Are many people here against net neutrality?

[halfpower]

My view is that net neutrality is a good thing. The Internet is a utility just like water and electricity and should be regulated. If we do away with net neutrality than I fear that the future of the Internet will be in the hands of large corporations like NBC and Time Warner.

I think the Internet is still in its infancy and a great deal of innovation is likely to still take place. Would great resources like Wikipedia ever exist if not for net neutrality?

My opinion is that the Internet isn't broken. It in fact works very well, and we should thus not try and fix it.

 

[GroundedSailor]

I agree with you. But try telling that to Senator Ted Stevens (R) of Alaska. He's the one who introduced that bill and does not want net neutrality.

IMHO he's the same moron who wants to drill for oil in Alaska and wanted that super expense bridge built for an island of 50 residents. Time they put him out to pasture.

 

[RichardE]

Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

 

[ajf3]

Not sure I understand it entirely, but something like this...

No more free porn since the bandwidth will be too expensive.

Plus, not so much individual contributions/pages/blogs either in the future... think more AOL-ish content provided by the big corps.

The lack of neutrality makes it ok for say verizon to throttle or block your bandwidth on VOIP ports if you're not using THEIR VOIP service.

Basically, without neutrality, the co's can act like the own the lines & only have to worry about customers voting with their feet, rather than having to deal with lawsuits.

 

[kylebisme]

I belive we can have a free and open system without outright neutrality, someting along the lines of priorty mail. An internet where everyone has access to the standard sevice but where we can also pay a premium for lower latency sounds reasonable to me.

 

[RichardE]

Originally posted by: TheSnowman
I belive we can have a free and open system without outright neutrality, someting along the lines of priorty mail. An internet where everyone has access to the standard sevice but where we can also pay a premium for lower latency sounds reasonable to me.

If that is what it is, than that would be fine. It seems like we already have that though, with premisum service ect. Seems to me they would make more money off charging companies regular, light or premium.

 

[kylebisme]

It is important to understand the difference between bandwidth and latency here. What we have now is various bandwidth options, in the post office analogy that is akin to paying different depending on how big/heavy of boxes you are sending. What the net nutrality proposal is intend to acomplish is to is to keep everyone on the same tier when it comes to latency, and in the sense of the post office analogy that means people can't have their packages sent faster by paying for priorty shipping.

 

[Jaskalas]

You?re asking us, the internet users, if we want to see it cut to ruins?

 

[kylebisme]

Would you like to be able to buy a better ping to your favorite game servers?

Granted, a lot of people think they are doing that when they upgrade from say 768/384 DSL to a 1.5/768 line, but that is just a difference in bandwidth and being a client on a game server doesn't use nearly as much as even the lesser connection there anyway so buying the higher bandwidth line doesn't help. However, being able to buy priority routing to a specific location on the internet would get you a better ping, and net neutrality stands in the way of us having such options.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

It does not affect the average user at all!

There is alot of unsubstatiated hype and stoopid rumors going on concerning net nutrality!

 

[CitizenKain]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

It does not affect the average user at all!

There is alot of unsubstatiated hype and stoopid rumors going on concerning net nutrality!

Then do tell, since you appear to be such an expert on this field.

 

[smashp]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

It does not affect the average user at all!

There is alot of unsubstatiated hype and stoopid rumors going on concerning net nutrality!

Oh Teach us master the ways of the Farce

 

[halik]

Umm they're not gonna speed up the internet (or in otherwords decrease latency times) as there are very few hops on the tier1 level and it's all on fibre anyway. What they could do is to retard the latency for customers that don't pay, which would be the more cost effective way of dealing with it.

Right now you have all the fibre infrastructure in place and packets get routed suing FIFO queue. With priorioty routing, the people that pay more would get higher number on p-queue. So basically large corporate sites and media pushers would get 50ms round trip where things like open source would get 500ms. Same for online gaming - you'll have to pay to get fast round trip for your CS:Source server.

 

[outriding]

Originally posted by: TheSnowman
I belive we can have a free and open system without outright neutrality, someting along the lines of priorty mail. An internet where everyone has access to the standard sevice but where we can also pay a premium for lower latency sounds reasonable to me.

What you are talking about here is QOS.

Currently when you jump providers one of two things happen with the QOS header.

1) It gets stripped
2) It gets ignored.

Why does it get ignored? Because the QOS header is set for a different domain.
To get QOS to run across the whole internet you would have to put the entire on a single domain.It that likely? No, there would be too much arguing about why should a tier one listen to a teir two provider. If I was a teir one I would not listen to a tier 2.

 

[outriding]

Here is a commentary from someone who is againts net neutrality

Here

Did you know Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are lobbying for net neutrality? If they?re successful, they?ll get a special, low-government-set price for the bandwidth they use, while everyone else -- consumers, businesses and government -- will have to pay a competitive price for bandwidth.

WTF so Google et al does not pay for bandwidth? That is what net neutrality is about.

Now someone who is Pro net neutrality

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

The first thing you will notice is your favorite sites dissappearing from the search engines because they do not pay.

The next thing you will notice is that you will not be able to access your favorite site because that site may be competition to what the owner of the bandwidth provides and your site does not pay them so it is blocked.

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: outriding

Originally posted by: TheSnowman
I belive we can have a free and open system without outright neutrality, someting along the lines of priorty mail. An internet where everyone has access to the standard sevice but where we can also pay a premium for lower latency sounds reasonable to me.

What you are talking about here is QOS.

Currently when you jump providers one of two things happen with the QOS header.

1) It gets stripped
2) It gets ignored.

Why does it get ignored? Because the QOS header is set for a different domain.
To get QOS to run across the whole internet you would have to put the entire on a single domain.It that likely? No, there would be too much arguing about why should a tier one listen to a teir two provider. If I was a teir one I would not listen to a tier 2.

You would if regulation was put in place to require it. In contesting the idea of net neutrality I'm not proposing some 'do it however you like' free for all.

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

It may result in a degradation of service for VOIP and similar applications, such as Skype. Services depending on low latency such as Vonage would have to pay for higher packet prioritization (increasing the cost to the consumer, all else being equal) or they could also suffer a degradation in service.

I'm not against prioritization per se. I think for many reasons that priority service implementations should only be allowed by the big carriers if they continue to provide the same level of service for non-priority subscribers: the same latency or less, the same bandwidth or more, etc. Bandwidth is not really a concern, apparently, since packet prioritization would mostly affect the ordering of packets. In some cases the higher-priority traffic could be pipelined on separate hardware.

Edit: I have still yet to see a definitive proof that QoS packet reordering will not decrease bandwidth for lower-QoS packets. Unless the packet priority is escalated or computed partly based on wait time (causing some overhead), a packet could wait indefinitely as higher-priority packets are serviced. I guess the devil is in the details... I can imagine a simple, efficient generation-promotion scheme that could work.

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: dmcowen674

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

The first thing you will notice is your favorite sites dissappearing from the search engines because they do not pay.

The next thing you will notice is that you will not be able to access your favorite site because that site may be competition to what the owner of the bandwidth provides and your site does not pay them so it is blocked.

Both of your sentences are absolutely untrue. Neither can even possibly happen.

 

[GeNome]

It's a long read but, it has all the info there. And it's not nearly as biased as some other things you could read...

 

[halik]

Originally posted by: 6000SUX

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

It may result in a degradation of service for VOIP and similar applications, such as Skype. Services depending on low latency such as Vonage would have to pay for higher packet prioritization (increasing the cost to the consumer, all else being equal) or they could also suffer a degradation in service.

I'm not against prioritization per se. I think for many reasons that priority service implementations should only be allowed by the big carriers if they continue to provide the same level of service for non-priority subscribers: the same latency or less, the same bandwidth or more, etc. Bandwidth is not really a concern, apparently, since packet prioritization would mostly affect the ordering of packets. In some cases the higher-priority traffic could be pipelined on separate hardware.

Edit: I have still yet to see a definitive proof that QoS packet reordering will not decrease bandwidth for lower-QoS packets. Unless the packet priority is escalated or computed partly based on wait time (causing some overhead), a packet could wait indefinitely as higher-priority packets are serviced. I guess the devil is in the details... I can imagine a simple, efficient generation-promotion scheme that could work.

Imagine yourself trying to explain what you just said to the Senate Commerce Comitee.... this is part of the reason why net neutrality stuff won't make it into the legislature. The people that make the rules have no idea what you're talking about.

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: halik

Originally posted by: 6000SUX

Originally posted by: RichardE
Can someone explain how net Neutrality affects the average user?

It may result in a degradation of service for VOIP and similar applications, such as Skype. Services depending on low latency such as Vonage would have to pay for higher packet prioritization (increasing the cost to the consumer, all else being equal) or they could also suffer a degradation in service.

I'm not against prioritization per se. I think for many reasons that priority service implementations should only be allowed by the big carriers if they continue to provide the same level of service for non-priority subscribers: the same latency or less, the same bandwidth or more, etc. Bandwidth is not really a concern, apparently, since packet prioritization would mostly affect the ordering of packets. In some cases the higher-priority traffic could be pipelined on separate hardware.

Edit: I have still yet to see a definitive proof that QoS packet reordering will not decrease bandwidth for lower-QoS packets. Unless the packet priority is escalated or computed partly based on wait time (causing some overhead), a packet could wait indefinitely as higher-priority packets are serviced. I guess the devil is in the details... I can imagine a simple, efficient generation-promotion scheme that could work.

Imagine yourself trying to explain what you just said to the Senate Commerce Comitee.... this is part of the reason why net neutrality stuff won't make it into the legislature. The people that make the rules have no idea what you're talking about.

Hmm, you're probably right. I need to come up with some simple graphics illustrating the ideas involved. Perhaps fatter and slimmer bundles of campaign contribution money flowing through the mail system?

 

[2Xtreme21]

I'm not against net neutrality at all, but I believe it's getting too much hype and the end user won't see much in the way of difference. If you want to see an example, do the following:

Start > Run > cmd. Type "tracert www.google.com" It'll show all the hops your connection takes to connect to the google server. For me, it goes through 17 different places before it eventually gets to 64.233.179.104 (google.com). What this act will do, is allow you to buy a priority connection to google servers, limiting your trace route to perhaps 4 or 5 hops rather than 17.

The same can then be said about every server. It just allows ISPs such as comcast to route lines DIRECTLY to big named servers rather than going through a web of connections to get to it.

 

[spidey07]

6000sux,

If properly designed QoS doesn't cause significant latency for any traffic. It's goal is to provide adequate service for all applications. All queues are serviced appropriately. It's extremely tunable/tweakable.

As far as proof, it's all in how it is designed. What you're describing is called starvation - where a high priority queue dominates a link and other traffic has a hard time getting through (inessence "starving" the other queue of bandwidth). This is mitigated, again, by good design and engineering. One common and preferred method is to set the high priority queue to only use a specific upper limit of the bandwidth - say 20%. Then those queues are monitored for packet drops and utilization. If utilizaiton gets high or drops start occuring then more bandwidth is added.

It's difficult to explain because QoS/traffic engineering design and theory is very deep, I'd need a white board to really explain it. Cisco and Juniper should have some very good white papers if you want to get really deep into it. words to search for are RSVP, DiffServ and MPLS.

To the point - multiservice networks require QoS and to prevent it's use would severely hamper the progress of the Internet.

 

[6000SUX]

Originally posted by: spidey07
6000sux,

If properly designed QoS doesn't cause significant latency for any traffic. It's goal is to provide adequate service for all applications. All queues are serviced appropriately. It's extremely tunable/tweakable.

As far as proof, it's all in how it is designed. What you're describing is called starvation - where a high priority queue dominates a link and other traffic has a hard time getting through (inessence "starving" the other queue of bandwidth). This is mitigated, again, by good design and engineering. One common and preferred method is to set the high priority queue to only use a specific upper limit of the bandwidth - say 20%. Then those queues are monitored for packet drops and utilization. If utilizaiton gets high or drops start occuring then more bandwidth is added.

It's difficult to explain because QoS/traffic engineering design and theory is very deep, I'd need a white board to really explain it. Cisco and Juniper should have some very good white papers if you want to get really deep into it. words to search for are RSVP, DiffServ and MPLS.

To the point - multiservice networks require QoS and to prevent it's use would severely hamper the progress of the Internet.

Thanks for the info-- it'll give some interesting reading this weekend. The bandwidth reservation scheme is simple and good, similar to dedicating one or more processors just to running real-time tasks in a hybrid OS. It shows that the blog someone posted in an older thread "explaining" some of this stuff was at least partly full of malarkey.