Net Neutrality and QoS: resources and such?

xSauronx

Lifer
Jul 14, 2000
19,582
4
81
Im an IT student with a couple of research papers due this semester that I need to get cracking on for a couple of classes and after doing some thinking Ive realized that Net Neutrality and general Quality of Service are two issues that I am not that knowledgeable about but would be well worth my time to learn about.

So...I need some help. Pointers to good resources, direct links, highlights of important facets on the issue of network neutrality as well as quality of service in general.

Anyone care to help get me started, or point me in the right direction?

Thanks
 

cmetz

Platinum Member
Nov 13, 2001
2,296
0
0
xSauronx, check the discussion on the NANOG mailing list archives of the L3/Comcast peering fight that happened recently. There was a good discussion (argument) back and forth that captured all the viewpoints I'd consider worth considering.

Some key points for you to remember in this discussion:

1. HEAVY, HEAVY astroturfing is going on in the public debate. All the usual suspects are using all the usual political tricks to push their positions. Try to look past all that.

2. "Neutral" means different things to different people, ergo "net neutrality" means different things to different people, and that leads to folks talking right past each other.

3. This is really about money, and business models. Most of the real players in this discussion are trying to find a way to maximize their profit and shift costs to everyone else. At the end of the day, make no mistake, you the end customer are going to be the one who pays for what you use. The question really comes down to how that money is going to get from you to the coffers of various companies.

4. ISPs' business models are broken. The cost per Mb/s that they can get paid to move bits is dropping much faster than the cost per Mb/s to actually carry the traffic (that is, the capex costs of fiber + gear, plus the opex costs of people). There's a point in the not too distant future where ISPs quite literally can't make a profit from moving IP packets. So ISPs are scared, and trying to figure out how to get more revenue.

5. Content providers' business models are broken. The cost per Mb/s that they pay to move bits does not reflect the actual cost of carriage - see #4. Some CDN folks like L3 are willing to sell as a loss leader to capture the market share as step (1), and expect there to be a step (3): Profit! Similarly, content providers have set up business models that require those artificially low content delivery costs in order to work. Anyone here remember when the first Internet bubble burst and ad rates went to 1/10th what they used to be? Guess what happens when content delivery costs go to 10x what they used to be?

6. Customers expectations are broken. ISPs' marketing departments told us that we can have "unlimited" Internet access, which was always a bold lie, and history and competition gave us prices that kept falling and speeds that kept rising. We continue to expect to get more speed each year, be able to use an "unlimited" amount of it, and to pay the same or less for it. There is rather obviously a point at which the economics of that are fundamentally broken, but try retraining every Internet user around the world on that one.

7. More of the action is on mobile (cell phone network) data and is going to be in the future. The mobile carriers are already used to nickle-and-diming you, and they've got their customers mostly trained for that, and they are deathly afraid of their economics looking like that of ISPs (see #4 and #6). They are fighting hard and fighting now for the ability to keep their networks from becoming a commodity.

So what you have is a lot of brokenness trends that end up meaning something's going to have to change, and some folks are going to be unhappy (and or bankrupt). The debate is really about what we do now, and it's really all a matter of some trade-offs.

In my personal opinion, taking a broken marketplace and mixing government regulation and political ideology into that is unlikely to make things less broken.
 

cmetz

Platinum Member
Nov 13, 2001
2,296
0
0
See RFC 6057 for Comcast's latest ideas on how to "manage traffic." Make no mistake, Comcast has a reputation for a reason, but down at the engineering level, they have a quite simple problem created by this whole "unlimited" marketing thing and they're trying to find a way to solve it or at least keep it from destroying their network.
 
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Texashiker

Lifer
Dec 18, 2010
18,811
198
106
4. ISPs' business models are broken.,,,,,,,,,,,,, There's a point in the not too distant future where ISPs quite literally can't make a profit from moving IP packets. So ISPs are scared, and trying to figure out how to get more revenue.

That statement only applies to markets where there is real competition. I live in rural east Texas and we only have 1 high speed internet service provider - which is cable modem.

AT&T is refusing to build the area for DSL. The only place that can get DSL is downtown, which is the business market. We just got T1 ability to downtown businesses last year (2010).

Because there is no competition, the cable modem provider can oversale, cut services and charge just about anything they want.

As for Net Neutrality - it means a lot of different stuff, depending on who you ask. To me, Net Neutrality is internet service providers treating all traffic equally. I think my ISP puts a throttle on ports used for gaming. If I trace a route to a game server, it might be in the 30 or 40 range. But when I fire up the game, my ping in game is 100+.
 

Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
1
71
none of this b/s affects comcast business or comcast metro-e.

you can pay $99/month and leech at 50 meg 24x7 off your torrents and they'll leave you alone. you pay $52.95 for home service and hit that 250gb limit and they'll jump all over you and ban you for a few years (after enough violations). which is hilarious. honestly its probably easier for me to move to comcast business (since work pays for it anyways) and setup a WAN replication gig using 10gig 24x7x364 (async snapshotting). they'll never care. been using comcast business since it came out. balls out is o-kay with them.

why don't they just sell a $99 "balls-out" leech package for consumers? i don't know.
 

Texashiker

Lifer
Dec 18, 2010
18,811
198
106
you pay $52.95 for home service and hit that 250gb limit and they'll jump all over you and ban you for a few years (after enough violations).

My cable modem provider has a 10 gig cap, and my family rarely goes over that limit. When a new game is released on Steam, we might hit 20 gigs a month.

The customer agreement say they can charge a customer $10 for every gig over 10. But they rarely send anyone a bill.

But 250 gigs? wow, that is some serious bandwidth every month.

If that 250 gigs was through my provider, they would probably send you a bill for $240 + your regular monthly bill, for a grand total of about $300.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,587
10,225
126
But 250 gigs? wow, that is some serious bandwidth every month.

If that 250 gigs was through my provider, they would probably send you a bill for $240 + your regular monthly bill, for a grand total of about $300.

I used to max out my 3Mbit/sec DSL line, 24/7. Granted, that was to my providers own Usenet server, so they didn't have to pay any transit/upstream costs for my usage. It was all on their local network, so it was cheap for them. By my quick calculations, that's almost 900GB/mo.
 

xSauronx

Lifer
Jul 14, 2000
19,582
4
81
xSauronx, check the discussion on the NANOG mailing list archives of the L3/Comcast peering fight that happened recently. There was a good discussion (argument) back and forth that captured all the viewpoints I'd consider worth considering.

Some key points for you to remember in this discussion:
** snip **

i caught some of the L3/comcast stuff recently but ill go look into it more.

thanks for the feedback so far everyone :)
 

gsaldivar

Diamond Member
Apr 30, 2001
8,691
1
81
none of this b/s affects comcast business or comcast metro-e.

Right, there is a huge difference between business and residential service, even when both are coming from the same company. For business data, if there is any problem I can pick up the phone 24/7, authenticate myself and speak to an engineer (not a CSR) within two or three minutes. :thumbsup:
 

xSauronx

Lifer
Jul 14, 2000
19,582
4
81
Another thing, could anyone suggest some interesting websites worth following or looking at that are network-centric? This is more for my own personal interest and Im interested in what is going on and what people are following

Thanks
 

Texashiker

Lifer
Dec 18, 2010
18,811
198
106
Another thing, could anyone suggest some interesting websites worth following or looking at that are network-centric?

Wired.com
zdnet.com
slashdot.org
Cnet - cnet is mostly reviews, but they do have some technews
Eweek

Those should keep you busy for a little while.

I also like to visit the technology sections at bbc.co.uk, cnn.com and yahoo news.
 
Last edited:

jimhsu

Senior member
Mar 22, 2009
705
0
76
xSauronx, check the discussion on the NANOG mailing list archives of the L3/Comcast peering fight that happened recently. There was a good discussion (argument) back and forth that captured all the viewpoints I'd consider worth considering.

Some key points for you to remember in this discussion:

1. HEAVY, HEAVY astroturfing is going on in the public debate. All the usual suspects are using all the usual political tricks to push their positions. Try to look past all that.

2. "Neutral" means different things to different people, ergo "net neutrality" means different things to different people, and that leads to folks talking right past each other.

3. This is really about money, and business models. Most of the real players in this discussion are trying to find a way to maximize their profit and shift costs to everyone else. At the end of the day, make no mistake, you the end customer are going to be the one who pays for what you use. The question really comes down to how that money is going to get from you to the coffers of various companies.

4. ISPs' business models are broken. The cost per Mb/s that they can get paid to move bits is dropping much faster than the cost per Mb/s to actually carry the traffic (that is, the capex costs of fiber + gear, plus the opex costs of people). There's a point in the not too distant future where ISPs quite literally can't make a profit from moving IP packets. So ISPs are scared, and trying to figure out how to get more revenue.

5. Content providers' business models are broken. The cost per Mb/s that they pay to move bits does not reflect the actual cost of carriage - see #4. Some CDN folks like L3 are willing to sell as a loss leader to capture the market share as step (1), and expect there to be a step (3): Profit! Similarly, content providers have set up business models that require those artificially low content delivery costs in order to work. Anyone here remember when the first Internet bubble burst and ad rates went to 1/10th what they used to be? Guess what happens when content delivery costs go to 10x what they used to be?

6. Customers expectations are broken. ISPs' marketing departments told us that we can have "unlimited" Internet access, which was always a bold lie, and history and competition gave us prices that kept falling and speeds that kept rising. We continue to expect to get more speed each year, be able to use an "unlimited" amount of it, and to pay the same or less for it. There is rather obviously a point at which the economics of that are fundamentally broken, but try retraining every Internet user around the world on that one.

7. More of the action is on mobile (cell phone network) data and is going to be in the future. The mobile carriers are already used to nickle-and-diming you, and they've got their customers mostly trained for that, and they are deathly afraid of their economics looking like that of ISPs (see #4 and #6). They are fighting hard and fighting now for the ability to keep their networks from becoming a commodity.

So what you have is a lot of brokenness trends that end up meaning something's going to have to change, and some folks are going to be unhappy (and or bankrupt). The debate is really about what we do now, and it's really all a matter of some trade-offs.

In my personal opinion, taking a broken marketplace and mixing government regulation and political ideology into that is unlikely to make things less broken.

Extremely good summary. In my opinion, which side of the debate you "should" be on depends on your answers to these questions:

1. If you need to get many bits to many customers and don't care how it gets there (i.e. Youtube), or if you want to be nickel and dimed by your ISP, you should support net neutrality.

2. If you need to get a few bits to a few customers and really care how fast they get there (i.e. VOIP), or if you want to be nickel and dimed by your content provider, you should be against net neutrality.

That's basically it. Both choices unfortunately are bad for the consumer.
 

imagoon

Diamond Member
Feb 19, 2003
5,199
0
0
none of this b/s affects comcast business or comcast metro-e.

you can pay $99/month and leech at 50 meg 24x7 off your torrents and they'll leave you alone. you pay $52.95 for home service and hit that 250gb limit and they'll jump all over you and ban you for a few years (after enough violations). which is hilarious. honestly its probably easier for me to move to comcast business (since work pays for it anyways) and setup a WAN replication gig using 10gig 24x7x364 (async snapshotting). they'll never care. been using comcast business since it came out. balls out is o-kay with them.

why don't they just sell a $99 "balls-out" leech package for consumers? i don't know.

I would suspect... that the people that pay 52.99 to move 200megabytes a month still support the $99 business model. Move all the users to $99 a month business plans and let them use it balls to the wall and you may find yourself in the same situation. Plus the extra costs for the better tech support lines.

Here, Comcast business is provided on the same nodes as the consumer system. Before I got rid of them due to service issues, I saw the same swings in service as the residential did @ 7pm etc. I do think I had a certain amount of QoS based guaranteed service though because while usage and ping times would suffer at 7pm mine was rock solid (when the line wasn't screwing up.)