hungryhorace

UDP isn't time sensitive, so could be dropped without the consumer noticing. There are some major services like DNS, VOIP and so forth that would need to be priorized, but apart from that...

hungryhorace

Absolutely. I would WANT my VOIP traffic prioritized also.

Pulaski

Prioritized? Either a phone conversation is real time, or it isn't, ..... it isn't a conversation at all! Or am I misunderstanding something about "prioritization"?

hungryhorace

I'm referring to the packets the phone call is encapsulated in being prioritized.

Pulaski

Right, that is exactly what I understood. .......

Steerpike

The call 'has to be' (near) real-time, so if there is too much traffic on the line, bits (literally!) of the conversation are 'dropped', and what you hear is a garbled conversation. You have probably encountered this before without realizing what it was. Skype would probably be a good example of a service where you'll hear 'drops'. What you hear is a 'generally high quality voice' (full range of frequencies) but with slices taken out. Hard to explain, but something you learn to recognize when you use voip services.

Pulaski

Interesting. ... I have heard that, just once, I think, during a job interview!!! The interviewer, now my boss was complaining about the poor call quality, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was a Vonage line, and I had to use it because there is poor cell phone coverage at home.

dlake02

Correct. They have a separate class where voice is run in a priority queue between their gateways and your phone.

However, in this instance, the Comcast network looks more like a private network where building this kind of service is straightforward.

As Steerpike said "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 that is the great debate in networking circles right now. His analogy to road networks is a good one as well - what we have in the Internet is a set of roads where you know source and destination and a rough map of how to get from A to B, but no control of competing resources. In other words, you really can make no more than a best-guess of how long it will take to GET from A to B.

In the early days of the 'net, that wasn't an issue as the data was not time/delay sensitive. That isn't the case for voice and video - they require defined service levels.

However, the methods by which you can control demands require a huge amount of co-ordination, and have proven to be politically unpopular.

The alternative which has worked up until now has been to throw bandwidth at the problem - the US carriers are still able to do this because they are charging SO much more than their EU counterparts. This is no longer the case for most of the EU operators.

Steerpike

What is a typical UK charge? And what rates are you using for comparison in the US? I think I'm paying about $50/month for reasonably fast internet access, though it's bundled with TV so I can't easily identify the cost.

Regarding 'net neutrality' ... I'm all in favor of services like Netflix and Hulu (subscribe to both), and don't care for the practices in general of companies like Comcast, but ... understanding that there are bottlenecks out there (be it the shared cable coming down my street, or the router at the ISP, or whatever), it seems fundamentally unfair that I could download movies all day long, saturating the pipes, while my neighbor (who's paying for the same service level) simply wants to view static web pages and get email.

Using my 'road' analogy, you don't want an 'oversized load' to be allowed on the freeway during rush hour, and you don't want two or three 'oversized loads' blocking all the lanes at once - impacting all other drivers.

Furthering the 'road' analogy, on the one hand, you have the argument that roads are built using taxpayer money, and should therefore be available to all (and exist to further the benefit of society as a whole); but on the other hand, you have toll roads being built that wouldn't get built if there weren't the tolls to fund them ...

I think one key element is - the provision of a utility like cable service is a necessary monopoly (you can't have 20 people all digging up the road laying cable) so one company is 'allowed' to have a monopoly, and as a result, has to be subjected to regulation. Having an ISP apply limits on usage seems reasonable, but it should not be selective limits targeted against competition. That is - it's ok if Comcast charge you extra for going over some quota, but they have to apply that equally and not target Netflix only, or whatever. What really messes this up is the fact that (eg) Comcast is both an ISP/data carrier AND a TV content provider, and thus has a complete conflict of interest.

hungryhorace

£10-30 GBP is the pricing for ADSL / Cable internet in the UK.

dlake02

The UK is expensive in EU terms, and a typical monthly charge is around £10-15/month for a BT Infinity-derived service. However, I'm currently paying £2.50/month for an unlimited but slow (16Mbit/s) ADSL service from TalkTalk. My last US experience was a hideous Comcast 15Mbit/s cable service at $50/month. In other words, slower and much more expensive. The other option was AT&T DSL at 684kbit/s as most of Silicon Valley cannot get high-speed AT&T service (and no Verizon).

Other EU countries are cheaper/faster. Most follow the ring-fenced/unbundled model - the national PTT owns 90%+ of the backbone and is not allowed to offer consumer service directly, but sells via a wholesale market.

And that is the real issue - the expensive part is building the core infrastructure. Whilst BT Openreach do not publish separate pricing from Big BT, it is thought that they are charging between £1 and £2/month/user for consumer broadband. At those sort of rates given the level of investment needed, it is an unprofitable business.

The difference in the US is there is no functioning wholesale market as the FCC has not seen this as a priority.

Instead, the US is unique in promoting multiple, competing services from soup-to-nuts. Hence, taking your analogy a little further, you could end up with 4, 5 or 6 road networks and your house having a driveway to each....

NOW you're back to the politics of it, and you should talk to the FCC The Internet should be no different from any other publicly funded utility. Unfortunately, the history of regulation and of the build-out of public infrastructure in the US has not been good (it's not been good in the UK either).

Yep. So, the answer is probably a single national carrier for last-mile, and then competing services. This works well in most other transport systems (e.g. power, gas, water, rail). However, it only works where that transport system is mature - for example, in the UK, massive investment is now needed in the power grid, but no-one wants to invest in it. The last major investment was in the 1950s when it was nationalised. The biggest investment in UK power networks right now is from EDF, the French state-owned power company.

Most countries are taking a consortium-based approach to infrastructure - the developing nations are building single last-mile networks (wired and wireless) either nationally owned or held as a private/public partnership. Even in the UK, considerable public money is going into the BT core network through tax breaks. It's the old problem that private companies can see no further than the next quarter, so long-term investment is impossible. There was talk that the last Labour government were so concerned that BT Openreach may have been nationalised (but BT Retail left as a private company).

If we want a pointer from history, we should look no further than the disaster that was rail privatisation - at least of the infrastructure. That vital national asset eventually cost the British public a huge amount of money. Whilst there is still a long way to go with UK rail, the level of investment going into core infrastructure since Network Rail went back to public ownership is huge, and there are successful private operators because of that.

So now you're into political preference for how you want your national infrastructure to be financed - I can't think of any worse outcome than having it all owned by a corporate such as Comcast or Google that is beholden to the quarterly culture, quite frankly.....