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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

#181

Post by wtallis »

grandalf wrote: post #139
wtallis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In other words, network topology adapts to traffic demand (albeit more slowly than traffic shaping). A fair traffic management policy would allow for YouTube users to consume bandwidth in exact proportion to their share of overall demand for bandwidth. Traffic shaping on top of that could only have the effect of meaning that a YouTube user will get more bandwidth than their Netflix-using neighbor even if they're bo…

> A fair traffic management policy would allow for YouTube users to consume bandwidth in exact proportion to their share of overall demand for bandwidth. I think this statement is in effect a straw man, since the relevant consideration for QoS is the timing of consuming that bandwidth. If you mean instantaneous bandwidth, then you are saying that both Youtube customers and Netflix customers should be able to use a ci…

> "If you mean instantaneous bandwidth, then you are saying that both Youtube customers and Netflix customers should be able to use a circuit that they primarily use for watching video to also be equally optimized for real time protocols.

> If you argue that a VOIP customer should be able to place a call with the absolute minimal latency the network can provide, even if it means that video content will (on average) buffer for an extra second, that is not an example of a fair system, just one that is extremely friendly to VOIP."

That's the real straw man. The current state of the art for QoS is active queue management that both increases effective link utilization and reduces latency to a point that VoIP is usable, as compared with naive FIFO queuing with tail drops when the queues are full. That's why I said QoS isn't a zero-sum game. In the real world, you don't actually have to choose between throughput and latency; both can be good enough for what people normally want to do. VoIP traffic doesn't cost enough bandwidth to have a significant impact on Netflix video quality, and firing up a Netflix stream doesn't have to produce queuing latencies that make VoIP unusable. And none of this requires any traffic shaping rules that deliberately identify what's video or VoIP—that's an objective criteria for "neutral" that doesn't force ISPs to use naive sub-optimal traffic management.

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

#182

Post by seibelj »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #60
seibelj wrote: post #54

I know several people who are highly involved with the FCC, telecom industry, and telecom law that think that "network neutrality" is just 2 words. Until 1970, and only because of lawsuits, it was illegal to connect anything to your phone line. You could get any phone you wanted from Ma Bell as long as it was black.[0] If you wanted a different color you had to pay extra. It took force to make Ma Bell and the FCC all…

How do you imagine the deregulation in this article will help competition? Specifically, that is.

By allowing upstart MVNO's to avoid arduous regulation processes. I am involved with 2 MVNO's that have been trying to merge for over a year, they don't have that many customers, and no one opposes it. Yet the FCC dragged their feet with no updates and no reason for the delay. This has real world, multi-million dollar consequences. The process is moving forward now since Ajit got hired.

Armchair technologists read an article about net neutrality on arstechnica and think it's black and white. News flash - telecom and ISP's have been shaping traffic since the beginning! You think NetFlix has high quality video on shitty connections because they are nice? Wrong! They pay for the privilege.[0]

I say, let the free market decide. The history of telecom is beyond insane. If you actually care about this stuff maybe you should learn more. This book is pretty esoteric but it gives the true history https://www.amazon.com/Great-Telecom-Meltdown-Fred-Goldstein...

[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401...

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

#183

Post by OraclesDyn388 »

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…

With respect, I see your opinion as the naive one. Qualia and all that...

The whole argument against "net neutrality" is plainly spoken as: A financial scheme to create a "new market" that I'll call "packet tollbooths."

The financialists run the world, so we'll carve out these new schemes that benefit the wealthy more than humanity.

When we could simply build newer, cheaper, higher capacity hardware, and keep installing it. Which we're going to do to some extent anyway. The extent is also determined more by financialists than the public and their needs.

Needs which could be articulated plainly by engineers and those that know how technology works. But again, they're pushed aside to serve their financialist masters as well.

It's another class based division, which shits on democratic process.

"Can't pay the toll? Slow lane for you! Enjoy Netflix Potato quality streams."

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

#184

Post by amazon_not »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #175
amazon_not wrote: post #158

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. 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…

> 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. So, anyone who can successfully define what they're doing as "not prioritizing" can entirely sidestep any regulation you have in mind. Putting a server in the ISP's datacenter is a common approach. Traffic to those servers doesn't have to go over any external peering lin…

> So, anyone who can successfully define what they're doing as "not prioritizing" can entirely sidestep any regulation you have in mind.

This argument makes no sense. Colocating a CDN node has nothing to do with prioritization. Nobody is fiddling with any QoS settings.

> Putting a server in the ISP's datacenter is a common approach. Traffic to those servers doesn't have to go over any external peering links.

What is your point?

> As one simple example, look at the ISPs that accelerate the first N bytes of connections, to prioritize interactive requests over bulk transfers/downloads.

This is an incorrect characterization of PowerBoost. PowerBoost uncaps your DOCSIS connection temporarily to take advantage of any momentarily free spare capacity. This is not prioritization, it's getting a free tier upgrade temporarily.

> Other ISPs apply more sophisticated approaches.

Such as?

> So, receive and deliver all traffic, regardless of available capacity or financial constraints?

Don't be silly. As long as the ISP provides whatever speed tier they sold to the consumer all is good and well. If they cannot do that then they are shortchanging the consumer and should be penalized for that.

> Provision every part of the network so it can handle all the traffic passing over any other part, because they're not allowed to limit bandwidth in any way at any point?

Yes, to the extent required to provide the service they sold.

> A saturated interconnect might mean "we're trying to screw Netflix", or it might mean "we can't afford it right now" (either because they're a small ISP and don't have the money, or because they're spending it on something their customers want more).

If you saturate your interconnect you fail at ISPing. There is no excuse. Interconnect capacity is cheap and plentiful.

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

#185

Post by seibelj »

JediWing wrote: post #134
seibelj wrote: post #54

I know several people who are highly involved with the FCC, telecom industry, and telecom law that think that "network neutrality" is just 2 words. Until 1970, and only because of lawsuits, it was illegal to connect anything to your phone line. You could get any phone you wanted from Ma Bell as long as it was black.[0] If you wanted a different color you had to pay extra. It took force to make Ma Bell and the FCC all…

Huh? The only reason you could connect "any lawful device" after 1968 was because of the FCC "Carterphone" rulemaking. In its absence, Ma Bell would have kept forced leasing of standard phones as long as possible. Perhaps I'm misunderstand you (or missing sarcasm?).

The FCC was regulating the monopoly! And why would anyone want a monopoly to exist? "Cheap phone service for grandma". That's always been the justification for all the insanity. It took years to deregulate and allow true competition, and it always came through because of lawsuits. Telecom is an industry run by lawyers.

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

#186

Post by seibelj »

badsock wrote: post #67
seibelj wrote: post #54

I know several people who are highly involved with the FCC, telecom industry, and telecom law that think that "network neutrality" is just 2 words. Until 1970, and only because of lawsuits, it was illegal to connect anything to your phone line. You could get any phone you wanted from Ma Bell as long as it was black.[0] If you wanted a different color you had to pay extra. It took force to make Ma Bell and the FCC all…

Telecoms are a classic example of a natural monopoly - which is to say it would be monopoly whether there's regulation or not. How do you imagine there would be competition in, say, fibre? A bunch of companies all running their own last mile? That's incredibly inefficient.

I would argue that wired and wireless are very different beasts. If you want to regulate fiber, that's debatable, but a competitive wireless landscape is ripe for competition given all the possibilities for delivering service.

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

#187

Post by OraclesDyn388 »

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…

The idea as I define is: Yes congestion management is a necessity. But congestion management should be done at as high a level as possible, that is, if we see a lot of bits, we add more hardware or shift those bits over to a similar path of similar performance and capacity and fill it, then add more.

We don't care about who sent them or received them, we just keep congestion low overall.

Usually the anti-neutrality crowd pedals an agenda of metered paying and those who can't get shittier service. It's more regressive rules intended to raise costs/profits by focusing on squeezing more money from those that have it, and ignoring everyone else.

The former is merely a technical solution to a technical problem.

The latter is the ruling financialist class forcing their "sound economics" on humanity without providing anything truly valuable in return

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

#188

Post by diminoten »

throwaway729 wrote: post #26
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…

So there's "internetworking, peering and transit contract negotiation", etc. And then there's "Comcast allowed to bundle internal video streaming platform with bandwidth in order to compete against Netflix" It's completely trivial for the FCC to allow the former and clamp down hard on the latter.

Why is it trivial?

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

#189

Post by OraclesDyn388 »

dnautics wrote: post #79
westbywest wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between shaping traffic to better fit the capacity available, and constricting traffic since you're incentivized to push alternate traffic from a business partner. The latter is what NN advocates are trying to discourage, and it does arguably mess with the 'level playing field' notion.

I don't think this distinction is as trivial as you think. Especially in a legal sense. Unless you want judges adjudicating in the Potter Stewart "I know it when I see it" sense, which can get scary.

You did nothing to explain how it's more complicated, or inform us of what we're missing, and ended on a draconian fear mongery type comment.

I don't really get how HN can take itself so much more serious than Reddit or Twitter.

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

#190

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #123
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. And I don't think the majority of "net neutrality" advocates want to break that. ...until the ISP decides to charge a large amount of money for the ability to do th…

> ...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…

> What does "last mile ISP" mean here?

It means you control a physical data wire that goes into more than a thousand residential buildings.

> DSL is no longer competitive, and most implementations of cable and fiber have no separation between "infrastructure provider" and "bandwidth provider".

You're the last mile ISP if you're the infrastructure provider regardless of whether you're also the bandwidth provider.

> What if their central office isn't connected to anyone else directly, because they get all their bandwidth and peering from one or more of the major backbones? Presumably they can say "go to those backbones", rather than having to start making peering arrangements with individual services.

Outside of megaplayers like Netflix and Google who are effectively Tier 1 networks unto themselves, the backbones and CDNs are the people who use the free peering. Some website like Yelp or Expedia doesn't want to peer with ISPs or run a CDN, they want to pay Akamai et al to take care of that.

> What if their central office doesn't have an "across the street" where you can put servers?

You can put them wherever you want to. Nobody stops you from putting all your servers for the whole world in one city, or having regional hubs, or doing whatever you want. That's your network, not the last mile ISP's. Level 3 can run fiber from an office 200 miles away if they think that's worth it over buying closer office space.

> Or what if they don't have a "central office", period?

Then where do they normally peer with other networks or operate CDN hardware?

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