Folks, I had provided some offline comments about the inclusion of provisioned bandwidth in ALTO. Enrico asked me to re-send them to the mailing list. I can also discuss in next week's ALTO session.
Here are my privacy concerns. 1. Depending on the ISP's pricing and rollout of bandwidth tiers, there may be relatively few subscribers within a particular tier. Therefore a third party consuming ALTO provisioned bandwidth information can make a good guess about the identity of a subscriber within a "rarely used" bandwidth tier. 2. Separately, a third party consuming ALTO provisioned bandwidth information may be able to make an informed guess about the economic status of a subscriber based on the bandwidth tier, which may not be desirable to the subscriber. 3. The subscriber may not intend to use *all* provisioned bandwidth for a particular application (e.g. P2P). For example, perhaps the subscriber intends to use provisioned uplink bandwidth for telecommuting, telepresence, online storage backups, etc. A third party consuming ALTO provisioned bandwidth information should be aware that the subscriber's provisioned bandwidth may be reserved for different applications. Here are my thoughts on dynamic address re-allocation. ISPs reallocate IPv4 subnets within their infrastructure from time to time, partly to ensure the efficient usage of IPv4 addresses (a scarce resource), and partly to enable efficient route tables within their network routers. The frequency of these "renumbering events" depend on the growth in number of subscribers and the availability of address space within the ISP. As a result, a subscriber's household device could retain an IPv4 address for as short as a few minutes, or for months at a time or even longer. Some folks have suggested that ISPs providing ALTO services could sub-divide their subscribers' devices into different IPv4 subnets (or certain IPv4 address ranges) based on the purchased service tier, as well as based on the location in the network topology. The problem is that this sub-allocation of IPv4 subnets tends to decrease the efficiency of IPv4 address allocation. A growing ISP that needs to maintain high efficiency of IPv4 address utilization may be reluctant to jeopardize their future acquisition of IPv4 address space. Therefore, consumers of per-user ALTO information should assume that subscribers retain IPv4 addresses for only a relatively short period of time, e.g. minutes, and that subscribers of different service tiers will co-exist in some ISP's IPv4 subnets. -- Rich -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of alto issue tracker Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 5:14 AM To: [email protected]; [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: [alto] #4: Provisioned bandwidth #4: Provisioned bandwidth ---------------------------------------------+------------------------------ Reporter: enrico.maro...@… | Owner: Sebastian Kiesel <ietf-a...@…> Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: major | Milestone: Component: reqs | Version: Severity: - | Keywords: ---------------------------------------------+------------------------------ The document should track (and ideally stimulate discussion to reach consensus) the arguments about providing information about provisioned bandwidth, as it may have non trivial impact on the protocol design. The topic was discussed in [wiki:Ietf76 Hiroshima] and previously on the mailing list: [http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/alto/current/msg00322.html] [http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/alto/current/msg00476.html] -- Ticket URL: <https://svn.tools.ietf.org/wg/alto/trac/ticket/4> alto <http://tools.ietf.org/alto/> _______________________________________________ alto mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto _______________________________________________ alto mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto
