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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

#161

Post by ajross »

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.

To be fair: even assuming subverter is a shill, it's far more likely that the account is being directed by the ISP lobby or related interests than by the FCC, whose employees are bland bureaucrats except at the very top. That's not authoritarianism, it's just astroturf. Non-government entities have been doing it for decades too.

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

#162

Post by revelation »

grandalf wrote: post #46
riskable wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone actually believe we will "run out of bandwidth" to the point where traffic shaping will become essential? Traffic shaping of saturated links sounds like a waste of time and resources when it's so much easier to just upgrade the hardware. It's cheaper too! It also happens to be the fucking purpose of the ISP (to provide adequate bandwidth for their customers). Think of how much it costs to pay people to ma…

> Traffic shaping of saturated links sounds like a waste of time and resources when it's so much easier to just upgrade the hardware. It's cheaper too! It also happens to be the fucking purpose of the ISP (to provide adequate bandwidth for their customers). This is a very naive comment. For anything other than a dedicated "business class" circuit with hard performance guarantees, speculation and shaping is involved i…

And people are perfectly fine with that! Define a service level, any level, then you have a product to sell.

But the current situation, where they sell "up to" whatever the last mile will sustain and then don't ever upgrade backbones, don't add interconnects, that particular fraud can not go on. A market doesn't work when vendors can sell you a product, lock you in and face no repercussions when they don't deliver even 10%.

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

#163

Post by pseudalopex »

rayiner wrote: post #126
bluejekyll wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a choice. AT&T in my area of SF is still crap compared to Comcast. So yes, I could choose to use AT&T, but I would be getting substantially worse service. All cities should be investing in building out infrastructure themselves, as it would increase the desire for companies and people to live and work where they have better connectivity.

Cities have no money. All across the country, they're insolvent and drowning in pension and other liabilities. SF is flush right now, which makes it particularly outrageous that it doesn't invest in infrastructure. But SF's behavior also tells you how cities got so deeply in debt with nothing to show for it.

A number of cities have tried to build fiber networks only to be thwarted by ISP lobbying at the state level. Some had their eyes on Google Fiber. SF is studying municipal fiber, although I don't know how seriously.

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

#164

Post by wtallis »

massysett wrote: post #156
wtallis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The assumption isn't perfect, but it's close enough. Techniques like MIMO offer diminishing returns for their cost to handset complexity and battery life. There are no big leaps to be had in wireless that are comparable to eg. switching from DSL to fiber. And it is very clear that demand for bandwidth is growing with no sign of stopping. Users want 4k streaming and cloud backups/storage, and display resolutions are still growing.

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

#165

Post by elastic_church »

Balgair wrote: post #140
Retric wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, the GP's name is: subverter. Like, it's in their flippin name.

I'm going to have to start shilling for conservatives so people give me accolades for my username

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

#166

Post by amazon_not »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #155
and0 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

> "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"

Why do you think turning ISPs into dumb pipes only would not fix most, if not all, problems?

The reason we have all these problems is that the ISPs do not want to be dumb pipes only.

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

#167

Post by redler »

grandalf wrote: post #65
wtallis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For anything other than a dedicated "business class" circuit with hard performance guarantees, speculation and shaping is involved in delivering the end product. The alternative to a connection with a SLA guarantee is a best effort connection, not discriminatory traffic shaping. Underprovisioning part of your network doesn't require you to show favoritism to certain traffic—the normal way to cope with larger than e…

> just start dropping packets where there's congestion Aside from being normal, do you think this is preferable because it is fair? I think of QoS as a way of allowing more types of SLA to exist. Maybe Youtube makes a deal with T-Mobile to keep videos playing longer (before packets start dropping) in exchange for money. This money might allow T-Mobile to invest in other parts of its infrastructure. Isn't any backbone…

Maybe Youtube makes a deal with T-Mobile to keep videos playing longer (before packets start dropping) in exchange for money. This money might allow T-Mobile to invest in other parts of its infrastructure.

Another possibility: as a major ISP nears network capacity, they can implicitly (or explicitly, depending on law) solicit revenue streams from Youtube and many others for "priority access" to their somewhat- or completely-captive customer base. Eventually, secondary tiers are created to efficiently segment the content market -- a priority plan conveniently sized for every budget. Those who can't or won't pay fall into an ever decreasing performance category as the priority slices are snatched up.

The ISP then starts selling premium bundles on the customer side -- Platinum Service will include Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Apple (and get our bonus in-house streaming service at no extra charge!). Platinum-Plus, for another $14.95 per month plus fees, adds priority streams from your choice of up to three major sports content sources. And Platinum-Pro adds non-degraded VPN so you can work from home. Choice!

The ISP is monetizing the fact that they're NOT adding capacity. Eventually they can choose to take the hit to their numbers and make that investment, but they'll do so within the now-normal tiered framework -- offering new capacity and premium deals at the top of the stack, rather than letting the bottom free-ride into better service.

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

#168

Post by wtallis »

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…

VDSL2 is great for the areas where most of the customers are already close enough to benefit. But outside of urban areas, you're still proposing almost the same degree of disruption to the neighborhood as a full fiber deployment. Instead of digging up the road and my yard and putting new cables into my house, you're now merely digging up the road and putting new boxes in every fifth yard. And all to offer downstream service that is almost as fast as what the DOCSIS provider currently delivers, and upstream capacity that most customers won't see much benefit from.

The dedicated last hop bandwidth of DSL sounds nice, but in practice the shared nature of DOCSIS usually isn't a problem and when it is the solution is no more expensive or invasive than what DSL requires up front for every neighborhood.

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

#169

Post by nickbauman »

riskable wrote: post #21
jerkstate wrote: post #16

Does anyone with a strong understanding of internetworking, peering and transit contract negotiation actually believe that "net neutrality" is possible? traffic shaping of saturated links seems like a necessary outcome to not undermine the smaller users (i.e. low bandwidth communications) that are impacted by heavy users (i.e. video streaming) if two peering parties can't come to terms on cost sharing for link upgrad…

Does anyone actually believe we will "run out of bandwidth" to the point where traffic shaping will become essential? Traffic shaping of saturated links sounds like a waste of time and resources when it's so much easier to just upgrade the hardware. It's cheaper too! It also happens to be the fucking purpose of the ISP (to provide adequate bandwidth for their customers). Think of how much it costs to pay people to ma…

Unfortunately profit is almost always made from oversubscribing the lines.

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

#170

Post by mulmen »

devindotcom wrote: post #142
guelo wrote: post #50

I hate these types of articles that provide extensive quotes and even a screenshot of part of the pdf, but refuse to link to the actual documents. It's probably an advertising thing where they don't want people to leave the site. The actual statements are available here https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-addresses-unnecessary-accou...

You're quite right. Normally I'm pretty good about that. (At least, I remembered today: https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/24/fcc-prepares-to-pull-broad... ) This article went through several revisions as I did research so the original opening couple paragraphs and links got lost in the shuffle. I've added the link back in.

Wow, thank you for this response. An author responding to a comment on their article seems rare in my eyes. Do you think this kind of commentary should happen on the TC website instead of a third party site? Do you think Facebook comments are conducive to constructive commentary on your articles?
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