Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#111

Post by exelius » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

revelation wrote: post #95

shubb wrote: post #36

Can anyone think of any advantages to a non-neutral internet? I can think of a few - Netflix and Skype would work better. Most likely, we'd be able to pay for priority traffic, just like we pay for a large AWS instance. Non-priority traffic might be cheaper than current bandwidth. It would be crazy to suggest all sites be forced to use the same size AWS instance... Some types of traffic are bandwidth sensitive, like…

You are burning an artificial technical straw-man. There is no technical capacity limit at play here. Networking technology has leapfrogged the bandwidth available to consumers many times over, and to boot, it is pretty much infinitely scalable. So when theres no problem transferring all of Netflix, Skype and BitTorrent simultaneously, why slow any of it? Sure, at times hardware fails, fiber is damaged, and ISPs can…

There's no technical capacity limit, that's true -- but there are operational and financial constraints. Replacing a half million routers across the country to remove the previous technical constraints isn't an easy or fast thing to do: the hardware will be obsolete before the implementation is finished.

Think about everything that goes into this: they can't just pick a piece of hardware off of Amazon; they have to review proposals for companies to manufacture and support the hardware over their 10-year lifespan. They then have to train their employees on them, develop migration plans, rollback plans, schedule maintenance windows, etc. These migration plans often involve significant changes to CPE configurations, which also need to be planned, tested, implemented and trained for.

It's a huge infrastructure. It costs a lot of money to make any significant change. And you seem to be confusing Ethernet with a last-mile technology; it's more of a last hundred feet technology. A lot of the effort over the last 10 years has been spent moving the telecom-owned equipment closer to consumer homes so that faster speeds can be obtained over shorter cable runs. As the length of a cable run increases, so does interference and you have to dial down speeds as a result (this is even true of fiber, albeit to a lesser extent).

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#112

Post by exelius » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #105

exelius wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Packets get dropped when links are saturated as they often are during peak hours. I know a network admin would think "well the links should never be saturated" but the economics of that just don't work in the consumer ISP space. You aim for a target level of service that means certain portions of the network will be saturated, and use QoS to ensure things like DNS and HTTP remain responsive. Regardless, the point is…

the economics of that just don't work in the consumer ISP space A citation is needed here. Somehow consumer ISPs got along for 15 years without "permanent congestion".

Because they didn't have 50% of their users trying to view 6 mbit/s video streams.

EDIT: Just wanted to clarify that 50% is a number I pulled out of my ass. The general point is that the percentage of users who stream video online on a regular basis is increasing more quickly than the economics/logistics allow the ISPs to perform network upgrades.

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#113

Post by loup-vaillant » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:03 PM UTC

But we already have such a slow lane. And it already made the internet less free and less useful.

It's the upload bandwidth.

Weak upload effectively killed peer to peer. File sharing is slower than it could be, and e-mail, chat, blogs… are all in the "Cloud". Very convenient, but also dangerous (insert random EFF or FSF argument here —they all apply).

With a worthy upload bandwidth, all these things could use a server at home, with many advantages for choice, control, privacy… You could argue it's impractical for a lambda user (and it is), but that's not the problem. If someone try to sell a simple server with a fantastic UX that host e-mail, blog, vlog, social network, and distributed encrypted backup, all out of the box, it would still suck because of the damn bandwidth —and firewalls in some cases. So, this business model is dead in the water, which is why it is still so dammed difficult to install one's own mail server.

You want net neutrality? Start with a neutral bandwidth. Stop treating users like consumers, and they may stop acting like ones. With any luck, it should kill YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Skype… except the users will still do what these "services" offer.

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#114

Post by shubb » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:03 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #106

revelation wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are burning an artificial technical straw-man. There is no technical capacity limit at play here. Networking technology has leapfrogged the bandwidth available to consumers many times over, and to boot, it is pretty much infinitely scalable. So when theres no problem transferring all of Netflix, Skype and BitTorrent simultaneously, why slow any of it? Sure, at times hardware fails, fiber is damaged, and ISPs can…

There is no technical capacity limit at play here. This. The US market is ripe for disruption or regulation. Sure, if you live remotely in Arizona, it may be hard to get a fat pipe, but it seems that even most cities have outrageous prices. I currently live in Germany. We have 150MBit downstream, 5 MBit upstream, plus phone and television for 40 Euro per month. When we lived in The Netherlands we were on 130 MBit dow…

Strikes me folks here are really complaining about a broken cable market, made up of local monopolies.

I googled the American cable market a bit, and some of what was described - the cable majors carving up the country so as not to compete, or aggressively blocking new competitors - that stuff sounds like anti-competitive practice.

Writing from a country with a functioning cable market, when I hear 'ISP will charge for X', I think 'Well I will change ISP then'. If you can't do that, I think net neutrality is the least of your problems.

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#115

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

k3liutZu wrote: post #32

TeMPOraL wrote: post #26

Late to the discussion about the general issue; could someone please help me understand what's the difference between the "Fast Lane"/"Slow Lane" and good old QoS?

It basically is QoS. But out of your control. And in favor of the highest bidder.

Was QoS ever under my control? I can manage things up to my router, but not upstream from it. (IANAS, I Am Not A Sysadmim)

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#116

Post by Karunamon » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #39

scrabble wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix is "proliferating anti-net-neutrality"? They seem to be actively and publicly pushing for net neutrality.

They want to maximize profits. So keeping costs down is important, but it's even more important to keep competitors out of the game. Currently they have no serious competitors, so they see the Comcast-tax as a pure added cost. But if this practice goes big and becomes an added cost to the market, barriers to enter it become higher, which keeps their position entrenched. Of course this would require a lot of formalisa…

>Currently they have no serious competitors

Prime video. Hulu.

>most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.

Conjecture. Contrary to populist belief, not every corporation is a soulless, amoral entity. Netflix has yet to demonstrate in even the smallest way that they are for anything but complete neutrality.

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#117

Post by CocaKoala » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

bitJericho wrote: post #86

CocaKoala wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't feel like getting to choose between two terrible options is really that much better than being stuck with one terrible option.

So you see no/little difference between an unethical ISP that's cheaper than a more expensive ethical one? I'm not sure what you think this debate is about.

I'd love to support a more ethical ISP, but as a practical matter, internet is already expensive and spending more for the same or less isn't really a workable option. Downgrading my connection is also not a great option; if I'm forced to choose between a fast expensive connection and a cheap slow connection, then yeah; it's great that Net Neutrality is a thing, but now I'm stuck in the shitty situation I was trying to prevent anyways.

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#118

Post by pdq » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:08 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #64

I don't know that this is the solution (or even that there's a problem). I know my opinion isn't very popular on HN on this issue; but I continue to share it because I feel it's important that people understand the view from the other side of the fence. I expect to get downvoted because people disagree with me, but then magical internet points never really mattered much to me. I think all this talk of the "slow lane"…

The other part that virtually no one talks about is how this would be regulated. Are we going to have "internet inspectors" from the FCC doing periodic surprise checks of every ISP? Will ISPs be required to have a neutrality license with full historical audit logs?

This reminds me of when the TSA took over airport screening after 9/11, over the belief that only a government agency could screen passengers securely. The net effect was longer lines, more expensive travel, less rights for flyers (ie either you get a body scan or a pat-down, and no more liquids on flights), and in general less happy travelers.

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#119

Post by jsz0 » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

shubb wrote: post #36

Can anyone think of any advantages to a non-neutral internet? I can think of a few - Netflix and Skype would work better. Most likely, we'd be able to pay for priority traffic, just like we pay for a large AWS instance. Non-priority traffic might be cheaper than current bandwidth. It would be crazy to suggest all sites be forced to use the same size AWS instance... Some types of traffic are bandwidth sensitive, like…

> Can anyone think of any advantages to a non-neutral internet?

It would give ISPs an incentive to spend the large sums of money required to upgrade their networks/infrastructure to offer significantly faster Internet speeds. I very much doubt that any amount of legislation/regulation is going to force ISPs into it otherwise.

Re: Dear Internet: Let’s Demo The Slow Lane

#120

Post by 3rd3 » Wed, May 07, 2014, 5:15 PM UTC

wiremine wrote: post #29

alandarev wrote: post #11

Issue is severe, but the proposed solution does not sound efficient in any way. In comparison to blackout day: 1. Turning site off is a lot easier than installing apache module and configuring it. What if site admin does not even have root access? 2. Customer getting the slow site load might not get the message, but instead turn around for a competitor. [1] [1] 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 s…

I don't think slowing the site down really helps convey the speed difference anyways, because they aren't seeing it apples-to-apples. Instead, I think you want to load two version of the site in to iFrames (or something) and throttle one. This would also be a good way to show a user how crappy their connection is compared to a _real_ high speed connection: The problem isn't just that they are creating a "fast" lane a…

The iframes idea is a really good one because it wouldn't require changes to the web server configuration. The throttle could simply be simulated with delayed loading using JavaScript.