This article is a mishmash of ideas that don't really work together. The author advocates for treating telecom infrastructure as a public utility, but then uses AT&T as an example of an "intelligent" network that wasn't innovative. But the phone system, under the AT&T monopoly, was regulated as a public utility! It was a system that prioritized stability, universal access, and yes, neutrality, over innovation. That's the nature of public utilities.
The author suggests that the cable companies should be forced to lease out their hybrid fiber-coax networks to competitors. Leaving aside the fact that these are private networks built with private money, there is the issue that this would destroy any incentive on the part of the cable companies to enhance and upgrade that infrastructure. Why pour billions of dollars into upgrading a system only to get razor-thin returns?
Public-utility "last mile", far from being opposed to competition, would facilitate it. The local or state government would own the ROW and maintain the fiber - maybe thru a contractor whose role is restricted to that function. Then your household or business line goes to a box where different companies can compete for slots/ports/whatever, and then you would choose which provider to connect you from there to the big pipes.
The "to the premises" provider would make a regulated profit, just like utility-model water and power companies, and the upstream providers would pay the going rate for their connections to customers, and compete for customers with rates, policies and over-the-top services.
Having a "last mile" monopoly, either embodied in the municipal government or in a regulated utility like British Telecom, can work. However, ensuring that the monopoly has sufficient incentives to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure is complex. See this article which discusses the issues presented by the British Telecom privatization: http://www.oecd.org/sti/ieconomy/1909801.pdf.
While it's theoretically possible, it's not what the author actually suggests. He suggests forcing Comcast, TWC, etc, to simply lease out their networks wholesale to competitors. This destroys the incentive these companies have to continue to upgrade their networks. There is an obvious reason why the author advocates that approach instead of the one you suggest: state and local governments have no money, and are extremely inefficient at building infrastructure projects to begin with.
We recently moved back to using BT as an ISP with their Infinity 2 FTTC service and I have been very pleasantly surprised, both with the installation (which was very quick and painless) and the resulting service.
It also looks like we might get full FTTP in the next year or so which will be even better.
Worth noting that we had BT as an ISP years ago and they were awful so I was reluctant to switch back - but the seem to be making significant investments in their network and their customer services - as well as some pretty good add on offerings like their sports channels.
What was most interesting is that Sky, he had bought the ISP we used to use (Be), were desperate to keep our business - they offered to reduce the 20Mbs connection we had to £8 a month...
So from what I can tell, the regulation of the BT-owned "last mile" seems to have created a market with real competition - which can only be good for consumers.
> So from what I can tell, the regulation of the BT-owned "last mile" seems to have created a market with real competition - which can only be good for consumers.
You shouldn't conflate the "regulation" that net-neutrality proponents are calling for in the U.S. with the "regulation" of BT. BT started out as a public corporation, which was privatized in the late 1980's and early 1990's. This privatization was accomplished with an express eye to ensuring that BT would continue to have incentives to invest in its network, and investors had notice of the terms of the arrangement.
What net neutrality proponents in the U.S. are arguing for is an additional layer of restrictions on existing networks that were built with private capital.
Yes, I didn't think the UK style regulation would apply at all in the US - just pointing out that it does seem to have worked here, which I think we can all agree is actually fairly surprising. After all, I don't think the other privatised services - particularly energy, water and railways, have worked out quite as well for consumers.
> The author advocates for treating telecom infrastructure like public utilities, but then says that competition is the answer. These are not compatible ideas!
They are compatible if you decouple the infrastructure owner from the service providers, as it happens in other industries.
>The author advocates for treating telecom infrastructure like public utilities, but then says that competition is the answer. These are not compatible ideas!
Why not? I can choose to get my electricity and gas from any of about 6 different companies, and water from at least 4. They still come in through the same cables and pipes, but price and packaging varies.
>The author suggests that the cable companies should be forced to lease out their hybrid fiber-coax networks to competitors.
Again, here, BT have to do that as part of being able to have a (near-[1])monopoly on building those networks in the first place. That means people can get fibre to the cabinet/premises without having to pay for BT's overpriced and underreliable service, even if it runs over their fibre network for the last mile.
[1] BT have a near-monopoly nationwide, while some areas have their own local networks in addition, but these can not be nationwide. Virgin (formerly NTL/Telewest) have a parallel national network, which uses coax for the last mile more like US cable[2], but has a far lower overall availability, being in a general case only available in cities and major towns, and in many of those then only in certain areas of them.
[2] BT's network is fibre to the cabinet with copper from the cabinet to premises in most populated areas now(up to 80 mbit), with some lucky area having fibre to the premises(up to 1 gbit), and rural/undersubscribed areas having copper to the cabinet (generally, maximum rates of ~12mbit or worse; many can only get 0.5 mbit). Virgin's network can generally get 100mbit to most/all premises it serves, which is a far more limited subset of BT's. Local ones vary wildly and may be anything up to 10gbit, but are generally around 100mbit.
>>I can choose to get my electricity and gas from any of about 6 different companies, and water from at least 4.
Huh, seriously? I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that didn't have monopoly gas, electric, water and sewer providers. Monopoly trash pickup is not that uncommon either. Perhaps that's a UK vs. US thing.
It struck me as weird, too. I dunno. I've lived in or spent time pretty much all over the US in the last 10 years, and as far as I could tell, I've never had a choice in my local water provider. Gas and electric, usually not, though I suppose there are places where some choice is available.
A situation like that would probably induce legislation or regulation to prevent price gouging. There are a few areas where it happens, e.g. in Hull there is only one ISP, who are by all accounts terrible, but can afford to be as there is no competition.
With water, yes, it's heavily regulated as a public utility. Gas and electrical is a more interesting story. Here in California, we've had some adventures with deregulation of electricity (while still maintaining natural monopolies over provision). It was a complete clusterfuck.
Decoupling the lines from the power-generation works okay as long as you have excess power generation capacity. E.g. California-style deregulation worked fine in Illinois.
Power generation also has the problem that building new generation capacity is extremely expensive and takes years or decades. The generating companies in California used that to their advantage by shutting down quite a lot of existing generating capacity so that there would be a supply shortage that the market couldn't respond to quickly and that predictably caused prices to skyrocket.
It isn't likely that would be repeated in the market for interconnection because it's a lot faster and cheaper for a competitor to run a strand of fiber to a central office than to build a multi-GW power generating station.
Where I live I can pay a small premium to have my power generated by renewable sources. Electrons are fungible on the grid so I assume they have it worked out on the back-end of the provider just supplying X load to the grid.
Yep, it's a fairly complex (as in, I don't understand it fully, although I've read a little) interaction of subsidies, varying prices, and the same of standby capacity (i.e. not actual capacity, but the ability to ramp up to generate x GW in y seconds should it be needed, to cover spikes - generally by gas power stations, which are able to vary output power far more quickly than most types, and by pumped storage, which can release up to a certain amount of energy per day for very short, large spikes, for example one one caused by people putting the kettle on when popular TV shows finish).
Most of the trading is automated and humans aren't involved, as prices are being constantly renegotiated as demand changes, and supply may also be throttled down or up for fuel-consuming non-nuclear sources (nuclear runs as close to max output as they can due to running costs being consistent through output levels, and fuel costs being negligible in any case) to maximise profit - generally by increasing output as prices rise, but for wind and other renewables, sometimes output is artificially limited as a way of manipulating subsidies, which can actually be more profitable for the operators if less power is sold under the right grid conditions.
All the data is open, which lets some interesting sites appear, such as http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php . Mousing over the source numbers shows a brief overview, and the site also includes international purchase/sale data.
The BT situation is very different, though. BT started out as a government-owned corporation. When it was privatized, the government developed an incentive scheme to ensure that the company had sufficient returns on its investment to continue to upgrade its network, and wrote that into the prospectus.
With this author and a lot of people, I agree that network neutrality is vital to the social benefits of the internet, and that the "public utility" model is best. The question, however is how to get there.
Historically, once big-money, rent-seeking [1] entities start profiting from some arrangement, it becomes extremely hard to dislodge them, because they protect their position by hijacking the government to their interests.
There's a little cause for hope in that there might be a mass protest like with SOPA.
Most calls for net neutrality read more as polemics ("cable companies suck!") rather than calls for what should and should not be allowed.
My two big issues with lots of net neutrality proponents are:
1. Priority of traffic. If my neighbor is bit-torrenting The Avengers I still want to be able to have my VoIP call work. He doesn't really care if his packets move marginally slower while I really care that my packets get through nearly all the time.
The rejoinder here is "well the ISPs should always make enough bandwidth for both of us." But the very nature of shared networks is that what my neighbor does can affect me. If you want a channel reserved for yourself, get a leased line and pay the expensive premium for it. (Or buy a guaranteed channel on the shared pipe, but that runs into the same issue with net neutrality.)
2. Companies with more money will always be able to buy better access. You can say "well we shouldn't make it even easier to them to be faster," but at a certain point this logic leads to crazy things like making it illegal for Netflix to use a private network running parallel to the Internet to move things faster to their CDN end points.
I want a net neutrality that stops my cable company from interfering with my Vonage packets because they want me to sell me their own VoIP service. I want a net neutrality where my ISP doesn't care if my video packets are coming from Microsoft or Netflix or YouTube. But that doesn't mean I'll sign up for anything wrapped in a "net neutrality" flag that is trying to nail jelly to a tree.
Traffic priority is very game-able and subjective, though. You can easily argue VoIP versus bulk transfer, but where's the application boundary between "necessary" and "not necessary" - music streaming? SSH? Online games? Who decides this?
It might be workable if it came with a guarantee that rates below (max bandwidth/contention ratio) would always be delivered from each customer, and traffic above that would be at risk from contention.
It is extremely easy test. Are you costrained by latency or bandwidth.
If it is latency - to have VOIP you need 200ms round trip top. That is the first lecture in Communication Technology 101.
Video streaming is latency tolerant but bandwidth sensitive. You moderately don't care if a packet gets lost or spikes as long as you have long enough buffer.
So any kind of conversation needs a fast lane. Downloading and streaming don't. But they need bulk.
The problem is the only time you actually have latency issues is when there is not enough bandwidth. Almost nothing is so sensitive that it can't stand for packets to be buffered for 25ms. The problematic latency is when you're sufficiently bandwidth constrained that packets are dropped and have to be retransmitted, in which case you can't drop streaming packets either or else over a matter of seconds the client's buffer will shrink into nothing and the video will start stuttering.
My PC has 32 gigabytes of RAM. That is a lot of buffer. Make the buffer minutes or half and hour. Right now it is more convenient for me to torrent at 100Mbit 1080p and just watch than stream.
That doesn't do any good for streaming when there isn't enough bandwidth. If the video bitrate is twice as much as the available bandwidth then it would take 30 minutes to fill the buffer in order to watch an hour of uninterrupted video. I want to turn on my TV and watch Netflix, not turn on my TV, come back in 30 minutes, watch one episode of House of Cards, come back in 30 minutes, etc.
It's not an easy test when looking at the packet. If you're relying on people to label their packets appropriately, they will lie if doing so gets them what they want.
There isn't anyone to go first at 2AM. Nobody's packets are dropped at that time of day.
The problem with QoS is that the window where it's actually useful is miniscule. If, on the one hand, it's 2AM and nobody is using the network, QoS does nothing because all the packets are delivered and none are dropped. On the other hand, if everybody is trying to watch the Superbowl at the same time and $STREAM_BPS * $NUM_USERS > $TOTAL_BANDWIDTH, QoS can't save you. You have more time-sensitive traffic than you have pipe to put it in, so at least some of your customers are going to see choppy video (or no video).
In the middle of that you have this tiny slice where the network is saturated "just right" for QoS to actually do something. You have only just enough bandwidth to handle all of the active streams, so that when some bursty thing (like loading a large web page) comes along, you can drop some packets from a stream and have just enough bandwidth available two seconds later to let the stream catch up before the client's buffer is exhausted.
To skip to the punch line, that never happens. Networks that hit 100% utilization on a regular basis are under-provisioned. If you're at the point where QoS helps you do something, your network is broken, because tomorrow's peak usage could be higher than today's which means you needed to start upgrading yesterday. QoS on the Internet is useless.
And that's before you get to the whole trouble with what to do about ssh tunnels and TLS connections and otherwise unclassifiable traffic.
I've helped plenty of clients where QoS changed their VoIP phones from "not working" to "working."
You can push my Windows Update example to 6pm -- I still don't care at all how it runs. I'd tell my router to mark it as the least time-sensitive of any of my network connections.
> I've helped plenty of clients where QoS changed their VoIP phones from "not working" to "working."
Because QoS on a LAN is a different animal. A LAN will have multiple machines that each have a 100Mbps or faster connection to a shared router with a 100Mbps or slower link to the rest of the Internet. That means one person downloading anything will saturate the entire Internet connection. ISPs have the opposite topology: A bunch of users with e.g. 50Mbps connections that come together to share a multi-Gbps uplink. Regularly saturating the uplink in that context is Bad. It means customers aren't getting the speeds you sold them.
There is also a difference between QoS and fairness. If you're using VOIP and I'm downloading something, the ISP should be dropping my packets before yours when we're on the same plan, but because of the quantity of traffic rather than the type. That pretty much exempts VoIP from being dropped, without doing any kind of DPI or traffic classification, based simply on how relatively little bandwidth it requires.
I think this is a great solution to this discussion. Customers should be charged transparently for a given QoS, and not secretly manipulated for a good average QoS for the network.
The only problem is complexity for both users and applications. Ideally you would have a set of pipes with different parameters and assign each application the right to use some pipes -- e.g. voip gets a slow and stable while torrent gets a fast but unstable one (but the assignment is your choice). Of course, those should be regionally consistent so that companies can't extort money from users of known traffic types (e.g. I know a priori Joe uses voip a lot so I'll raise his voip-optimal cost).
Consumers may also not be very happy with an inconsistent pricing, though. Some misconfigured app could use ton of expensive bandwidth. But this has to be worked out, it's essential for the future of the net; we can't be completely at the mercy of ISPs as the gatekeepers of content.
It seems many people think any kind of QoS means we no longer have a completely dumb pipe and ergo we have now lost network neutrality.
I agree with you that the ISP should not care about who is on the other end of my connection. VoIP packets for Skype or for Vonage or for my ISP's phone service should all get the VoIP bit set and all be treated the same.
These are more complicated rules than the water company has, but the Internet is more complicated that the water company. Water usage in a household doesn't double every N years.
"bit-torrenting The Avengers" is a Strawman - illegal things are illegal and should dealt with regardless of net neutrality. Everyone does a load of stuff on the Internet, who's to decide what should have priority? Games? Email? Business? Youtube?
Weakness in your argument 2:
Slippery Slope. Let's see if "not making it easier to buy better access" is a good thing, regardless if it affects Netflix and their hypothetical attempt of "using a private network parallel to the Internet".
ISPs should not care where the packets are coming from, end of story. Agree?
You're missing the point of his argument 1. It isn't that pirating is illegal, it's that torrenting by nature has less strict bandwidth and latency requirements than VoIP calling.
Then make it "downloads and seeds the entire open source catalog out there" - it's still that the friendly neighbor won't care about a few kbps less while those can make or break a VoIP line.
The bittorrent vs voip argument has nothing to do with legality- it applies equally well if the torrent is of a Linux install iso. On purely technical grounds, some data is simply higher priority than others.
What this means is that good net neutrality rules are more nuanced than you "ISPs should not care where the packets are coming from, end of story." QoS needs to be factored in.
No, you pay for X speed you should get X speed. And screw everything else. If you are using it for work/play/illegal activities, let the pertinent authorities do what is legal - but do not throttle traffic based on intended use.
Nothing else really works this way. The 2.2 GHz CPU in my Nexus 5 will throttle to 1.x GHz after a couple of minutes. Linux will happily hand out way more memory than there is actually in the system. Airlines will overbook, etc. Oversubscription/overcommit is just how engineers design systems. It's unnecessarily expensive to over-design systems to accommodate theoretical maximum capacity.
Also, how much are you willing to pay for such a system? Comcast/TWC's margins are like 10%. The margins on their cable businesses alone is probably a lot narrower than that. They couldn't profitably design a network that overbuilt--nobody could.
But is is a disservice to under-design systems to not accomodate real usage capacity.
You should always have 10% more hardware available than what your peak usage is, so when that goes up you have wiggle room to move your boundaries up more.
That, or you advertise your service as 10 - 20MB/s during non-peak hours, and throttled rates from 6 - 12. Which would naturally drive consumers who want the bandwidth to distribute the load throughout the day.
The the necessary complement that, if it's not economical for the ISP to serve movies to the clients, it's the ISP job to cap bandwidth or increase prices for customers. Not Netflix.
I think you're missing a useful distinction: It's important which criteria someone is using when they discriminate between packets.
The real problem is when companies discriminate based on the semantic substance of the data.
All "blog post" data should be co-equal, regardless of the political views in it. Similarly, all VoIP data should be equal, regardless of whether it's a religious sermon or a phone-sex line.
But prioritizing VoIP over blog-posts? That's a much different (much more acceptable) situation.
Yeah! Why should I have to deal with slower internet because you are using Netflix! You should have to pay more to your ISP if you want to use some bandwidth hogging service like that.
So many of these net neutrality initiatives seem to think "the Internet" is a strictly American phenomenom. The Internet at large cares very little about what the FCC or anyone in America does. The USA might have an outsized influence over what other countries do with their Internet, but that appears to be waning in recent years.
In short, I would appreciate if these recent net neutrality initiatives stopped insinuating that US telecoms policy, FCC action, or Comcast/Verizon/Large US ISP, have any effect on the Internet at large.
The biggest shock for me when I moved to US was to get to know that my apartment complex has an exclusive contract with one cable company. I think they would be sued out of existence (both of them) in Europe for trying to do the same. Net neutrality starts here, so that I have access to at least 3 major service providers in my home and nobody can get an exclusive deal on providing internet to a certain area. You could see how fast Comcast and Verizon disappears when the real competition comes in play...
You know what I love about these kinds of posts and articles? It's their awesome logics: private entities (who, naturally, seek to maximize their profits) are damaging net neutrality (to make profit); therefore, we should limit the government (FCC). My natural reaction whenever I see FCC being bashed over net neutrality is, "either there is some weird causal fuckup somewhere, or logics stops working; either way, WTF?"
What part of the argument do you see as trying to limit the FCC. If anything, it is telling the FCC to regulate more sternly by enforcing the line-sharing rule.
The only tool of the common man against centralized monopolies seems to be to innovate faster than the monopoly power can centralize.
I think the only hope for the free Internet is some kind of p2p wireless mesh network or other mechanism to circumvent Comcast altogether. Comcast and Monsanto are untouchable. (Thinking about Monsanto because of some lame GMO prop I heard on NPR this morning)
"Super Wi-Fi" looks like it could be a great technology for this p2p mesh network, but I don't think there is consumer devices available yet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Wi-Fi
You can not economicaly circunvent cable (or fiber). P2p networks are not efficient.
What you can do is include the cable and fiber into the p2p network. People can bill routing with some Bitcoin like tech (altough I doubt Bitcoin itself could be used), and let Comcast et al. completely in the dark about whose data they are carrying.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 67.3 ms ] threadThe author suggests that the cable companies should be forced to lease out their hybrid fiber-coax networks to competitors. Leaving aside the fact that these are private networks built with private money, there is the issue that this would destroy any incentive on the part of the cable companies to enhance and upgrade that infrastructure. Why pour billions of dollars into upgrading a system only to get razor-thin returns?
The "to the premises" provider would make a regulated profit, just like utility-model water and power companies, and the upstream providers would pay the going rate for their connections to customers, and compete for customers with rates, policies and over-the-top services.
While it's theoretically possible, it's not what the author actually suggests. He suggests forcing Comcast, TWC, etc, to simply lease out their networks wholesale to competitors. This destroys the incentive these companies have to continue to upgrade their networks. There is an obvious reason why the author advocates that approach instead of the one you suggest: state and local governments have no money, and are extremely inefficient at building infrastructure projects to begin with.
It also looks like we might get full FTTP in the next year or so which will be even better.
Worth noting that we had BT as an ISP years ago and they were awful so I was reluctant to switch back - but the seem to be making significant investments in their network and their customer services - as well as some pretty good add on offerings like their sports channels.
What was most interesting is that Sky, he had bought the ISP we used to use (Be), were desperate to keep our business - they offered to reduce the 20Mbs connection we had to £8 a month...
So from what I can tell, the regulation of the BT-owned "last mile" seems to have created a market with real competition - which can only be good for consumers.
You shouldn't conflate the "regulation" that net-neutrality proponents are calling for in the U.S. with the "regulation" of BT. BT started out as a public corporation, which was privatized in the late 1980's and early 1990's. This privatization was accomplished with an express eye to ensuring that BT would continue to have incentives to invest in its network, and investors had notice of the terms of the arrangement.
What net neutrality proponents in the U.S. are arguing for is an additional layer of restrictions on existing networks that were built with private capital.
They are compatible if you decouple the infrastructure owner from the service providers, as it happens in other industries.
Why not? I can choose to get my electricity and gas from any of about 6 different companies, and water from at least 4. They still come in through the same cables and pipes, but price and packaging varies.
>The author suggests that the cable companies should be forced to lease out their hybrid fiber-coax networks to competitors.
Again, here, BT have to do that as part of being able to have a (near-[1])monopoly on building those networks in the first place. That means people can get fibre to the cabinet/premises without having to pay for BT's overpriced and underreliable service, even if it runs over their fibre network for the last mile.
[1] BT have a near-monopoly nationwide, while some areas have their own local networks in addition, but these can not be nationwide. Virgin (formerly NTL/Telewest) have a parallel national network, which uses coax for the last mile more like US cable[2], but has a far lower overall availability, being in a general case only available in cities and major towns, and in many of those then only in certain areas of them.
[2] BT's network is fibre to the cabinet with copper from the cabinet to premises in most populated areas now(up to 80 mbit), with some lucky area having fibre to the premises(up to 1 gbit), and rural/undersubscribed areas having copper to the cabinet (generally, maximum rates of ~12mbit or worse; many can only get 0.5 mbit). Virgin's network can generally get 100mbit to most/all premises it serves, which is a far more limited subset of BT's. Local ones vary wildly and may be anything up to 10gbit, but are generally around 100mbit.
Huh, seriously? I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that didn't have monopoly gas, electric, water and sewer providers. Monopoly trash pickup is not that uncommon either. Perhaps that's a UK vs. US thing.
It isn't likely that would be repeated in the market for interconnection because it's a lot faster and cheaper for a competitor to run a strand of fiber to a central office than to build a multi-GW power generating station.
Most of the trading is automated and humans aren't involved, as prices are being constantly renegotiated as demand changes, and supply may also be throttled down or up for fuel-consuming non-nuclear sources (nuclear runs as close to max output as they can due to running costs being consistent through output levels, and fuel costs being negligible in any case) to maximise profit - generally by increasing output as prices rise, but for wind and other renewables, sometimes output is artificially limited as a way of manipulating subsidies, which can actually be more profitable for the operators if less power is sold under the right grid conditions.
All the data is open, which lets some interesting sites appear, such as http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php . Mousing over the source numbers shows a brief overview, and the site also includes international purchase/sale data.
Historically, once big-money, rent-seeking [1] entities start profiting from some arrangement, it becomes extremely hard to dislodge them, because they protect their position by hijacking the government to their interests.
There's a little cause for hope in that there might be a mass protest like with SOPA.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
The bill existed before, though after everything with the NSA, it got moving pretty fast.
My two big issues with lots of net neutrality proponents are:
1. Priority of traffic. If my neighbor is bit-torrenting The Avengers I still want to be able to have my VoIP call work. He doesn't really care if his packets move marginally slower while I really care that my packets get through nearly all the time.
The rejoinder here is "well the ISPs should always make enough bandwidth for both of us." But the very nature of shared networks is that what my neighbor does can affect me. If you want a channel reserved for yourself, get a leased line and pay the expensive premium for it. (Or buy a guaranteed channel on the shared pipe, but that runs into the same issue with net neutrality.)
2. Companies with more money will always be able to buy better access. You can say "well we shouldn't make it even easier to them to be faster," but at a certain point this logic leads to crazy things like making it illegal for Netflix to use a private network running parallel to the Internet to move things faster to their CDN end points.
I want a net neutrality that stops my cable company from interfering with my Vonage packets because they want me to sell me their own VoIP service. I want a net neutrality where my ISP doesn't care if my video packets are coming from Microsoft or Netflix or YouTube. But that doesn't mean I'll sign up for anything wrapped in a "net neutrality" flag that is trying to nail jelly to a tree.
It might be workable if it came with a guarantee that rates below (max bandwidth/contention ratio) would always be delivered from each customer, and traffic above that would be at risk from contention.
If it is latency - to have VOIP you need 200ms round trip top. That is the first lecture in Communication Technology 101.
Video streaming is latency tolerant but bandwidth sensitive. You moderately don't care if a packet gets lost or spikes as long as you have long enough buffer.
So any kind of conversation needs a fast lane. Downloading and streaming don't. But they need bulk.
My 2am download of Windows Update goes into the bargain basement slow lane. Let anyone else go first, I don't care.
The problem with QoS is that the window where it's actually useful is miniscule. If, on the one hand, it's 2AM and nobody is using the network, QoS does nothing because all the packets are delivered and none are dropped. On the other hand, if everybody is trying to watch the Superbowl at the same time and $STREAM_BPS * $NUM_USERS > $TOTAL_BANDWIDTH, QoS can't save you. You have more time-sensitive traffic than you have pipe to put it in, so at least some of your customers are going to see choppy video (or no video).
In the middle of that you have this tiny slice where the network is saturated "just right" for QoS to actually do something. You have only just enough bandwidth to handle all of the active streams, so that when some bursty thing (like loading a large web page) comes along, you can drop some packets from a stream and have just enough bandwidth available two seconds later to let the stream catch up before the client's buffer is exhausted.
To skip to the punch line, that never happens. Networks that hit 100% utilization on a regular basis are under-provisioned. If you're at the point where QoS helps you do something, your network is broken, because tomorrow's peak usage could be higher than today's which means you needed to start upgrading yesterday. QoS on the Internet is useless.
And that's before you get to the whole trouble with what to do about ssh tunnels and TLS connections and otherwise unclassifiable traffic.
You can push my Windows Update example to 6pm -- I still don't care at all how it runs. I'd tell my router to mark it as the least time-sensitive of any of my network connections.
Because QoS on a LAN is a different animal. A LAN will have multiple machines that each have a 100Mbps or faster connection to a shared router with a 100Mbps or slower link to the rest of the Internet. That means one person downloading anything will saturate the entire Internet connection. ISPs have the opposite topology: A bunch of users with e.g. 50Mbps connections that come together to share a multi-Gbps uplink. Regularly saturating the uplink in that context is Bad. It means customers aren't getting the speeds you sold them.
There is also a difference between QoS and fairness. If you're using VOIP and I'm downloading something, the ISP should be dropping my packets before yours when we're on the same plan, but because of the quantity of traffic rather than the type. That pretty much exempts VoIP from being dropped, without doing any kind of DPI or traffic classification, based simply on how relatively little bandwidth it requires.
Neutrality means non discrimination on who sends the packet and who receives is.
QoS means that the provider have obligation to deliver a packet with strict timing.
So you buy 100-mbit slow lane and 1Mbit fast. They can even give you 2 IPs for that. If you are a call center you buy 100 of the fast lane and so on.
The only problem is complexity for both users and applications. Ideally you would have a set of pipes with different parameters and assign each application the right to use some pipes -- e.g. voip gets a slow and stable while torrent gets a fast but unstable one (but the assignment is your choice). Of course, those should be regionally consistent so that companies can't extort money from users of known traffic types (e.g. I know a priori Joe uses voip a lot so I'll raise his voip-optimal cost).
Consumers may also not be very happy with an inconsistent pricing, though. Some misconfigured app could use ton of expensive bandwidth. But this has to be worked out, it's essential for the future of the net; we can't be completely at the mercy of ISPs as the gatekeepers of content.
I agree with you that the ISP should not care about who is on the other end of my connection. VoIP packets for Skype or for Vonage or for my ISP's phone service should all get the VoIP bit set and all be treated the same.
These are more complicated rules than the water company has, but the Internet is more complicated that the water company. Water usage in a household doesn't double every N years.
I'd draw the line as "semantic" discrimination. (This includes if ISPs are using other things, like DNS names, as heuristics.)
So while VoIP should be given priority over the text of a blog post, two blog-posts should be coequal regardless of the opinions inside them.
"bit-torrenting The Avengers" is a Strawman - illegal things are illegal and should dealt with regardless of net neutrality. Everyone does a load of stuff on the Internet, who's to decide what should have priority? Games? Email? Business? Youtube?
Weakness in your argument 2:
Slippery Slope. Let's see if "not making it easier to buy better access" is a good thing, regardless if it affects Netflix and their hypothetical attempt of "using a private network parallel to the Internet".
ISPs should not care where the packets are coming from, end of story. Agree?
What this means is that good net neutrality rules are more nuanced than you "ISPs should not care where the packets are coming from, end of story." QoS needs to be factored in.
Also, how much are you willing to pay for such a system? Comcast/TWC's margins are like 10%. The margins on their cable businesses alone is probably a lot narrower than that. They couldn't profitably design a network that overbuilt--nobody could.
You should always have 10% more hardware available than what your peak usage is, so when that goes up you have wiggle room to move your boundaries up more.
That, or you advertise your service as 10 - 20MB/s during non-peak hours, and throttled rates from 6 - 12. Which would naturally drive consumers who want the bandwidth to distribute the load throughout the day.
How is this calculated? Do they get to factor in losses from other parts of their conglomerate?
Oh, right, and what about their captive market?
You can disable this behavior:
This can be mostly solved in a neutral way using fair queuing and AQM.
Companies with more money will always be able to buy better access.
Sure, but let's let those companies choose rather than being extorted by ISPs.
If you are saying that a Netflix should never need to negotiate faster speeds with a customer's ISP, I agree.
The the necessary complement that, if it's not economical for the ISP to serve movies to the clients, it's the ISP job to cap bandwidth or increase prices for customers. Not Netflix.
The real problem is when companies discriminate based on the semantic substance of the data.
All "blog post" data should be co-equal, regardless of the political views in it. Similarly, all VoIP data should be equal, regardless of whether it's a religious sermon or a phone-sex line.
But prioritizing VoIP over blog-posts? That's a much different (much more acceptable) situation.
In short, I would appreciate if these recent net neutrality initiatives stopped insinuating that US telecoms policy, FCC action, or Comcast/Verizon/Large US ISP, have any effect on the Internet at large.
I think the only hope for the free Internet is some kind of p2p wireless mesh network or other mechanism to circumvent Comcast altogether. Comcast and Monsanto are untouchable. (Thinking about Monsanto because of some lame GMO prop I heard on NPR this morning)
What you can do is include the cable and fiber into the p2p network. People can bill routing with some Bitcoin like tech (altough I doubt Bitcoin itself could be used), and let Comcast et al. completely in the dark about whose data they are carrying.