Despite efforts of the EU and the ITU to put the Internet genie back in her bottle, she grows louder and prouder every day. She is still in her formative days, as the old world money tries to tame her radical free spirit. Let's hope decisions made by old men in new Dubai doesn't keep her from constantly changing humanity.
It's not the "EU" as in the EU Parliament. In fact they've passed a resolution to oppose this sort of changes at ITU's WCIT. The article talks about ETNO, an European telecom association. So it's the ISP's and carriers from Europe pushing for these changes. Nothing to do with the EU Parliament or EU governments (well, Russia and China's censorship proposals are entirely different from this). Just corporations being greedy. The EU Parliament has actually legislated their roaming prices twice in the past (downwards), because they thought roaming prices should be much smaller than they were, within EU's borders.
I'm pretty sure I'm exposing my extreme ignorance on the matter, but how does the ITU have the authority to take decisions like this? Shouldn't W3 have a say? Or somebody else?
For one thing, the ITU is a governmental body (that is, its members are governments; it is an agency of the UN), while the W3C and IETF are open membership organizations that anyone can join.
In other words, the ITU is run by people whose job is to run things. The IETF and W3C are run by people whose job it is to do things. Groups of the former category tend to want to control those of the latter.
Edit to add: the different outcomes of the ITU vs. IETF/W3C can also be attributed to the purpose of existence of their members. People who run things (e.g. governments) want to keep running things. Thus, their work tends to result in new laws and treaties. People who do things (e.g. engineers) want to keep doing things. Thus, their work tends to result in voluntary, consensus-based agreements.
The summit can result in more then net neutrality threats, it includes censorship, monitoring, archiving and usage regulations. The ITU comprises of 193 countries and over 700 private-sector entities. It has become more transparent due to public outcry, but who knows what is discussed over dinner ( aka there is a lot of money and control being looked over as though it's a map to the new world).
With regards to Quality of Service, what's wrong with letting the packet flags decide QoS, with customers paying for a guaranteed percentage of high-QoS bandwidth during peak network load?
In other words, when the network is underutilized, all packets would be transmitted with high priority and low latency, with QoS flags allowing packets to jump ahead in packet queues. When the network is heavily loaded, high-QoS packets beyond the customer's quota would be relegated to best effort.
In this situation, what's stopping all traffic senders from marking their packets with the QoS flag? After all, they don't want their traffic getting stuck behind some other sender's traffic.
I had a sentence addressing this issue which I deleted before posting, because it seemed that the situation is the same as if the network is heavily loaded: if the upstream provider's high QoS bandwidth is exhausted, customer traffic beyond their guaranteed QoS allocation reverts to best effort (with the number of packets reverted proportional to the total upstream overage and the individual customer's overage).
Each customer only has a limited amount of QoS high priority traffic. If someone flags every packet with high priority, all the QoS mean is that the first packages get improved priority and everything else get default low priority.
That mean a customers software can balance the use of QoS for time sensitive traffic, and maybe even flag some data as below default to get bonus high priority traffic points. If its the software that runs on the consumers device that decide priority, the software developer can pick the exact needed QoS his program or service need.
The bonus effect here is that if the QoS fail and the program breaks, its the software developer that are liable and not the ISP. Currently, if a ISP QoS software breaks, the ISP is actually quite open for lawsuits from both the user and the service that get effected.
The customer isn't the one flagging the packets with QoS, the sender of the traffic is. So sure, if you're talking about outbound VoIP traffic from the customer's computer, they could do that. But what about inbound traffic, which for nearly all customers is the bulk of their traffic? There can be no way to put controls on who sets the QoS flag, which means everybody needs to set it or they risk having their own service degraded because someone else decided to inappropriately set their own QoS flag.
Basically, it's tragedy of the commons. All incoming traffic is going to end up with the QoS flag set, and thus the internet will basically behave as if it didn't exist.
"All incoming traffic is going to end up with the QoS flag set, and thus the internet will basically behave as if it didn't exist."
Except people will be expected to pay a premium for it. Ie, it's a glorified rate hike masked as a technical non-sequitur.
TL;DR: QoS may be useful for networking, but it is not useful for inter-networking.
The only use for QoS IMHO is an "emergency lane" for health-and-safety traffic, assuming it carried the same disincentives to abuse (jail) as does 911 and other emergency services. (Not even VoIP is "high-priority" enough to warrant it.)
The other problem with the "sender pays" model is that there's no basis for it. You're not "tying up the line" by sending any more than you are by receiving. You are either online or you aren't. Anything else is rolling backwards downhill, away from the Internet.
I live in Canada, and all of the ISPs wires were subsidized with taxes then handed over to the incumbent carriers to use and sub-let.
A network can saturate, that's fine. I have a link that's either on or off, that's fine too. If the overall network speed is disatisfactory, that means it's time to upgrade the switches -- possibly at my expense (I presume that's what I've been paying for) -- but the Internet has always been best-effort and that's also the point. It automatically load balances. QoS is a solution in search of a problem. The solution has always been at the switch when it's saturated. A CPU process scheduler may boost a process temporarily to increase responsiveness, but only for an instant. The long-term, steady state, is still a free-for all. Nothing stops you from having QoS on your network or PC, but it is not a core service.
ISPs simply need to stop over-selling rates and attempting to "manage" link speed to compensate. Stop saying there's a difference between plan A and plan B if they come over the same wire. There's no basis for telling subscriber A that they get 512Kbps when subscriber B get 3Mbps over the same wire and there's no technical difference... They both have that wire and that wire is paid for, or being paid for, by their subscription. Both subscriber A and subscriber B pay the same rate and compete for the same throughput. The switch balances throughput fairly and it costs the ISP no more than ever. I'm not against creative pricing and free markets, just against single-use networks being called "the Internet." QoS may be a networking technology but it is not an Internet technology.
The whole ISP pricing model is artificial, and moving towards the grossly-overpriced text message pricing. The only reason small ISPs can't offer anything like I have described (anymore) is because they have no choice but to buy service through incumbents who are inflicting these QoS and bandwidth management fictions.
I have run a network for thousands of users (academic; students with torrents competing with instructors with videoconferencing, and administrators with VoIP), and while it may be appropriate to classify traffic (ex, emergency, or non-emergency), when the customer is "the public" and the context is "a democracy" all traffic must be treated equally in the extreme, otherwise it is simply discrimination. Even if you classify traffic as "government" and "non-government", or "porn" and "non-porn" you have big social fall-out.
"The Internet" is best-effort by design and that is more than enough. In my experience well-intentioned administrators without real-world experience come in and try to "solve" the latency problem creating more problems. Latency needs to be fixed at the switch in the same way CPU scheduling is: if a link hasn't spoken recently, it gets a little short-lived priority boost. The user has no say.
These management decisions are coming from the same people who buy "smart" switches that cost 10 times as much so they can use VLANs as a security technique, when it isn't, and when PPPoE would have worked just as well and provided the desired encryption.
We consistently invent little nested versions of our universe (even going so far as to t...
Put a stateful table in there, and there is no problem identify most inbound traffic as high priority if the receiver first initiate the communication with high priority set. There is a bit of issues with mutli-path routing, but its a rare issue that could likely be ignored as non-QoS worthy packages.
Of course, that only work inside one ISP and its customers, or between ISP which agree to respect each other limited use of QoS, both this approach would not fall for the tragedy of the commons. So long the end-user who initiate the traffic ends up deciding what priority is needed, limited use of QoS could help solve problem of voip vs bittorent.
Routers (and bittorrent clients, and operating systems) allow households to prioritize their traffic already. (IMHO, any "solution" to bittorrent vs voip should live at the edge where it only affects the person who chose it.)
Read the Republic Wireless forums to see how many people actually understand the QoS settings of their router. These people are seemingly power users at the least, and certainly early adopters. Perhaps it's the acronym soup engineers expect the laymen to know, or perhaps it's the laziness of the typical end user, but I suspect it is a little of both.
That's just because many existing routers have bad UI. Some of them just have a checkbox for automatic QoS that works fine. AFAIK the bufferbloat/CeroWRT people are working on open source QoS that just works with no configuration. Downstream QoS really needs to be done at the ISP, though.
QoS generally gives ISPs incentives to deliberately cause congestion by not upgrading their networks. Also, pretty much nobody is talking about customers paying for their own QoS; the idea is for Netflix to pay for it.
If Netflix pays for it, where does Netflix get that money? Customers again. The customer always pays, whether directly or indirectly.
The only difference is in the mix and distribution of customer money flows. Some customers will be freeloading to a certain extent, others will be paying over the odds.
If Netflix pays to send and, out of necessity, passes that cost on to Joe Netizen (who also pays for his Internet service), he will have payed twice -- and that's only one service. I can't imagine how YouTube would survive under that, let alone Linux, et al.
I've worked on a consumer network that did that. It was a company wiring up apartment buildings in a college town. They would drop 2 T1s into an apartment, then plug them into a FreeBSD box, with a proprietary QoS kernel module (this was the early aughts) and then they'd use 802.11 to connect up the people in the apartments. My job was handling the FreeBSD box and writing ipfw rules to identify and prioritize different classes of traffic. (I am blanking on the module name. It was a long time ago.)
Obviously, the kids are going to absolutely trash that 3Mbps.
They were killed by DSL, which gave you way more bandwidth for way less money vs. the T1s. Doing the same thing with DSL at the head doesn't work because QoS works by reordering the packets in the queue. To get packets to queue, you need to know how big your pipe is, and you never know exactly how big your DSL pipe is. (or, at least, that's how it looks to dumb sysadmins like me who only get to play with a server connected to the dsl modem through a ethernet port.)
Anyhow, my belief is that it's turned out to be cheaper to just buy more bandwidth. Bandwidth is incredibly cheap, and it keeps getting cheaper every year.
I would definitely have more bandwidth rather than traffic shaping, but I also want my telemusic, teleconferencing, and gaming packets to arrive at their destinations ten milliseconds ago, and not get dropped the same way my bulk HTTP transfers should during heavy load.
Even with plenty of bandwidth, there's still the buffer bloat issue. If you decrease the buffer sizes and use random packet dropping, your VoIP and gaming packets could get too many dropped. If you leave the buffers as they are, you could have very high jitter. So, either we need a way of saying we want high-priority packets not to get dropped when the buffers are full, or we need a way of saying we want high-priority packets to bypass bloated buffers.
I can't help but wonder why they didn't try this 20 years ago. As it stands now, it seems hopelessly out of touch with reality. Why would people start paying more for online services when the price of everything tends to decrease over time? And why do governments think that the big internet companies are going to pay for this? They have shareholders too, after all.
> I can't help but wonder why they didn't try this 20 years ago.
20 years ago, nobody cared about the few, the unusual, the networked. 15 years ago, people damned well did care, but everyone was in 'run in circles, scream and shout' mode and business plans were more-or-less optional. 10 years ago it was definitively too late. Does that seem like an eye blink to you? It does to a multinational bureaucracy.
My life fades... the vision dims... all that remains are memories. Looking back over the history of the Internet, from about 1991 to 2001, I remember a time of chaos, bizarre dreams, and the growing suspicion that the average people more-or-less snuck online too quickly for anyone who could have been said to have been 'in charge' to notice.
The whole concept of "sending party network pays" is just an elaborate wordplay. Relay-switched telecommunications networks are inherently symmetric. The concept of a "sending" party is meaningless; the originating party pays. This makes a lot of sense, since the originating party is the one in a position to decide whether to place the call and therefore should bear the cost.
By renaming the originating party to the "sending" party, they can redefine YouTube/NetFlix/whoever as the "sending" party even though the user is the originating party. Thus they attempt to justify denying the user the service which they already have paid for unless they receive the appropriate kickbacks^W "fees" from whoever is serving the data.
I'm not sure I understand this idea at all. To me, it sounds a bit like gasoline companies asking from Walmart or Costco to pay them because a lot of people drive to Walmart and Costco using their gasoline. That may be true, but they pay exactly for that! Moreover, the only reason why people buy gasoline is to drive to places, so where the idea that somebody owes them extra for that comes from?
In the same way, internet access is a commodity and the only reason I pay for it is that I need to get to Google or Netflix or such. Where the idea that Google or Netflix get "free ride" comes from? I pay for my access, Google and Netflix pay for their connectivity. If the connectivity is not enough, customers would complain and depending on where the problem is, end up paying for better local access (if they know it's slow for them but fine for the neighbor next door that uses different provider) or have their provider (i.e. Netflix) upgrade their connectivity by telling them to improve delivery or they stop paying/visiting/clicking on ads. This all should work as it works now, where the idea of a "free ride" and additional payments due comes from?
32 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 74.2 ms ] threadIn other words, the ITU is run by people whose job is to run things. The IETF and W3C are run by people whose job it is to do things. Groups of the former category tend to want to control those of the latter.
Edit to add: the different outcomes of the ITU vs. IETF/W3C can also be attributed to the purpose of existence of their members. People who run things (e.g. governments) want to keep running things. Thus, their work tends to result in new laws and treaties. People who do things (e.g. engineers) want to keep doing things. Thus, their work tends to result in voluntary, consensus-based agreements.
In other words, when the network is underutilized, all packets would be transmitted with high priority and low latency, with QoS flags allowing packets to jump ahead in packet queues. When the network is heavily loaded, high-QoS packets beyond the customer's quota would be relegated to best effort.
That mean a customers software can balance the use of QoS for time sensitive traffic, and maybe even flag some data as below default to get bonus high priority traffic points. If its the software that runs on the consumers device that decide priority, the software developer can pick the exact needed QoS his program or service need.
The bonus effect here is that if the QoS fail and the program breaks, its the software developer that are liable and not the ISP. Currently, if a ISP QoS software breaks, the ISP is actually quite open for lawsuits from both the user and the service that get effected.
Basically, it's tragedy of the commons. All incoming traffic is going to end up with the QoS flag set, and thus the internet will basically behave as if it didn't exist.
Except people will be expected to pay a premium for it. Ie, it's a glorified rate hike masked as a technical non-sequitur.
TL;DR: QoS may be useful for networking, but it is not useful for inter-networking.
The only use for QoS IMHO is an "emergency lane" for health-and-safety traffic, assuming it carried the same disincentives to abuse (jail) as does 911 and other emergency services. (Not even VoIP is "high-priority" enough to warrant it.)
The other problem with the "sender pays" model is that there's no basis for it. You're not "tying up the line" by sending any more than you are by receiving. You are either online or you aren't. Anything else is rolling backwards downhill, away from the Internet.
I live in Canada, and all of the ISPs wires were subsidized with taxes then handed over to the incumbent carriers to use and sub-let.
A network can saturate, that's fine. I have a link that's either on or off, that's fine too. If the overall network speed is disatisfactory, that means it's time to upgrade the switches -- possibly at my expense (I presume that's what I've been paying for) -- but the Internet has always been best-effort and that's also the point. It automatically load balances. QoS is a solution in search of a problem. The solution has always been at the switch when it's saturated. A CPU process scheduler may boost a process temporarily to increase responsiveness, but only for an instant. The long-term, steady state, is still a free-for all. Nothing stops you from having QoS on your network or PC, but it is not a core service.
ISPs simply need to stop over-selling rates and attempting to "manage" link speed to compensate. Stop saying there's a difference between plan A and plan B if they come over the same wire. There's no basis for telling subscriber A that they get 512Kbps when subscriber B get 3Mbps over the same wire and there's no technical difference... They both have that wire and that wire is paid for, or being paid for, by their subscription. Both subscriber A and subscriber B pay the same rate and compete for the same throughput. The switch balances throughput fairly and it costs the ISP no more than ever. I'm not against creative pricing and free markets, just against single-use networks being called "the Internet." QoS may be a networking technology but it is not an Internet technology.
The whole ISP pricing model is artificial, and moving towards the grossly-overpriced text message pricing. The only reason small ISPs can't offer anything like I have described (anymore) is because they have no choice but to buy service through incumbents who are inflicting these QoS and bandwidth management fictions.
I have run a network for thousands of users (academic; students with torrents competing with instructors with videoconferencing, and administrators with VoIP), and while it may be appropriate to classify traffic (ex, emergency, or non-emergency), when the customer is "the public" and the context is "a democracy" all traffic must be treated equally in the extreme, otherwise it is simply discrimination. Even if you classify traffic as "government" and "non-government", or "porn" and "non-porn" you have big social fall-out.
"The Internet" is best-effort by design and that is more than enough. In my experience well-intentioned administrators without real-world experience come in and try to "solve" the latency problem creating more problems. Latency needs to be fixed at the switch in the same way CPU scheduling is: if a link hasn't spoken recently, it gets a little short-lived priority boost. The user has no say.
These management decisions are coming from the same people who buy "smart" switches that cost 10 times as much so they can use VLANs as a security technique, when it isn't, and when PPPoE would have worked just as well and provided the desired encryption.
We consistently invent little nested versions of our universe (even going so far as to t...
Of course, that only work inside one ISP and its customers, or between ISP which agree to respect each other limited use of QoS, both this approach would not fall for the tragedy of the commons. So long the end-user who initiate the traffic ends up deciding what priority is needed, limited use of QoS could help solve problem of voip vs bittorent.
The only difference is in the mix and distribution of customer money flows. Some customers will be freeloading to a certain extent, others will be paying over the odds.
Obviously, the kids are going to absolutely trash that 3Mbps.
They were killed by DSL, which gave you way more bandwidth for way less money vs. the T1s. Doing the same thing with DSL at the head doesn't work because QoS works by reordering the packets in the queue. To get packets to queue, you need to know how big your pipe is, and you never know exactly how big your DSL pipe is. (or, at least, that's how it looks to dumb sysadmins like me who only get to play with a server connected to the dsl modem through a ethernet port.)
Anyhow, my belief is that it's turned out to be cheaper to just buy more bandwidth. Bandwidth is incredibly cheap, and it keeps getting cheaper every year.
This and all similar ideas are very dangerous.
Compare pure commercial networks (mobile SMSes, ISDN) with Internet which has academic background.
What is the right direction for Internet? Why we talk about paid QoS packets ideas and not about Google Fiber?
Even with plenty of bandwidth, there's still the buffer bloat issue. If you decrease the buffer sizes and use random packet dropping, your VoIP and gaming packets could get too many dropped. If you leave the buffers as they are, you could have very high jitter. So, either we need a way of saying we want high-priority packets not to get dropped when the buffers are full, or we need a way of saying we want high-priority packets to bypass bloated buffers.
20 years ago, nobody cared about the few, the unusual, the networked. 15 years ago, people damned well did care, but everyone was in 'run in circles, scream and shout' mode and business plans were more-or-less optional. 10 years ago it was definitively too late. Does that seem like an eye blink to you? It does to a multinational bureaucracy.
My life fades... the vision dims... all that remains are memories. Looking back over the history of the Internet, from about 1991 to 2001, I remember a time of chaos, bizarre dreams, and the growing suspicion that the average people more-or-less snuck online too quickly for anyone who could have been said to have been 'in charge' to notice.
By renaming the originating party to the "sending" party, they can redefine YouTube/NetFlix/whoever as the "sending" party even though the user is the originating party. Thus they attempt to justify denying the user the service which they already have paid for unless they receive the appropriate kickbacks^W "fees" from whoever is serving the data.
In the same way, internet access is a commodity and the only reason I pay for it is that I need to get to Google or Netflix or such. Where the idea that Google or Netflix get "free ride" comes from? I pay for my access, Google and Netflix pay for their connectivity. If the connectivity is not enough, customers would complain and depending on where the problem is, end up paying for better local access (if they know it's slow for them but fine for the neighbor next door that uses different provider) or have their provider (i.e. Netflix) upgrade their connectivity by telling them to improve delivery or they stop paying/visiting/clicking on ads. This all should work as it works now, where the idea of a "free ride" and additional payments due comes from?