I so wish that the network nuetrality debate included discussions such as these.
On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 5:53 PM, Jonathan Morton <chromati...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 29 Mar, 2018, at 3:26 am, Dave Taht <dave.t...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> A finicky bit would be who to penalize when the underlying medium >> (shared cable) is oversubscribed. > > Two obvious reasonable solutions: share equally per subscriber, or share > proportionately to provisioned bandwidth per subscriber. Either should be > fairly straightforward to implement in an integrated qdisc, and either would > penalise the (instantaneously) heaviest users before affecting normal or > light users. > > Equal sharing has the interesting side-effect that subscribers on lower tiers > don't notice backhaul congestion at all until higher tiers have been forced > down to their level. This potentially gives ISPs an incentive to avoid such > extreme congestion (by upgrading backhaul to match demand), since rational > customers won't pay for bandwidth they can't use. It also ensures that all > subscribers retain a reasonable, basic level of service during abnormal > congestion events. > > Conversely, proportional sharing might give a perverse incentive, since > paying more gives a larger share of the pie, no matter how cramped it is. > Artificial scarcity could then be used to aid up-selling in an anti-consumer > manner, similar to what's been seen with Netflix. It would be naive to > assume that ISPs won't do this, given the opportunity, so it would be better > to build only the more consumer-friendly option into the software. > > Theoretically, a middle ground could be to assign a sharing weight separately > from the provisioned bandwidth. This would permit, for example, subscribers > provisioned at 100:1 bandwidths to receive 4:1 service under congested > conditions. However, this would be under ISPs' control and fully documented, > and would therefore be a little too tempting to abuse. > > - Jonathan Morton > -- Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC http://www.teklibre.com Tel: 1-669-226-2619 _______________________________________________ Cake mailing list Cake@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cake
