hungryhorace

You know this is the same argument Comcast made? http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/13/54...s-google-fiber

dakota44

I didn't think that the FCC would take that unfortunate court ruling lying down.

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission will propose new rules to encourage equal access to the web, by pushing Internet providers to keep their pipelines free and open.

The proposal on so-called net neutrality, to be introduced by Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the commission, will prohibit broadband companies from blocking any sites or services from consumers. It will also aim to prevent Internet service providers from charging content companies for access to a faster, express lane on the web.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/bu...rnet.html?_r=0

hungryhorace

The FCC is run by a cable lobbyist!

dakota44

Read the article. The new rules will protect net neutrality. If the FCC were on the side of the cable companies they would have just let the ruling be the end of it and not come up with new regulations to satisfy the court decision and it's acceptance that the FCC has the right to establish new rules to protect the net. All the court said was that the current rules gave no authority for their actions. The new rules will.

Pulaski

Bob, perhaps you'd care to let CNN know that there is no substance to their report this afternoon.

Bob

I mentioned that well before they announced their plans to roll out into new cities.

Which does make sense with the TW/Comcast merger.

Steve_

And so it begins: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/bu...agreement.html

So guaranteed access rather than faster access is how I read that. First paragraph is a little misleading.

Anian

Sounds like those guys who guarantee your house won't burn down if you pay them a bit of cash.

Steerpike

Does this not sound a bit like QOS? I'm familiar with QOS from a corporate network perspective - (guaranteed minimum) Quality Of Service. I would not expect anyone to provide QOS service on their network without having to pay for it - they are essentially guaranteeing your traffic a minimum speed throughout their entire network, and to do that, they have to be willing to bump other traffic.

dlake02

No QoS on the Internet.... You'd need an admission and policing policy that understood customer need vs available resources. ATM was designed to do exactly this. But IP won. It's a Betamax vs VHS debate again.

There are methods for introducing QoS on IP, but it would require a degree of co-ordination that so far has escaped the industry.

It also points to a central point of control model which some countries just seem opposed to.

Steve_

It's not QoS, it's FoBS.

It's just a way of violating net neutrality without explicitly saying it, they remove a set of routers which supposedly makes it "more reliable" so it's an indirect way of prioritizing the traffic because it gets into their network more directly. There's no direct "preference" per se but as they use 30% of the available bandwidth they obviously get first stab at it as there is one less network layer to plough through.

And I'm sure the Comcast routers are configured in some way to give some sort of indirect preference as well. And you're dealing with Comcast directly too so their engineers are going to help you first.

Like I said above, as a Canadian or any foreigner for that matter, you're clearly going to get shafted as so much traffic goes through the US, it's physically impossible to have such direct access to the infrastructure.

hungryhorace

There is no way that traffic prioritisation is not being implemented at some point within a US ISP. The issue is whether that prioritisation directly impacts on customers.

For example, I assure you that routers within an ISP will be configured to drop less time sensitive packets (like ICMP). Is that violating net neutrality?

Steerpike

True End-to-end QOS is impossible but if you know where your bottlenecks are, you can attempt to address them. So if they've determined that the video streaming bottleneck is at their ingress point to the comcast network, paying to have that 'widened' makes some sense.

In my last job, we had to maintain voice quality and we were using a hosted, 3rd party voice provider. We had an internal MPLS network from CenturyLink, that allowed us to control our own internal cross-country network (call center on east coast, data center west coast), but we couldn't control the last bit that touched the hosted voice service. So we did a deal with the voice provider to install a CenturyLink circuit, essentially extending our 'mpls' network into their data center.

Once you get into the nitty gritty of how the internet works - a collection of private carriers - I don't see any way around this type of arrangement. And given that bandwidth really does cost money to the carriers, I just can't see how anyone can achieve this without paying money. A 'freeway' (cars) analogy works for me; if the freeway is under-used, everyone is happy - cars can get on and drive as fast as they like. But once you get congestion, you have to have a way to prioritize. Tolls, express lanes, etc ... This is where I don't quite understand how 'net neutrality' is supposed to work in practical terms, especially when you have one person simply wanting to send/receive emails, and another person wanting to stream a 1 gig movie, both paying for the same 'basic cable' data.

Steerpike

More to the point - I suspect Comcast put QOS on their own hosted voice services - that is, if you subscribe to comcast's 'phone service', I suspect they give you QOS at least from your home to their central servers. A comcast customer-to comcast customer call is probably prioritized end-to-end. I would if I were comcast!

Steve_

Or what about UDP? That's a big chunk of internet traffic.

I'm sure the lawyers will argue about it.