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FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

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Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#151

Post by wahern »

wtallis wrote: post #106
scarface74 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that any many decently populated areas, it's at least a "duopoly". You would have the cable company and the phone company competing. I have a choice between Comcast and AT&T.

This is a short-term situation that is already mostly dead. The pre-existing infrastructure of POTS and CATV wiring was re-purposed to provide Internet connectivity. But the last-mile POTS infrastructure is completely saturated and xDLS services cannot compete against DOCSIS. Comcast can upgrade you from 20Mbps to 1Gbps by replacing the box down the street and selling you a new modem. AT&T has to dig up the street an…

POTS still has alot of life left in it. It just hasn't seen any investment. Long-term it could handle greater overall capacity given each household has a physically dedicated line to an aggregation point.

Phone companies just need to invest in putting the DSL modems closer to the households, say at the neighborhood cabinet rather than the switching station. A literal mile is too far. VDSL2 can do 100Mb/s in each direction at 500 meters, and there's no bandwidth contention with your neighbor. And VDSL2 is extremely mature, hardly the state of the art. By comparison, at the office I pay $450/month for dedicated 100Mb/s fiber service from Cogent. And the POTS infrastructure is just about as reliable--which is to say, very reliable.

I live in San Francisco, which is already extremely dense. AT&T owns the POTS system, but they refuse to put in the investment. My switching station is almost 2 miles away. I finally got fiber from Sonic.net. They're investing in hanging fiber over much of the westerner half of the city at a time when AT&T is hemming and hawing about upgrading their cabinets. And interestingly, my fiber service runs straight to that switching station 2 miles away.

The only reason cable dominates is because the phone companies aren't interested in competing. AT&T and Verizon own a huge amount of the POTS infrastructure, but are entirely focused on mobile and cable. It's a ridiculous state of affairs having so much infrastructure managed by the same oligopoly. When I cancelled Comcast and told them I was only paying $40/month for Gigabit fiber there was a long pause--he was absolutely incredulous. Was it a promo price, he asked. (No.) He knew there was no chance of retaining me as a customer.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#152

Post by pseudalopex »

scarface74 wrote: post #128
noxToken wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as the other child comment. Every locale I've been to has had at least 3 choices with an occasional 4th: a cable company, a phone company, and a satellite company. The 4th is typically a very small, local ISP. The cable company has always had the most bang for the buck. It's something like 60Mb down at about $1/Mb. The phone company is the underdog that gets you from under the thumb of the cable company at a low…

I have gigabit internet from AT&T - $70 a month. On my best computer I routinely get 900Mbps+/900Mbps+. No data caps, no extra fees. Even in the few areas where Comcast does offer 1Gbps they still only have 35Mbps up stream. It's the cable companies that are being left behind by fiber deployments.

Verizon stopped deploying FIOS to new cities in 2010 and entirely in 2015. Since then, they've begun building out in Boston, but future plans are unclear. AT&T has been deploying new fiber, but that was a condition for them to acquire DirecTV. It's a long way from being an option for most Americans.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#153

Post by [deleted] »

aanm1988 wrote: post #31
oldrny wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the idea of network neutrality to prevent discriminating between traffic sources, not quantities? I.e. providers can still charge an arm and a leg for heavy users, and allow 'light' users to pay significantly less (maybe based on some non-linear scale?)

Yeah, but anti-neutrality people tend to try to create the other narrative. Popular metaphor I've seen is "net neutrality is like telling the post office they have to charge the same for a large heavy package and an envelope". Which is not true, you have to charge the same for each heavy package regardless of what is in it, but you can still charge more than an envelope.

[deleted]

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#154

Post by scarface74 »

wahern wrote: post #151
wtallis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a short-term situation that is already mostly dead. The pre-existing infrastructure of POTS and CATV wiring was re-purposed to provide Internet connectivity. But the last-mile POTS infrastructure is completely saturated and xDLS services cannot compete against DOCSIS. Comcast can upgrade you from 20Mbps to 1Gbps by replacing the box down the street and selling you a new modem. AT&T has to dig up the street an…

POTS still has alot of life left in it. It just hasn't seen any investment. Long-term it could handle greater overall capacity given each household has a physically dedicated line to an aggregation point. Phone companies just need to invest in putting the DSL modems closer to the households, say at the neighborhood cabinet rather than the switching station. A literal mile is too far. VDSL2 can do 100Mb/s in each dire…

AT&T is not interested in delivering video over wires. They want to move customers to DirectTV as quickly as possible. There is no marginal cost to deliver video over satellite to an additional customer as far as Infrastructure.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#155

Post by JoshTriplett »

and0 wrote: post #136
JoshTriplett wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...until the ISP decides to charge a large amount of money for the ability to do that, and then under-provision their peering links so that there is no other way to have adequate performance. The latter is the primary problem here. > Require last mile ISPs to do free peering with anyone who has traffic for their last mile customers. What does "last mile ISP" mean here? DSL is no longer competitive, and most impleme…

I appreciate that you bring these questions up but your overall point seems to be "this is complicated and you can't provide logically / morally perfect arguments", which seems a little pointless. All legal matters are complicated, but we're a modern society full of a lot of bright people and "free market lol ISPs get to be highway robbers now" doesn't seem like the best we can do. I also disagree with the notion tha…

My argument isn't "this is complicated so let's not"; it's "this is complicated and needs to be handled with care, not with a trivial attempted fix like 'dumb pipes only' the way people often seem to think". Together with a healthy dose of "regulation has historically failed to adapt to future technologies". And we don't really want regulations that privilege the tech we currently know over the future tech we don't; that tends to lead in unpleasant directions, including regulatory capture and blocking of future competitors.

I think the fundamental problem here is that in most locations we don't have a market at all, free or otherwise. We're looking at all these restrictions in an effort to work around the fundamental problem of "people have little to no choice in ISPs". If you're going to have one ISP in an area and regulate its behavior heavily, you might as well just have the government run it. (Note: that's not a recommendation.)

I'd be entirely in favor of solving the problem by saying "last-mile infrastructure (from customers all the way to the nearest meet-me room) is a public utility, all ISPs have to remain separate from the last-mile infrastructure". If the average customer had a choice of half a dozen or more ISPs, none of these problems would arise, because any ISP stupid enough to make services deliberately worse would get dropped in favor of ISPs that don't. ISPs could then compete on everything from services provided, customer service, neutrality, geek-friendliness, IPv6 availability, CDNs/mirrors, or anything else they think people want.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#156

Post by massysett »

wtallis wrote: post #127
massysett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a NN opponent, you have somewhat captured my viewpoint. Mostly I think NN is fighting the last war. NN proponents continually assert there is no competition for wired Internet and, therefore, it must be regulated. I think looking at wired Internet defines much too narrow a market. As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well. The recent reignition o…

> As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well. Ignoring the laws of physics tends to make for bad public policy. Wireless will never be able to compete against wired services. This disparity will only grow over time, not shrink. There are only two ways for wireless providers to substantially increase the speed of their offerings: by acquiring more spe…

You assume that high-speed wideband that is always getting faster and wider is of paramount importance. I doubt this is the case. Furthermore, more spectrum is not necessarily needed to improve bandwidth as technology improves.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#157

Post by wtallis »

and0 wrote: post #124
JoshTriplett wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you phrase it as just "don't prioritize traffic", you've just broken most CDNs, as well as QoS that optimizes for latency/bandwidth to improve VoIP and similar. There's absolutely nothing wrong with, for instance, a content provider handing an ISP a box that sits on their network, mirrors/caches content, and serves it up to that ISP's customers. That helps the content provider, the ISP, and the ISP's customers. An…

Thanks for the robust answer. I think the CDN fix could be built right into net-neutrality laws: If you're going to support that functionality then also do it equally to any CDN that is also willing to foot the bill and/or meets certain criteria. For example, don't only let Netflix's smaller competitors let that box sit on your network. (No, this regulation wouldn't be burdensome either.) QoS is something I'm unfamil…

> As long as that applied to all VoIP services and apps equally, though I'm not sure how you would be able to tell.

The only fair way to do this is to use port numbers and protocols and endpoint IP addresses only for the purpose of telling which packets belong to which traffic flow or customer. For deciding which flows get priority, you should look only at the actual pattern of traffic: sparse low-rate flows should be assumed to be interactive, in the same manner that your operating system's CPU scheduler assumes that processes with intermittent load are more latency-sensitive than long-running sustained loads. To see how this kind of packet scheduling works in the real world, look at the fq_codel and cake queue disciplines in Linux. The former has become the default for many Linux distributions and is used by some of the more modern commercial wireless routers.

This will have the side effect that my ssh session will get the same preferential treatment as your VoIP, unless I'm using it to tunnel rsync.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#158

Post by amazon_not »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #87
and0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ^ I say this every time and no one has ever been able to answer: how is a simple "don't prioritize traffic" some kind of competition-killing regulation, and how would removing it actually create competition anyway?

If you phrase it as just "don't prioritize traffic", you've just broken most CDNs, as well as QoS that optimizes for latency/bandwidth to improve VoIP and similar. There's absolutely nothing wrong with, for instance, a content provider handing an ISP a box that sits on their network, mirrors/caches content, and serves it up to that ISP's customers. That helps the content provider, the ISP, and the ISP's customers. An…

> If you phrase it as just "don't prioritize traffic", you've just broken most CDNs, as well as QoS that optimizes for latency/bandwidth to improve VoIP and similar.

This is simply incorrect. CDNs are not prioritized on any ISP network. CDNs work because they have a shorter route to the end user, not because they have a higher priority.

ISPs should not and do not apply QoS in their core for VoIP or anything else when it's part of generic Internet traffic. It's the end users responsibility to QoS police VoIP or other traffic on their WAN interface. The ISP just shifts the bits.

Not privatizing traffic does not break CDNs nor customer QoS. Neither of these things have anything to do with net neutrality.

> But even then, how do you draw a bright line between "deliberately degrading", "not giving an advantage to", and "not doing anything to address bandwidth problems when they arise"?

It's pretty obvious how you draw that bright line. Don't prioritize and don't congest interfaces.

> How would you suggest writing a regulation that doesn't break CDNs and similar, and that can tell the difference between "deliberately hurting" and "not helping"?

Easy. As I already wrote, forbid prioritizing and saturation of network interconnects.

> How will that regulation adapt when people come up with new ideas to make the web faster?

It does not need to when done right, as explained above.

> One angle I could imagine working: limiting the ability of one company or family of companies to run both an ISP and network services via that ISP. Still hard to write something robust, though.)

Nothing hard about it. It's called functional separation and it's a widely applied remedy to the anticompetitive nature of telecom markets in other countries.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#159

Post by grzm »

Retric wrote: post #122
necessity wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People agree with someone you disagree, so it must be a conspiracy. Also I think you underestimate the intelligence of the average commentor.

Look at the comment and submission history of the account he responded to. It's a well maintained shill used for propaganda and likely one of many. This is then kind of thing you see in authoritarian states and rather chilling.

If you believe an account is being used for some sort of abuse, please contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer. They are very responsive.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#160

Post by massysett »

cstejerean wrote: post #137
massysett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a NN opponent, you have somewhat captured my viewpoint. Mostly I think NN is fighting the last war. NN proponents continually assert there is no competition for wired Internet and, therefore, it must be regulated. I think looking at wired Internet defines much too narrow a market. As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well. The recent reignition o…

Wireless competition is only alive because the government blocked the merger of T-Mobile and AT&T and then of Spring and T-Mobile. This then forced T-Mobile (and now Sprint) to get creative in trying to compete with Verizon and AT&T. Also, wireless is not really competition for home internet. Try cancelling your home internet service and relying solely on one of the wireless carriers and see how far you'll get. The l…

Wireless is not for everyone--not yet. However, many people do not use a lot of bandwidth and they may find wireless to be quite adequate. As wireless bandwidth goes up in quality and down in price, people might truly start to "cut the cord".

Twenty years ago you could substitute "cellular" for "wireless" and "landline" for "home internet" and make the same claims. No one dreamed people would eliminate land phones back when only a few had a "car phone".

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