And what if Comcast was throttling Netflix on their peering connections - let’s say because they are supporting hospital video traffic for remote operations or consultations? Would they be the bad guys then? Or should people’s movies override health care concerns?
Such complexity is precisely why it is imperative to keep the FCC out of this.
You are paying for a connection to the Internet. You are not paying for a full speed connection to every other site on the Internet, and it is beyond absurd to expect your ISP to provide that, not to mention the remote site having to support every user at full bandwidth. Bandwidth is, and always will be, a shared and constrained resource.
It may assume that the ISP is aware of what protocols are flowing across its pipes. It does assume that the ISP is aware of the bandwidth flowing to and from particular sources. The latter is definitely their business (and their Business); the former may be.
Your choice. You can get charged depending on the class of service you’re currently using. Or you can resign yourself to paying extra for peak bandwidth even when you aren’t using it. Or you can stop assuming that the Internet is a good vehicle for high-bandwidth streaming data, which it isn’t and has never been.
Ya pays yer money and takes yer cherce. You can’t have it all. What are you willing to give up?
And what if Comcast was throttling Netflix on their peering connections - let’s say because they are supporting hospital video traffic for remote operations or consultations? Would they be the bad guys then? Or should people’s movies override health care concerns?
Such complexity is precisely why the FCC should keep out of this.
You sound just like the Republicans who are complaining about over-regulation of the fossil fuel industry while they pollute the hell out of everyone due to vast under-regulation.
An overzealous FCC (oxymoron) isn’t the problem here. This is a problem manufactured by a lack of proper broadband ISP competition.
You act as if Comcast isn’t already a massive, anti-competitive, protected oligopoly. If we had more true regulation and competition, there’d already be more than enough bandwidth for hospital video traffic, Netflix traffic and then some. Competition would have pushed it there by now.
These aren’t true technical hurdles, these are political hurdles enabled by anti-American, anti-competitive sloth in (too big to exist) corporations that are increasingly calling all the shots as they push false dilemmas onto consumers who lack proper choices in broadband.
The problem isn’t that there’s too much regulation, the problem is that there is not nearly enough. Comcast has been coddled by a lax government into becoming an anti-competitive oligopoly. Corporate communism is the issue, certainly not a meddling FCC (once again, an oxymoron).
If Comcast can’t handle demand with their massive profits, then it’s time to break them up and introduce competition that can and will. Actually, it’s already time to break them up as they never should have been coddled into this anti-competitive position in the first place.
You say this as though it is a fact. This is a pretense.
This is competition in action
This is FCC inaction
Those are a lot of malicious assumptions, which seem to pass the idea along that the government is the corrupt party here, and the telecom companies are injured parties. It’s quite the narrative.
Why is it that one side of this discussion for you is a devil, and the other the hero of the piece?
The responsibility of MY ISP, and what I expect under the terms of the contract I signed with them, is to provide me the best connection possible that they are capable of, up to the level of bandwidth for which I am paying them. It is not absurd in the slightest to expect them to hold up their end of the deal. When the ISP decides to restrict the bandwidth to a particular site (i.e., Netflix) then the ISP is now violating their contract with me.
This is not a case of Netflix not being able to support all users at full bandwidth, this is the case of an ISP (Comcast) intentionally restricting the bandwidth of their contracted customers. It is extortion, plain and simple.
You made me rethink what I thought I knew about this topic. Thank you!
Edited to add: I have no love for Comcast. Their employees have committed property crimes against me at two out of the last three properties where I’ve lived…and I’ve never been a Comcast customer. At one property, repeated crimes which caused unsafe conditions for my then very young children. Their response every time: we work for Comcast; you can’t do anything to us.
So I was enlightened by your posts on the subject, but that doesn’t mean I want Comcast to benefit in any way.
[quote=“PhasmaFelis, post:15, topic:23896”]through an anonymizing VPN (which should make things slower if the bandwidth isn’t throttled)
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That isn’t necessarily true, it would entirely depend on the route taken from the Comcast user to the VPN provider, and from the VPN provider to Netflix. If that route was not passing through the congested peering point that the direct connection to Netflix was passing through, then it could easily cause that difference in speed.
I won’t speculate on the speedtest thing since I haven’t seen any of that information, however.
The difference here is that Comcast isn’t selling bandwidth to Cogent. It would be more likely that Comcast currently is either buying bandwidth from Cogent, or that they have a free peering agreement which relies on an assumption that the traffic is roughly equal in both directions. Comcast’s trying to get Cogent to pay for peering upgrades, or possibly trying to get them to pay for the imbalance in traffic.
Those peering points are going to need to be upgraded at some point, no matter what - it’s extremely unlikely that removing only Netflix traffic will remove the entire imbalance, and it’s unlikely that Comcast will be capable of making a direct connection to other networks every time there’s a need to lower traffic through those points.
No, it’s only throttling if it’s actually throttling. A congested peering point is not throttling. And it’s known that Cogent’s been having issues with congested peering points, which are causing problems for traffic for everyone passing through those peering points.
Here’s the thing: Cogent doesn’t charge their customers based on what remote networks their traffic goes to, they charge based on the customer’s overall traffic. They could try to negotiate a price increase with Netflix on the idea that Netflix is using so much traffic that it’s forcing them to pay for upgrades in their connectivity to other networks… but Netflix would point out that it’s not as though it’s only their traffic that’s clogging those peering points. It would be much more likely that the costs of upgrades would be spread across Cogent’s customers in that situation.
And that would be business as usual for ISPs.
I’m curious… aside from email, what data are you thinking of that people wouldn’t want to travel as fast as possible? Sure, some applications need traffic to travel quickly or they start to see issues, but no one wants traffic to be slowed.
It seems likely that these tiers of data for different speeds only emerge once you’re charging for tiers of data speeds. In that case, it becomes “you can go fast if you can pay for it”, rather than “you can go fast if your application needs it”.
There’s also a billing problem, in that you (as someone who wants to send data quickly) are most likely not a customer of every network between you and your destination. What happens when five or ten networks are all lining up at the trough, each one with different ideas of how much you should pay for what kind of service, and no way to absolutely verify that you actually sent traffic that passed through their networks?
And the ISPs should be able to decide for their customers what is and is not important? And that decision should be based on how much people are willing to pay, because it’s somehow critical that people who can afford it should not wait, and that should be at the expense of other paying customers?
Do you support separate sidewalks for the wealthy, too?
Oh, I see you rather do support such a concept, and want the government to stay out of the ‘natural order of things’, which involved keeping the best service aside for the best connected, quite literally in this case.
Quality, service, price. Pick any two.
False choice. I expect and have been continuously promised all three by my ISP and the other services which use them to get to me.
The internet is not a truck I am buying, nor is it a private beach which the best paths to can be closed off by entitled landowners.
Would you find it fair if Exxon charged UPS significantly more for gasoline than they charged you, only because UPS uses a lot of fuel? Probably not, but that’s because there is an actually functioning marketplace with hundreds of gasoline stations to choose from - and they each buy their gasoline from a few heavily government regulated refineries.
if there were an actual marketplace here, maybe the fair market mechanisms you describe would come into play, but the pretense that it’s a vibrant healthy marketplace is a farce.
IMHO the FCC needs to flex its muscle on this, and end the practice of preferential data routing which is only profitable due to the false monopolies which they failed to prevent. Never too late though.
I agree that it’s going to be difficult for Comcast to have equal incoming and outgoing traffic on connections to backbone providers. However, Comcast’s own policies for settlement-free peering with internet backbone providers specifies that “Applicant must maintain a traffic scale between its network and Comcast that enables a general balance of inbound versus outbound traffic.”
The rules of course get more complicated as the amount of traffic between two peers gets larger. Overall, those kinds of peering rules tend to be very flexible… right up until one of the parties decides the other should start paying.
Interestingly enough, if Comcast is giving Netflix a full connection with routes out to the rest of the internet and if they have routes that are more optimal than Netflix’s other provider(s), they may see their outgoing traffic rise and the notion that Comcast “will never send out as much traffic” could become even less true.
This is not a Net Neutrality issue. This is an infrastructure investment and a paid peering arrangement. This is really no different than other infrastructure investments content providers make to push their content closer to their customers, such as co-located proxies on ISP networks, and content delivery networks. This is a deal that is good for Comcast customers. At no cost to Comcast, Comcast customers receive a more direct connection to Netflix, improving performance for that service, while load on Comcast’s other peering arrangements is reduced and overall network performance is also improved. This is a Good Thing. I help operate a small ISP, and if a content provider came to me offering a direct link to their service that would reduce my main transit feeds by 1/3 - at no cost to me - I would be jumping out of my skin to make that happen, because it’s not just good for me, it’s good for my customers.
This would only be a Net Neutrality issue if Netflix were paying to have competing services artificially penalized and Netflix artificially prioritized, or if Comcast were threatening to artificially penalize Netflix unless they ponied up. An infrastructure investment is a completely different beast, because it is not an artificial enhancement of service, it is an actual, physical build of new infrastructure to provide better service to their customers, and a purchase of actual services rendered by Comcast for their work in managing that side of the peering arrangement. Conflating infrastructure investment that improves network performance with the artificial manipulation of traffic, and calling it a violation of Net Neutrality principles, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet is built right now, and frankly serves no one. If we can’t keep these things clear then we are going to have a very difficult time addressing real Net Neutrality issues, because we’re obviously unable to distinguish real Net Neutrality issues from imaginary ones.
I’d say you’re at a Crossroads. Funny how profit blinds us.
[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:32, topic:23896”]
And the ISPs should be able to decide for their customers what is and is not important? And that decision should be based on how much people are willing to pay, because it’s somehow critical that people who can afford it should not wait, and that should be at the expense of other paying customers?
[quote]
There are only two choices if you want enough bandwidth available to handle the way the Internet is being used (or in my opinion abused) these days. Either everyone has to pay more for that bandwidth to be available, or those who are actively using it have to pay more. I happen to believe in promoting efficient use of resources, and I think innovation in that area would be driven most effectively by having different QOS tiers at different prices. I also happen to believe in essential services costing less than luxury services, and basic browsing and lower resolution and accepting possible buffering delays and so on can deliver perfectly adequate service for most non-entertainment needs.
If anything, what I’m trying to do is make the wealthy carry more of the excess burden they’re putting on the network.
[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:32, topic:23896”]
Oh, I see you rather do support such a concept, and want the government to stay out of the ‘natural order of things’, which involved keeping the best service aside for the best connected, quite literally in this case.
[quote]
Not what I said, of course. Nor what I intended.
[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:32, topic:23896”]
False choice. I expect and have been continuously promised all three by my ISP and the other services which use them to get to me.
[quote]
You’ve been lucky. We’ve all been indecently lucky. Build-out has kept sufficiently ahead of demand that latency has been low and most ISPs have been able to deliver more than enough bandwidth. I don’t think that’s going to be sustainable for too much longer. I wish it was otherwise.
Flip it around: Would you object if folks who were willing to accept connections with greater latency were offered a discount? I’m not necessarily lobbying for a price hike per se; I’m suggesting that people be able to choose a level of service which meets their needs. Which they’re already doing by picking different levels of bandwidth and by selecting among ISPs which have different throttling policies, in exchange for different price points.
[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:32, topic:23896”]
Would you find it fair if Exxon charged UPS significantly more for gasoline than they charged you, only because UPS uses a lot of fuel?
[quote]
No, but I would find it fair if Exxon charged UPS extra to be able to cut in line ahead of me at the pump. Remember, the question isn’t just bandwidth, it’s throughput – not whether you get served at all or even within a reasonable time, but who gets served in a shorter-than-reasonable time and what octane level they’re demanding. I don’t expect Premium gas at Basic Unleaded prices. I don’t expect First-Class Check-In at Economy-class prices. It’s nice when you can get those, but I think it’s more important for the basic service to be available to everyone at a reasonable price than for everyone to pay the same price but pay more.
I agree with you that there isn’t an actual marketplace here. I disagree with you that this means we throw up our hands and pretend that no problem exists.
The backbones already have preferential/prioritized data routing. It hasn’t caused Internet civilization to collapse; quite the contrary, it’s what has enabled some of the low-latency apps we take for granted such as MMO near-real-time gaming. Nobody much notices that because it’s short packets and low bandwidth and pushing up their priority to reduce latency isn’t especially visible to most other users. Sustained high-bandwidth low-latency connections are more difficult to manage and it’s harder to disguise delays,
If you want streaming movies without hiccups, you need to discuss what is and isn’t allowed to hiccup and how to prioritize those. And this being a for-profit service, that’s going to get into questions of pricing. Idealistically, I wish it didn’t, but I’m an engineer rather than a scientist and I’m more concerned about making the system work best for the most people at least cost than about whether the solution is maximally socialistic – even though my politics do lean in the latter direction.
Even water is subject to rationing at times, and that’s about as basic a social resource as you can get. If you’d rather see the Internet rationed during times of peak load, I can live with that too…
It’s sad how cynicism blinds us. Are you suggesting that businesses should not be in the habit of making deals that can offer their customers better services at lower cost? It’s called innovation.
As a Crapcast customer and Netflix subscriber, the net effect of what we’ve witnessed since the end of January is that it wasn’t a threat, it was action Crapcast took. There was a sudden and huge drop in the quality of Netflix streaming (full and/or super HD dropped to the top end of SD) at our house. We called Netflix first, and from what they could tell, data was streaming out at full and/or super HD. OK. So we call Crapcast and they lied to our faces, pointed fingers at Netflix (then at our TV manufacturer) and then try to sell us their competing (and crappier) streaming service, not to mention that one out-of-country “tech” that tried to sell us even more bandwidth.
There are perfectly legitimate ways for an ISP to determine traffic priority - they’re based on the markings the sender puts on the traffic. What they should do with that information is different for different places in the network.
First of all, IP packet headers have a Class of Service (COS) field. COS0 = “regular”, and it’s the default if you don’t set a COS. COS1=faster, COS2=even faster, COS3=really really fast, etc. Some versions differentiate between “If you’ve got congestion, it’s ok to delay this packet but never drop it” and “it’s ok to drop the packet, but never delay it” (you might use the first for network management traffic and the second for VOIP.) They’re rarely used outside of corporate networks or ISP internal applications. Unfortunately, there isn’t a “COS = -1 Slower” marking. Routers generally support this in hardware, but ISPs don’t generally support it across peering points, because the business models never figured it out.
Then there’s the IP protocol field - In general, TCP is designed to adapt to congestion, delay, and packet loss, and UDP isn’t, so you’d want to prioritize UDP and other non-TCP traffic (especially IP-level functions like ARP), and you’d also want to prioritize IPSEC packets because you don’t know what’s inside them. Routers may not support this in hardware, but it’s a great way to deal with congestion if you’ve got the CPU or hardware horsepower.
Then there’s looking at the port numbers. It’s deeper in the packet, generally requires CPU inspection instead of hardware, so ISPs are less likely to do it, because it may be cheaper to buy more bandwidth than faster routers, but in some applications it can be really useful. The classic thing you’d want to do is give FTP a low priority, HTTP and email middling, TELNET highest. These days almost everything has moved to HTTP or HTTPS, but you can still give HTTP and FTP lower priority. Unfortunately, Bittorrent tends to hide itself in other protocols to avoid malicious ISP blocking.
There’s also session size. Except for streaming video, usually you want to give high priority to shorter transactions and lower priority to longer ones (because they can usually deal with going slower), but you don’t want to do it because neither the user nor the ISP wants you having to restart really long transactions and wasting all the transmit time. Streaming video makes that a tougher question.
They can also poke around inside the packets with Deep Packet Inspection. That’s a useful thing for firewalls and intrusion protection systems to do, especially since most applications and malware wrap themselves in HTTP/HTTPS these days, but it’s almost always inappropriate for an ISP to do to open-internet traffic, and also burns enough CPU horsepower that they don’t usually do it on a routine basis unless they or a customer are under some kind of attack, because it costs too much money. But Moore’s Law has a way of changing the definition of “too expensive”.
What you really would like your ISP to do on your downstream connection, if you have congestion, is to give high priority to VOIP and most other UDP apps and VPNs, medium priority to web and other TCP traffic, and lowest priority to Bittorrent, so the applications that need to be responsive will be responsive and the ones that don’t need it get best-effort.
But congestion in the backbone is a different problem. You have to deal with it in real-time when it happens, which you do partly by setting router priorities and letting TCP adapt to it and partly by doing traffic routing engineering (e.g. moving some traffic to a less congested route to the same destination), but you also have to deal with it by longer-term capacity planning. If you remember the IETF OSI-stack tshirt, Layer 8 is financial and Layer 9 is political, and both of them actually do happen.
*Disclaimer: This is entirely my personal opinion. I work for a large carrier, but not in the ISP part of the business or in public relations, who are the people who can tell you corporate policy. If I were writing official policy, it would be on corporate letterhead and I’d be wearing a suit while I typed it. I’ve mostly worked with large business networks, where you get lots of cool tools to deal with network issues, but that does include internet connectivity these days. *
I don’t know enough about the net neutrality issues to comment on them, but as a Comcast customer and Netflix user I too noticed a sudden and radical change in how Netflix worked for me starting around January. I think it was in Comcast’s interest to fix the problem asap, because other than checking Boingboing and my e-mail the only real thing I use the internet for is Netflix. I can easily use the free WIfi at the coffee house 3 doors down for e-mail and random web surfing, the only reason I need to pay Comcast is I don’t care to watch movies in my pajamas at the coffee house. And I’m sure my neighbors are glad that I don’t. Without Netflix I simply won’t pay for home internet any more. It does strike me that the cable company has a certain motivation to make streaming harder for me. But what they don’t realize is that I simply won’t go back to cable. If I can’t stream, I’ll just read books instead.
