This is why the content providers need to establish dedicated QoS-aware data connections with the consumers' Internet providers. These data connections cost money. This is what the ISPs want the content providers to pay for.
My ISP doesn't have any control over that either, but that's not going to stop them from taking money from HBO, now is it?
Well yes, actually, it would. The ISPs aren't saying, "Pay us money or we'll degrade your service." They're saying, "To give you prioritized handling, we need to set up a dedicated, QoS-aware network path from the source to our network. Pay us money to provide that connection to you."
You can't do QoS over the public Internet, which means you can't provide CATV-quality IPTV over the public Internet.
The ban is a consequence. ISPs can do all of the prioritization they want within their existing network infrastructure. There's just been no need to do so at this point because there's been no demand yet for CATV-quality IPTV. The problem with doing QoS only within the ISP's network boundaries is that it doesn't apply to the packets for the majority of their trip over the Internet. Up to the point where QoS takes effect, they've been in direct competition with every other bit of Internet traffic out there and may have been delayed or dropped along the way. You might get 99%, but 99% is still hopelessly inferior to existing CATV solutions so as to make an Internet-based IPTV provider unlikely to succeed. You need end-to-end QoS, which means dedicated, QoS-aware network connections to the content providers. These cost money, and it is this that Net Neutrality proponents seem to want to stop.
QoS decisions have to be made at the source, not the destination. If your IPTV stream has to travel over the public Internet, QoS decisions can't be made until the packets arrive at your ISP. By this time, the packets have been in direct competition with bulk file downloads and e-mail, and may be delayed or dropped equally with these other types of traffic.
In order to get low-latency, high-priority handling of a data stream from a content provider (such as an IPTV provider intending to compete with your local cable TV company), you need end-to-end control over the network path. This can't be done over the public Internet. This means you need dedicated network connections between the content provider and your ISP, and decisions like that can't be made based on the whims of an individual subscriber.
QoS can be maintained by a router in YOUR house quite effectively.
I think you misunderstand what QoS does. If it's your broadband connection that's the "choke point", such as you viewing an IPTV program while downloading something with BitTorrent, your router can't do anything to ensure those two data streams are prioritized correctly. By the time your router receives the data, the packets have already been delayed or lost. All of that prioritization occurs on the router on the ISP's side. QoS flags must be set upstream for them to have any effect. Your broadband router could theoretically set its own QoS policies for the same traffic, but it's only going to have an effect on your local LAN, and your LAN is always going to be faster than your broadband connection, so it will have no effect. You can't tell the delivery guy that the package he's delivering should have been overnighted. It's too late!
You'll be pleased to note that they do all this without requiring any sort of contract or agreement with Skype, Blizzard, or any of those "sensitive traffic" providers, so I don't know where you're getting your imaginary big-business-fellating idea from.
It's QoS 101. QoS can only apply where the network is set up to honor it. If your content provider uses ISP A, and ISP A is connected to backbone B, which is connected to backbone C, which is connected to your ISP D, and D sets up some fancy QoS hardware to prioritize incoming packets, that has nothing to do with A, B or C. B and C almost certainly are ignoring QoS (if any flags were set by A in the first place), and your IPTV stream is in direct competition for CPU and bandwidth with every other type of traffic travelling over the Internet.
Now, your IPTV stream might still work 99% of the time without pixellation or dropping out, but there's no way it's going to be as reliable as your existing CATV service, which means it will be impossible for an IPTV provider that intends on competing with CATV to work if the public Internet is routing the TV stream.
There's also the issue of scale. If HBO has a million subscribers, and all of those are unicast streams going over the public Internet, this is an ungodly amount of bandwidth. You really need multicast to do this effectively. HBO sends out a handful of streams to the providers, and the providers multicast those out to the customers. This uses a ~millionth of the bandwidth. But you know what? You can't do multicast on the public Internet either. There is simply no way to effectively do CATV-quality IPTV without end-to-end control over the network path.
Right now ISPs avoid such congestion, since customers would complain. Once they start charging for QoS they'll be sure to stop expanding their bandwidth
Why? Wouldn't customers still complain?
Then pay-to-play websites will get the same service they get now, and anybody else will get degraded service.
Wouldn't this be obvious to customers? Wouldn't this be a good reason to move to a competitor? ISPs have the capability of degrading service today. Why haven't they done it? Probably because customers would leave?
stop filtering out the QoS bits and instead ignore them everywhere but on the two ends of your DSL line. You'd get all the benefits of QoS without any disruption to your neighbors
The reason QoS bits are filtered is because you can't trust them when they're coming over the public Internet. Honoring untrustworthy QoS bits on your broadband connection would allow for unprecedented effectiveness in DoS attacks, and allow incompetent providers to set QoS flags that have no business being set. Imagine a file download service purporting to be faster than their competitors. They do this by setting QoS flags. Yes, they're faster, but QoS is also prioritizing them equally with your IPTV, so now your TV goes out whenever you download from this service. This is why dedicated connections to content providers are necessary, when those content providers wish to provide time-sensitive data such as IPTV. You need a trusted path in order to do QoS. This is why money must change hands. Someone has to pay for it.
I understand you'll argue that this is only true if I want to take advantage of the benefits offered by the prioritized traffic, but I feel pretty confident that that won't the case.
I doubt it too. Since prioritization of "premium" data would require significant infrastructure changes, I imagine those costs would be spread among all of the customers and implemented throughout the network, not just on your personal broadband connection. Even if you're given the option to control or turn it off on your broadband connection, there will still likely be some form of QoS applying to the data elsewhere in the network, if only to ensure that the data is there "on time" should you or your neighbor choose to allow it to be prioritized over your own broadband connection.
They'll just quietly throttle it down
The technology needed to "throttle" things in the manner you're suggesting is completely different from the QoS technologies normally discussed in connection with Net Neutrality. ISPs have had the capability of doing traffic shaping to degrade service since ISPs have been in business.
The prioritization that comes with QoS only matters when there's congestion. As long as every link between your content provider and you is humming along below capacity, things will arrive (pretty much) as fast as they could reasonably arrive. Only when you see congestion, such as you viewing an IPTV stream while doing a BitTorrent download at the same time, does QoS and prioritization become a factor.
Now, this isn't really an argument against your point about business ethics. Just because businesses haven't done this sort of thing already doesn't mean they can't start today. But shaping traffic in this manner is fundamentally different from QoS as normally discussed. The capability of deliberately degrading service is not what ISPs are asking for. They're asking for the ability to prioritize when congestion would force something to be degraded.
With no real profit motive to improve the part of its business that doesn't make it very much money
I see your point, but take this to an extreme. What if the ISP decided to simply cut off access to "non-premium" sites? Their customers would leave in droves, right? So customers do value access to the general Internet, and I think that an ISPs ability and willingness to give good service to those sites will absolutely continue to be a deciding factor when customers choose to give them their business.
Maybe I am being overly optimistic. But per-user, the revenue these ISPs obtain from their "premium content" partners isn't going to even approach the revenue they're going to get from the customer's broadband connection itself. If HBO offered their service over IPTV, there's no way their per-user costs to the ISP are going to equal my broadband connection. There's no way I'm going to be paying $100/month to subscribe to HBO. It seems like a terrible business decision to move so far in favor of the minority of your revenue when it means the majority is going to decide to take their business elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but any cable TV competitor has got to work better than this. You shouldn't have to shout to your kids downstairs to stop playing their online game because your shows are cutting out. Keep in mind that this "net neutrality" debate isn't about existing Internet applications. You can hop on YouTube today and it works fine. It's about emerging IPTV applications.
You prioritize it yourself, either by stopping your downloads
"BILLY! STOP THOSE BITTORRENT DOWNLOADS RIGHT NOW! YOU'RE MESSIN' UP NANNA'S SHOWS!"
I don't want a TV service that goes out every time my network traffic spikes. Maybe some people would be OK with that, but I think that would be a horrible competitor to cable TV.
or by using a router that understands content and assigns priorities accordingly
A router on your side of your broadband connection can't do squat with packets that were dropped on the other side of that connection. It's usually your broadband connection that's the slowest link, not your home LAN. It's the routers on the ISP side of your connection that have to queue or drop packets. It's your ISP that needs to implement QoS in order to properly prioritize your data. Nothing you do on your end is going to matter, because your LAN is always going to be faster than your broadband connection. Remember that prioritization of traffic coming to you must be done on the other guy's routers. It's like getting a package from the postman a week after it was sent and telling the postman you'd like it overnighted. It should have been marked as 'overnight' where it was sent, and every postal worker in the chain must have agreed to handle it as overnight mail. This analog doesn't exist in the Internet today, and that's part of the reason you don't see CATV-quality IPTV today.
Of course, that doesn't preclude your ISP from using QoS-aware routing that uses your desires in making its prioritization decisions, but unless the entire network path between the content provider and your ISP is QoS-aware, it's going to be less reliable than a dedicated, fully-QoS-aware network connection.
The problem is that in order to get QoS to work from end-to-end, you have to have QoS-aware network path from end to end. Since you can't do QoS over the Internet, this means your ISP must contract with the content provider to establish and maintain that link. Otherwise, the video/game traffic you want to prioritize will be travelling over a non-QoS-aware Internet along with every other bit of traffic, and your packets could be delayed or dropped anywhere in between. There's no way for your ISP to tell other ISP's, "Hey, my customer Joe wants these packets prioritized over those packets, so could you do that for me?"
It's not practical to take one customer's wishes and to go out and lay fiber and buy routers to establish that dedicated network path. Now, it might be reasonable for your ISP to do that in response to a large number of customers wanting that, but the ISP still has to negotiate with the content provider to make it happen, and the construction and maintenance of that connection still costs money.
But once the ISP has a nice, fully-QoS-aware network path between itself and the content providers, it certainly would be slick if the ISP could then give you the option of extending that prioritization down your DSL connection, or not, based on your desires. I think, though, that that level of flexibility probably won't be very cost-effective, but you'd be within your rights to ask for it.
Yes, existing TCP- and UDP-based applications work well over the "neutral" Internet, primarily because that's where they evolved. The issues being debated stem from emerging technologies. People aren't subscribing to IPTV services over the public Internet to their TVs yet, but when they do, they're going to expect that it works just as well as their existing cable TV. YouTube-style video resolution, and 10 seconds of "buffering..." every time you change the channel just flat out will not work. Channel changes need to be quick and you can't have the video cutting out every 10 seconds whenever your family members are playing games online or downloading something with BitTorrent. The technology needs to be able to tell the two types of data streams apart and prioritize IPTV over bulk data transfers. You need QoS to do that, which is where your "non-neutral" Internet rears its head. In addition, since you can't do QoS over the entire route that the packets take over the public Internet, you really need dedicated network connections between the content provider and the consumer's ISP that are QoS-aware, and those cost money.
And all this because the ISP couldn't just provide their customers the service they wanted.
It's comments like these that suggest some of us are on a completely different wavelength from others. I'd really like to understand what this rift is, and whether it's something fundamental that I'm missing or that others are missing.
What "service" are you talking about here? The only way you're going to guarantee that all of the data sent over your network connection arrives without interruption is if you have an infinite amount of bandwidth. Obviously that isn't the case. If you have a 10Mbit connection, you're only going to be able to fit 10Mbit of data down it. If you try to transfer more, packets get delayed (queued) or dropped.
If you attempt to share a 5Mbit video stream (say, HBO) with a BitTorrent download, the network has no way of telling those apart. Without QoS telling the routers otherwise, packets from both sources get delayed or dropped equally. Your BitTorrent slows down and your HBO starts cutting out. QoS and prioritization would allow you to continue watching your IPTV while other, lower-priority things are going on in the background.
Nothing "has" to break until you congest your data connection with traffic. At that point you have to decide: do you want a "neutral" Internet, where no preference is given to either data stream, or a "non-neutral" Internet, where the network understands that your IPTV is more important and gives it preference when the connection gets congested?
How do you intend on applying QoS rules to packets that have already been dropped? It's your broadband connection that's likely to be congested, not your home LAN. By the time your router sees the packets, they've already made their way through the only likely congested link. It's the router on the other side, where the pipe narrows, that needs to apply QoS rules to prioritize your traffic for you, not your own equipment.
This also ignores the longest part of the packet's journey, as it travels over the public Internet. Applying QoS toward the end is certainly better than not applying it at all, but there are lots of other places where congestion could delay or drop your packets, in favor of something that could have been delayed. Unless you can get QoS working all the way from the content provider to your ISP, your experience is still going to be inferior to every-day cable TV.
Fair enough, but TIVO would still experience the same data loss issues as you'd experience with live TV, if your data connection is congested and you have no way to prioritize traffic.
On a large packetized network, some amount of buffering is unavoidable
Agreed, but the devil is in the degree. If you control how your network is engineered, you can empirically determine the best buffering/responsiveness trade-off for your needs. Over the public Internet, you have no idea how your packets are going to be handled or what congestion it's going to experience on the way, and consequently, services like this need to buffer a significant amount of data to ensure uninterrupted playback, and even that isn't always accurate.
Here's how it works: you start queuing incoming streams that exceed their bandwidth limit.
How do mechanisms like this differentiate between your high-priority HBO stream and your low-priority BitTorrent download? How do you ensure that your upstream provider agrees with how you want them prioritized?
If an IPTV company is willing to pay for higher QOS then they can accomplish that with local caching solutions like Akamai.
This does nothing to differentiate traffic as it travels over my DSL connection. The Internet path between my content provider and me is most tightly constrained as it travels over my telephone wire. If this is congested, it's usually because the router on my ISP's side has more data to send me than my connection is capable of handling. Consequently, packets get delayed or dropped.
As a consumer, who cares not one iota about how all of this works, all I see is my HBO dropping out every time my spouse grabs something using BitTorrent. As a consumer, I want data connectivity that will allow my ISP to prioritize one over the other, so that my TV programs aren't being interrupted every 10 seconds due to congestion over my DSL line. (The ISP has to do the prioritization because by the time it's reached my equipment, any packets that were going to be dropped have already been dropped.)
As for your kids hogging your bandwidth - there are any number of technical and social solutions to maintaining QOS through your own internet connection that needn't affect anybody else.
So, you're thinking of yelling downstairs to your spouse or your kids to stop playing online until you're done watching your TV program? That doesn't sound like a very good product to me.
Now, on the constructive side, some sort of QoS solution placed on the ISP side, but under my control might be nice to have. I could tell my ISP's routers how things should be prioritized over my own Internet connection, and it could reserve bandwidth for certain types of traffic as I see fit. The problem with this solution is that it can only function within the confines of my ISP's network. They can't control how other Internet providers upstream will prioritize that same traffic, so if I'm subscribing to IPTV service via the public Internet, that traffic is still competing with every other BitTorrent download and e-mail. Local caching solutions, as you mentioned, could alleviate some of that, but you're still a long ways away from low-latency, high-bandwidth streaming we need for real-time HDTV programming, IMO. In addition, who do I call when my HBO is on the fritz, and both my content provider and my own ISP's networks are running flawlessly? The problem could be 2 or 3 hops deep into the public Internet on a backbone provider's network that neither my ISP nor my content provider have any business relationship with. This is where having a dedicated connection between content provider and consumer ISP is desirable. Telling consumers that they can't watch TV because of some unspecified Internet problem is a step down in terms of service and reliability from what consumers are used to from existing cable TV services (jokes about our own cable TV service notwithstanding).
If you, as a customer, find that their prioritization policies are not to your liking, and the ISP gives you no ability to customize the prioritization policies for your own Internet connection, you're free to give your business to someone else. If no ISPs offer guaranteed service for your favorite content provider, though, there isn't really much you can do other than try to consume your content over the non-prioritized public Internet.
And that will probably work just fine until your connection is congested, at which point you'll wish you had some way of telling the network that HBO traffic should take precedence over some BitTorrent. If only your ISP had some way of doing QoS...
And since that would jack your IPTV bill up beyond reason, nobody will buy IPTV.
Not at all. I imagine the increases would be reasonable, but they'd be increases nevertheless. This is really secondary to the neutrality debate, though. If you want to prioritize traffic, somebody has to pay for it. You'll ultimately pay for it, but that question is really just about who has to be the bad guy hiking their rates.
So, your argument is that we should give ISPs carte blanche to turn the internet into their own personal profit wagon
I still don't understand why people return to this theme. My connection to my ISP is already my ISP's personal profit wagon. If my ISP were to come up to me one day and say, "We're going to limit your download speeds to all of these sites that haven't paid us money to 10kbps," I would leave them and find a new ISP. This would be a stupid business move on their part. In reality, what they're saying is, "We're not going to give 'express', low-latency, high-bandwidth service to all of these sites that haven't paid us money. But we're leaving everything else as it is today." And I think that's fine.
Is there something more to this than a conspiracy theory?
The "IPTV" services you talk about today aren't quite the same thing that you view on your TV. For one, the bitrates for these services are miniscule compared to that necessary for standard- or high-definition TV programming. Second, there's usually a multi-second lag between the time you request playback and the time playback starts. This lag time is used to buffer enough of the content that playback can appear seamless. Do you want your TV to behave this way? Do you want to change channels and be greeted with a "Buffering... 10%" footer while you wait 5-10 seconds for enough content to be streamed to your TV before you can watch it?
Purchasing better hardware at the customer end to prioritize traffic won't solve anything, because your congestion is on your Internet connection itself. By the time it's arrived at your DSL router (or whatever), it's already traversed your Internet connection and packets have already been dropped if the link was congested. You need your ISP's cooperation to do this, but even with your ISP allowing you to prioritize packets on the ISP's side, they can't guarantee how the public Internet is going to treat the same data. If that IPTV stream has to make its way through 3 or 4 major backbones, you can't control how those other providers prioritize your packets.
A company that wants to provide you cable TV service over IP simply can't do it using the public Internet. They need to make special arrangements with your ISP to ensure the entire network path is QoS-aware. This doesn't seem to be possible with a "neutral" Internet.
If they're allowed to choke off whatever they please, its no longer an open internet with an equal burden of entry.
An important thing to remember here is that there aren't any more chokes than existed previously. If you stream video today and start a large data transfer, your data connection becomes congested and both transfers are "choked" equally. QoS and prioritization simply set up rules that allow some traffic to avoid being choked while other traffic is disproportionately affected, but if your data connection is never congested, you will never see these effects. You can avoid congestion the same way you've always done it: don't do too many things at once over the same connection. Turn off your IPTV stream if you want to maximize the bandwidth available to some unprioritized traffic.
I strongly suspect people will ALWAYS want to know when their access to something is being throttled because the provider has been bribed to make your access more difficult by someone who can't compete on a level field.
Prioritization only matters when the network connection is congested. When it's congested, packets must necessarily be dropped. You can either drop all packets equally (your data transfer slows and your HBO starts cutting out), such as with a "neutral" Internet like today's, or you can prioritize (your data transfer slows more, but HBO stays on the air), in a "non-neutral" fashion.
Customers won't just know what's being throttled, they will actively want it to be that way.
In what way does mandatory equality of QOS negatively impact the internet?
It means you cannot reasonably deliver IPTV services over the Internet. Most consumers do not want their HBO to start cutting out when their kids start playing a game online or starting a large data transfer. To prevent this, you need prioritization of data, and you can't do that over the public Internet. This means your ISP needs the ability to contract with content providers for dedicated network connections and someone needs to pay for that. (Ultimately, of course, that person is you, the consumer.)
Removing net neutrality allows ISPs to charge (blackmail) providers (sites) for priority.
QoS is only usable within a certain administrative domain. Within your ISP, they might use QoS, but any traffic to/from the public Internet is not QoS-managed. It can't be. If any Internet Joe had the capability of setting QoS flags on his packets, think of the abuse that would cause.
Further, ISPs can't simply set QoS flags on inbound traffic from certain providers and not others. Ignoring the legal/business issues, these flags only take effect once the packet enters the ISP's network. Since QoS doesn't occur on the public Internet, all of that data has already been in competition with all of the other data out there and will arrive missing packets and with delays.
It's not about blackmail. Traffic on the public Internet will (necessarily) remain undifferentiated and unprioritized. The problem is that unprioritized traffic (like that on the public Internet) is inappropriate for high-bandwidth, low-latency services such as IPTV. Today, we have a "neutral" Internet. This means that when you try to stream video from a content provider, you get occasional hiccups, and if you attempt to download some data while watching your video, your Internet connection becomes congested and it suffers even further; the two data transfers are undifferentiated and impacted equally.
There is a finite amount of data you can shove down a pipe, and with no QoS and no prioritization of packets, nothing has precedence and everything is degraded equally. Now imagine IPTV services running over this type of network:
You're watching your favorite TV show, and your son starts playing a game, or your spouse starts uploading some data to the office. Your TV show starts getting pixelated and cuts out. No consumer would want this. In an era where your TV signal is transmitted over your Internet connection, you're likely to want your TV signal to have a certain guaranteed quality of service, right?
So how do you do that? You can't do QoS over the Internet, but you need QoS between your content provider and your TV. Your ISP can do QoS, but they can't do it over the Internet. They have to set up a private, dedicated network connection between themselves and the content provider. That's the only way you're going to be guaranteed bandwidth all the way from the content provider to your TV, and at that point your Internet connection can look at the QoS flags and slow packets destined for your children's online game or your spouse's data transfer to keep the TV channel going without interruption.
Network Neutrality simply means that the ISP is either not allowed to set up that dedicated network connection to the content provider, or if they decide to do it, they have to eat the cost (and by "eat the cost", we mean, "pass the cost onto the consumer").
Forget about the "Net Neutrality" label for a moment and ask yourself which of these scenarios is more appealing:
Unprioritized traffic, your file download competes with HBO (neutral Internet)
Prioritized traffic, but either your ISP or content provider bill goes up to pay for it (non-neutral Internet)
So do you want reliable TV service, or do you want your channels to cut out whenever you download something over the Internet? You can't have "neutral" prioritization, and if you tell your ISP that they have to eat the cost and set up dedicated networks for prioritized traffic to everyone who wants one, then everyone's going to want one and now you have to worry about premium content A competing with premium content B (not to mention the hike in your ISP's bill).
When you realize that you really do have to have prioritized, non-neutral network traffic, the next question becomes: Who pays for it? What do you think the fair thing to do is?
This isn't accurate. Hearsay only applies to statements of truth, such as someone saying, "This guy broke the law!" If you sent that in an e-mail, and someone tried to admit the e-mail as evidence that the guy in question broke the law, this would be hearsay. But in this situation, it's the fact that the e-mail was sent that's important, and it's perfectly proper evidence for that purpose.
IANAL, but it is my understand that even if you could, you'd have to demonstrate harm that could be compensated. "Because it got me convicted of a crime" isn't something you can make a claim for. But if the situation were different and they turned over some trade secret to someone else, and that cost you a big contract, sure you could sue for that, so long as you could make a good case that your agreement with the carrier included a guarantee of confidentiality.
Yeah, this is my understanding also. FedEx is in possession of your package (just as your ISP is in possession of your data). They're free to turn it over to the feds, if they want, but the feds have to have some sort of judicial approval in order to take it away from them without their consent.
Your UPS story seems like a good business decision, but that's all it is (as far as I know).
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly!
This is why the content providers need to establish dedicated QoS-aware data connections with the consumers' Internet providers. These data connections cost money. This is what the ISPs want the content providers to pay for.
Well yes, actually, it would. The ISPs aren't saying, "Pay us money or we'll degrade your service." They're saying, "To give you prioritized handling, we need to set up a dedicated, QoS-aware network path from the source to our network. Pay us money to provide that connection to you."
You can't do QoS over the public Internet, which means you can't provide CATV-quality IPTV over the public Internet.
The ban is a consequence. ISPs can do all of the prioritization they want within their existing network infrastructure. There's just been no need to do so at this point because there's been no demand yet for CATV-quality IPTV. The problem with doing QoS only within the ISP's network boundaries is that it doesn't apply to the packets for the majority of their trip over the Internet. Up to the point where QoS takes effect, they've been in direct competition with every other bit of Internet traffic out there and may have been delayed or dropped along the way. You might get 99%, but 99% is still hopelessly inferior to existing CATV solutions so as to make an Internet-based IPTV provider unlikely to succeed. You need end-to-end QoS, which means dedicated, QoS-aware network connections to the content providers. These cost money, and it is this that Net Neutrality proponents seem to want to stop.
QoS decisions have to be made at the source, not the destination. If your IPTV stream has to travel over the public Internet, QoS decisions can't be made until the packets arrive at your ISP. By this time, the packets have been in direct competition with bulk file downloads and e-mail, and may be delayed or dropped equally with these other types of traffic.
In order to get low-latency, high-priority handling of a data stream from a content provider (such as an IPTV provider intending to compete with your local cable TV company), you need end-to-end control over the network path. This can't be done over the public Internet. This means you need dedicated network connections between the content provider and your ISP, and decisions like that can't be made based on the whims of an individual subscriber.
I think you misunderstand what QoS does. If it's your broadband connection that's the "choke point", such as you viewing an IPTV program while downloading something with BitTorrent, your router can't do anything to ensure those two data streams are prioritized correctly. By the time your router receives the data, the packets have already been delayed or lost. All of that prioritization occurs on the router on the ISP's side. QoS flags must be set upstream for them to have any effect. Your broadband router could theoretically set its own QoS policies for the same traffic, but it's only going to have an effect on your local LAN, and your LAN is always going to be faster than your broadband connection, so it will have no effect. You can't tell the delivery guy that the package he's delivering should have been overnighted. It's too late!
It's QoS 101. QoS can only apply where the network is set up to honor it. If your content provider uses ISP A, and ISP A is connected to backbone B, which is connected to backbone C, which is connected to your ISP D, and D sets up some fancy QoS hardware to prioritize incoming packets, that has nothing to do with A, B or C. B and C almost certainly are ignoring QoS (if any flags were set by A in the first place), and your IPTV stream is in direct competition for CPU and bandwidth with every other type of traffic travelling over the Internet.
Now, your IPTV stream might still work 99% of the time without pixellation or dropping out, but there's no way it's going to be as reliable as your existing CATV service, which means it will be impossible for an IPTV provider that intends on competing with CATV to work if the public Internet is routing the TV stream.
There's also the issue of scale. If HBO has a million subscribers, and all of those are unicast streams going over the public Internet, this is an ungodly amount of bandwidth. You really need multicast to do this effectively. HBO sends out a handful of streams to the providers, and the providers multicast those out to the customers. This uses a ~millionth of the bandwidth. But you know what? You can't do multicast on the public Internet either. There is simply no way to effectively do CATV-quality IPTV without end-to-end control over the network path.
Why? Wouldn't customers still complain?
Wouldn't this be obvious to customers? Wouldn't this be a good reason to move to a competitor? ISPs have the capability of degrading service today. Why haven't they done it? Probably because customers would leave?
The reason QoS bits are filtered is because you can't trust them when they're coming over the public Internet. Honoring untrustworthy QoS bits on your broadband connection would allow for unprecedented effectiveness in DoS attacks, and allow incompetent providers to set QoS flags that have no business being set. Imagine a file download service purporting to be faster than their competitors. They do this by setting QoS flags. Yes, they're faster, but QoS is also prioritizing them equally with your IPTV, so now your TV goes out whenever you download from this service. This is why dedicated connections to content providers are necessary, when those content providers wish to provide time-sensitive data such as IPTV. You need a trusted path in order to do QoS. This is why money must change hands. Someone has to pay for it.
I doubt it too. Since prioritization of "premium" data would require significant infrastructure changes, I imagine those costs would be spread among all of the customers and implemented throughout the network, not just on your personal broadband connection. Even if you're given the option to control or turn it off on your broadband connection, there will still likely be some form of QoS applying to the data elsewhere in the network, if only to ensure that the data is there "on time" should you or your neighbor choose to allow it to be prioritized over your own broadband connection.
The technology needed to "throttle" things in the manner you're suggesting is completely different from the QoS technologies normally discussed in connection with Net Neutrality. ISPs have had the capability of doing traffic shaping to degrade service since ISPs have been in business.
The prioritization that comes with QoS only matters when there's congestion. As long as every link between your content provider and you is humming along below capacity, things will arrive (pretty much) as fast as they could reasonably arrive. Only when you see congestion, such as you viewing an IPTV stream while doing a BitTorrent download at the same time, does QoS and prioritization become a factor.
Now, this isn't really an argument against your point about business ethics. Just because businesses haven't done this sort of thing already doesn't mean they can't start today. But shaping traffic in this manner is fundamentally different from QoS as normally discussed. The capability of deliberately degrading service is not what ISPs are asking for. They're asking for the ability to prioritize when congestion would force something to be degraded.
I see your point, but take this to an extreme. What if the ISP decided to simply cut off access to "non-premium" sites? Their customers would leave in droves, right? So customers do value access to the general Internet, and I think that an ISPs ability and willingness to give good service to those sites will absolutely continue to be a deciding factor when customers choose to give them their business.
Maybe I am being overly optimistic. But per-user, the revenue these ISPs obtain from their "premium content" partners isn't going to even approach the revenue they're going to get from the customer's broadband connection itself. If HBO offered their service over IPTV, there's no way their per-user costs to the ISP are going to equal my broadband connection. There's no way I'm going to be paying $100/month to subscribe to HBO. It seems like a terrible business decision to move so far in favor of the minority of your revenue when it means the majority is going to decide to take their business elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but any cable TV competitor has got to work better than this. You shouldn't have to shout to your kids downstairs to stop playing their online game because your shows are cutting out. Keep in mind that this "net neutrality" debate isn't about existing Internet applications. You can hop on YouTube today and it works fine. It's about emerging IPTV applications.
"BILLY! STOP THOSE BITTORRENT DOWNLOADS RIGHT NOW! YOU'RE MESSIN' UP NANNA'S SHOWS!"
I don't want a TV service that goes out every time my network traffic spikes. Maybe some people would be OK with that, but I think that would be a horrible competitor to cable TV.
A router on your side of your broadband connection can't do squat with packets that were dropped on the other side of that connection. It's usually your broadband connection that's the slowest link, not your home LAN. It's the routers on the ISP side of your connection that have to queue or drop packets. It's your ISP that needs to implement QoS in order to properly prioritize your data. Nothing you do on your end is going to matter, because your LAN is always going to be faster than your broadband connection. Remember that prioritization of traffic coming to you must be done on the other guy's routers. It's like getting a package from the postman a week after it was sent and telling the postman you'd like it overnighted. It should have been marked as 'overnight' where it was sent, and every postal worker in the chain must have agreed to handle it as overnight mail. This analog doesn't exist in the Internet today, and that's part of the reason you don't see CATV-quality IPTV today.
Of course, that doesn't preclude your ISP from using QoS-aware routing that uses your desires in making its prioritization decisions, but unless the entire network path between the content provider and your ISP is QoS-aware, it's going to be less reliable than a dedicated, fully-QoS-aware network connection.
Yes, that would be ideal.
The problem is that in order to get QoS to work from end-to-end, you have to have QoS-aware network path from end to end. Since you can't do QoS over the Internet, this means your ISP must contract with the content provider to establish and maintain that link. Otherwise, the video/game traffic you want to prioritize will be travelling over a non-QoS-aware Internet along with every other bit of traffic, and your packets could be delayed or dropped anywhere in between. There's no way for your ISP to tell other ISP's, "Hey, my customer Joe wants these packets prioritized over those packets, so could you do that for me?"
It's not practical to take one customer's wishes and to go out and lay fiber and buy routers to establish that dedicated network path. Now, it might be reasonable for your ISP to do that in response to a large number of customers wanting that, but the ISP still has to negotiate with the content provider to make it happen, and the construction and maintenance of that connection still costs money.
But once the ISP has a nice, fully-QoS-aware network path between itself and the content providers, it certainly would be slick if the ISP could then give you the option of extending that prioritization down your DSL connection, or not, based on your desires. I think, though, that that level of flexibility probably won't be very cost-effective, but you'd be within your rights to ask for it.
Yes, existing TCP- and UDP-based applications work well over the "neutral" Internet, primarily because that's where they evolved. The issues being debated stem from emerging technologies. People aren't subscribing to IPTV services over the public Internet to their TVs yet, but when they do, they're going to expect that it works just as well as their existing cable TV. YouTube-style video resolution, and 10 seconds of "buffering..." every time you change the channel just flat out will not work. Channel changes need to be quick and you can't have the video cutting out every 10 seconds whenever your family members are playing games online or downloading something with BitTorrent. The technology needs to be able to tell the two types of data streams apart and prioritize IPTV over bulk data transfers. You need QoS to do that, which is where your "non-neutral" Internet rears its head. In addition, since you can't do QoS over the entire route that the packets take over the public Internet, you really need dedicated network connections between the content provider and the consumer's ISP that are QoS-aware, and those cost money.
It's comments like these that suggest some of us are on a completely different wavelength from others. I'd really like to understand what this rift is, and whether it's something fundamental that I'm missing or that others are missing.
What "service" are you talking about here? The only way you're going to guarantee that all of the data sent over your network connection arrives without interruption is if you have an infinite amount of bandwidth. Obviously that isn't the case. If you have a 10Mbit connection, you're only going to be able to fit 10Mbit of data down it. If you try to transfer more, packets get delayed (queued) or dropped.
If you attempt to share a 5Mbit video stream (say, HBO) with a BitTorrent download, the network has no way of telling those apart. Without QoS telling the routers otherwise, packets from both sources get delayed or dropped equally. Your BitTorrent slows down and your HBO starts cutting out. QoS and prioritization would allow you to continue watching your IPTV while other, lower-priority things are going on in the background.
Nothing "has" to break until you congest your data connection with traffic. At that point you have to decide: do you want a "neutral" Internet, where no preference is given to either data stream, or a "non-neutral" Internet, where the network understands that your IPTV is more important and gives it preference when the connection gets congested?
How do you intend on applying QoS rules to packets that have already been dropped? It's your broadband connection that's likely to be congested, not your home LAN. By the time your router sees the packets, they've already made their way through the only likely congested link. It's the router on the other side, where the pipe narrows, that needs to apply QoS rules to prioritize your traffic for you, not your own equipment.
This also ignores the longest part of the packet's journey, as it travels over the public Internet. Applying QoS toward the end is certainly better than not applying it at all, but there are lots of other places where congestion could delay or drop your packets, in favor of something that could have been delayed. Unless you can get QoS working all the way from the content provider to your ISP, your experience is still going to be inferior to every-day cable TV.
Fair enough, but TIVO would still experience the same data loss issues as you'd experience with live TV, if your data connection is congested and you have no way to prioritize traffic.
Agreed, but the devil is in the degree. If you control how your network is engineered, you can empirically determine the best buffering/responsiveness trade-off for your needs. Over the public Internet, you have no idea how your packets are going to be handled or what congestion it's going to experience on the way, and consequently, services like this need to buffer a significant amount of data to ensure uninterrupted playback, and even that isn't always accurate.
How do mechanisms like this differentiate between your high-priority HBO stream and your low-priority BitTorrent download? How do you ensure that your upstream provider agrees with how you want them prioritized?
This does nothing to differentiate traffic as it travels over my DSL connection. The Internet path between my content provider and me is most tightly constrained as it travels over my telephone wire. If this is congested, it's usually because the router on my ISP's side has more data to send me than my connection is capable of handling. Consequently, packets get delayed or dropped.
As a consumer, who cares not one iota about how all of this works, all I see is my HBO dropping out every time my spouse grabs something using BitTorrent. As a consumer, I want data connectivity that will allow my ISP to prioritize one over the other, so that my TV programs aren't being interrupted every 10 seconds due to congestion over my DSL line. (The ISP has to do the prioritization because by the time it's reached my equipment, any packets that were going to be dropped have already been dropped.)
So, you're thinking of yelling downstairs to your spouse or your kids to stop playing online until you're done watching your TV program? That doesn't sound like a very good product to me.
Now, on the constructive side, some sort of QoS solution placed on the ISP side, but under my control might be nice to have. I could tell my ISP's routers how things should be prioritized over my own Internet connection, and it could reserve bandwidth for certain types of traffic as I see fit. The problem with this solution is that it can only function within the confines of my ISP's network. They can't control how other Internet providers upstream will prioritize that same traffic, so if I'm subscribing to IPTV service via the public Internet, that traffic is still competing with every other BitTorrent download and e-mail. Local caching solutions, as you mentioned, could alleviate some of that, but you're still a long ways away from low-latency, high-bandwidth streaming we need for real-time HDTV programming, IMO. In addition, who do I call when my HBO is on the fritz, and both my content provider and my own ISP's networks are running flawlessly? The problem could be 2 or 3 hops deep into the public Internet on a backbone provider's network that neither my ISP nor my content provider have any business relationship with. This is where having a dedicated connection between content provider and consumer ISP is desirable. Telling consumers that they can't watch TV because of some unspecified Internet problem is a step down in terms of service and reliability from what consumers are used to from existing cable TV services (jokes about our own cable TV service notwithstanding).
If you, as a customer, find that their prioritization policies are not to your liking, and the ISP gives you no ability to customize the prioritization policies for your own Internet connection, you're free to give your business to someone else. If no ISPs offer guaranteed service for your favorite content provider, though, there isn't really much you can do other than try to consume your content over the non-prioritized public Internet.
And that will probably work just fine until your connection is congested, at which point you'll wish you had some way of telling the network that HBO traffic should take precedence over some BitTorrent. If only your ISP had some way of doing QoS...
Not at all. I imagine the increases would be reasonable, but they'd be increases nevertheless. This is really secondary to the neutrality debate, though. If you want to prioritize traffic, somebody has to pay for it. You'll ultimately pay for it, but that question is really just about who has to be the bad guy hiking their rates.
I still don't understand why people return to this theme. My connection to my ISP is already my ISP's personal profit wagon. If my ISP were to come up to me one day and say, "We're going to limit your download speeds to all of these sites that haven't paid us money to 10kbps," I would leave them and find a new ISP. This would be a stupid business move on their part. In reality, what they're saying is, "We're not going to give 'express', low-latency, high-bandwidth service to all of these sites that haven't paid us money. But we're leaving everything else as it is today." And I think that's fine.
Is there something more to this than a conspiracy theory?
The "IPTV" services you talk about today aren't quite the same thing that you view on your TV. For one, the bitrates for these services are miniscule compared to that necessary for standard- or high-definition TV programming. Second, there's usually a multi-second lag between the time you request playback and the time playback starts. This lag time is used to buffer enough of the content that playback can appear seamless. Do you want your TV to behave this way? Do you want to change channels and be greeted with a "Buffering... 10%" footer while you wait 5-10 seconds for enough content to be streamed to your TV before you can watch it?
Purchasing better hardware at the customer end to prioritize traffic won't solve anything, because your congestion is on your Internet connection itself. By the time it's arrived at your DSL router (or whatever), it's already traversed your Internet connection and packets have already been dropped if the link was congested. You need your ISP's cooperation to do this, but even with your ISP allowing you to prioritize packets on the ISP's side, they can't guarantee how the public Internet is going to treat the same data. If that IPTV stream has to make its way through 3 or 4 major backbones, you can't control how those other providers prioritize your packets.
A company that wants to provide you cable TV service over IP simply can't do it using the public Internet. They need to make special arrangements with your ISP to ensure the entire network path is QoS-aware. This doesn't seem to be possible with a "neutral" Internet.
An important thing to remember here is that there aren't any more chokes than existed previously. If you stream video today and start a large data transfer, your data connection becomes congested and both transfers are "choked" equally. QoS and prioritization simply set up rules that allow some traffic to avoid being choked while other traffic is disproportionately affected, but if your data connection is never congested, you will never see these effects. You can avoid congestion the same way you've always done it: don't do too many things at once over the same connection. Turn off your IPTV stream if you want to maximize the bandwidth available to some unprioritized traffic.
Prioritization only matters when the network connection is congested. When it's congested, packets must necessarily be dropped. You can either drop all packets equally (your data transfer slows and your HBO starts cutting out), such as with a "neutral" Internet like today's, or you can prioritize (your data transfer slows more, but HBO stays on the air), in a "non-neutral" fashion.
Customers won't just know what's being throttled, they will actively want it to be that way.
It means you cannot reasonably deliver IPTV services over the Internet. Most consumers do not want their HBO to start cutting out when their kids start playing a game online or starting a large data transfer. To prevent this, you need prioritization of data, and you can't do that over the public Internet. This means your ISP needs the ability to contract with content providers for dedicated network connections and someone needs to pay for that. (Ultimately, of course, that person is you, the consumer.)
QoS is only usable within a certain administrative domain. Within your ISP, they might use QoS, but any traffic to/from the public Internet is not QoS-managed. It can't be. If any Internet Joe had the capability of setting QoS flags on his packets, think of the abuse that would cause.
Further, ISPs can't simply set QoS flags on inbound traffic from certain providers and not others. Ignoring the legal/business issues, these flags only take effect once the packet enters the ISP's network. Since QoS doesn't occur on the public Internet, all of that data has already been in competition with all of the other data out there and will arrive missing packets and with delays.
It's not about blackmail. Traffic on the public Internet will (necessarily) remain undifferentiated and unprioritized. The problem is that unprioritized traffic (like that on the public Internet) is inappropriate for high-bandwidth, low-latency services such as IPTV. Today, we have a "neutral" Internet. This means that when you try to stream video from a content provider, you get occasional hiccups, and if you attempt to download some data while watching your video, your Internet connection becomes congested and it suffers even further; the two data transfers are undifferentiated and impacted equally.
There is a finite amount of data you can shove down a pipe, and with no QoS and no prioritization of packets, nothing has precedence and everything is degraded equally. Now imagine IPTV services running over this type of network:
You're watching your favorite TV show, and your son starts playing a game, or your spouse starts uploading some data to the office. Your TV show starts getting pixelated and cuts out. No consumer would want this. In an era where your TV signal is transmitted over your Internet connection, you're likely to want your TV signal to have a certain guaranteed quality of service, right?
So how do you do that? You can't do QoS over the Internet, but you need QoS between your content provider and your TV. Your ISP can do QoS, but they can't do it over the Internet. They have to set up a private, dedicated network connection between themselves and the content provider. That's the only way you're going to be guaranteed bandwidth all the way from the content provider to your TV, and at that point your Internet connection can look at the QoS flags and slow packets destined for your children's online game or your spouse's data transfer to keep the TV channel going without interruption.
Network Neutrality simply means that the ISP is either not allowed to set up that dedicated network connection to the content provider, or if they decide to do it, they have to eat the cost (and by "eat the cost", we mean, "pass the cost onto the consumer").
Forget about the "Net Neutrality" label for a moment and ask yourself which of these scenarios is more appealing:
So do you want reliable TV service, or do you want your channels to cut out whenever you download something over the Internet? You can't have "neutral" prioritization, and if you tell your ISP that they have to eat the cost and set up dedicated networks for prioritized traffic to everyone who wants one, then everyone's going to want one and now you have to worry about premium content A competing with premium content B (not to mention the hike in your ISP's bill).
When you realize that you really do have to have prioritized, non-neutral network traffic, the next question becomes: Who pays for it? What do you think the fair thing to do is?
This isn't accurate. Hearsay only applies to statements of truth, such as someone saying, "This guy broke the law!" If you sent that in an e-mail, and someone tried to admit the e-mail as evidence that the guy in question broke the law, this would be hearsay. But in this situation, it's the fact that the e-mail was sent that's important, and it's perfectly proper evidence for that purpose.
IANAL, but it is my understand that even if you could, you'd have to demonstrate harm that could be compensated. "Because it got me convicted of a crime" isn't something you can make a claim for. But if the situation were different and they turned over some trade secret to someone else, and that cost you a big contract, sure you could sue for that, so long as you could make a good case that your agreement with the carrier included a guarantee of confidentiality.
Yeah, this is my understanding also. FedEx is in possession of your package (just as your ISP is in possession of your data). They're free to turn it over to the feds, if they want, but the feds have to have some sort of judicial approval in order to take it away from them without their consent.
Your UPS story seems like a good business decision, but that's all it is (as far as I know).