pay $20 for as many bagels a week as you want, and I take one bagel a day and you take five hundred, the store should make sure I get my one before you get your five hundredth.

Re:So is there a form for the ISP

[Bengie]

First come first serve. If your ISP can't keep up, blame them, not other users for trying to make use of what they paid for. Bandwidth is the cheapest part of an ISP, cheaper than customer support even. If you want to blame people for consuming more than you, blame grandma for calling support and running up the ISP's cost of operations faster than the 24/7 torrent seeder.

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?

What site?

[jd2112]

My ISP appears to be blocking fcc.gov.