[WISPA] net neutrality article
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/net-neutrality-plan-would-permit-blocking-bittorrent http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/28/1431214/FCCs-Net-Neutrality-Plan-Blocks-BitTorrent -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] net neutrality article
Do not feed the troll (repeat) On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Marco Coelho coelh...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/net-neutrality-plan-would-permit-blocking-bittorrent http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/28/1431214/FCCs-Net-Neutrality-Plan-Blocks-BitTorrent -- Marco C. Coelho Argon Technologies Inc. POB 875 Greenville, TX 75403-0875 903-455-5036 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
[WISPA] Net Neutrality article by Robert X. Cringely
Sorry for the cross-post. Having not really been following the whole Neutrality Debate, this clarified some stuff for me. I hope you enjoy it. Copied from: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060622.html June 22, 2006 Net Neutered: Why don't they tell us ending Net Neutrality might kill BitTorrent? By Robert X. Cringely Last week's column was about Bill Gates' announced departure from day-to-day management at Microsoft and a broad view of the Net Neutrality issue. We'll get back to Microsoft next week with a much closer look at the challenges the company faces as it ages and what I believe is a clever and counter-intuitive plan for Redmond's future success. But this week is all about Net Neutrality, which turns out to be a far more complex issue than we (or Congress) are being told. Net Neutrality is a concept being explored right now in the U.S. Congress, which is trying to decide whether to allow Internet Service Providers to offer tiers of service for extra money or to essentially be prohibited from doing so. The ISPs want the additional income and claim they are being under compensated for their network investments, while pretty much everyone else thinks all packets ought to be treated equally. Last week's column pointed out how shallow are the current arguments, which ignore many of the technical and operational realities of the Internet, especially the fact that there have long been tiers of service and that ISPs have probably been treating different kinds of packets differently for years and we simply didn't know it. One example of unequal treatment is whether packets connect from backbone to backbone through one of the public Network Access Points (NAPs) or through a private peering arrangement between ISPs or backbone providers. The distinction between these two forms of interconnection is vital because the NAPs are overloaded all the time, leading to dropped packets, retransmissions, network congestion, and reduced effective bandwidth. Every ISP that has a private peering agreement still has the right to use the NAPs and one has to wonder how they decide which packets they put in the diamond lane and which ones they make take the bus? Virtual Private Networks are another example of how packets can be treated differently. Most VPNs are created by ISP customers who want secure and reliable interconnections to their corporate networks. VPNs not only encrypt content, but to a certain extent they reserve bandwidth. But not all VPNs are created by customers. There are some ISPs that use VPNs specifically to limit the bandwidth of certain customers who are viewed as taking more than their fair share. My late friend Roger Boisvert, a pioneer Japanese ISP, found that fewer than 5 percent of his customers at gol.com were using more than 70 percent of the ISP's bandwidth, so he captured just those accounts in VPNs limited to a certain amount of bandwidth. Since then I have heard from other ISPs who do the same. As pointed out last week, though, there is only so much damage that an ISP can do and most of it seems limited to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone service where latency, dropouts, and jitter are key and problematic. Since VoIP is an Internet service customers are used to paying extra for (that, in itself, is rare), ISPs want that money for themselves, which is the major reason why they want permission to end Net Neutrality--if it ever really existed. The implications of this end to Net Neutrality go far beyond VoIP, though it is my feeling that most ISPs don't know that. These are bit schleppers, remember, and the advantages of traffic shaping are only beginning to dawn on most of them. The DIS-advantages are even further from being realized, though that will start to change right here. The key question to ask is what impact will priority service levels have on the services that remain, those having no priority? In terms of the packets, giving priority to VoIP ought not to have a significant impact on audio or video downloads because those services are buffered and if they take a little longer, well that's just the price of progress, right? Wrong. Let's look at the impact of priority services on BitTorrent, the single greatest consumer of Internet bandwidth. Though e-mail and web surfing are both probably more important to Internet users than BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file transfer scheme uses more total Internet bandwidth at something over 30 percent. Some ISPs absolutely hate BitTorrent and have moved to limit its impact on their networks by controlling the amount of bandwidth available to BitTorrent traffic. This, too, flies in the face of our supposed current state of blissful Net Neutrality. A list of ISPs that limit BitTorrent bandwidth is in this week's links, though most of them are, so far, outside the United States. BitTorrent blocking or limiting can be defeated by encrypting the torrents, but that
RE: [WISPA] Net Neutrality article by Robert X. Cringely
I read through this, and it didn't square with my understanding in many ways. I ran it past one of my senior engineers and this is his response: Cringely clearly needs to learn some more about the subject before he spouts technical pronouncements. Any ISP using VPNs to limit traffic to a customer is crazy as a loon. Maybe they did that in the old days, but certainly not anymore. I'm amazed that he honestly thinks that NO ISPs in the U.S. limit BitTorrent traffic. It was the first sign that he's pretty clueless technically and doesn't talk to very many ISPs. I do agree with him that Net Neutrality doesn't exist now, never existed in the past, and that this will not change. I disagree with a few other points: 1) I don't think that the current system is broken or bad, 2) comparing shaped traffic with unshaped traffic is dumb, 3) comparing optimized BitTorrent traffic with unoptimized is also dumb. Jeff Jeff Broadwick ImageStream 800-813-5123 x106 -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pete Davis Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 6:54 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; isp-wireless@isp-wireless.com; WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] Net Neutrality article by Robert X. Cringely Sorry for the cross-post. Having not really been following the whole Neutrality Debate, this clarified some stuff for me. I hope you enjoy it. Copied from: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060622.html June 22, 2006 Net Neutered: Why don't they tell us ending Net Neutrality might kill BitTorrent? By Robert X. Cringely Last week's column was about Bill Gates' announced departure from day-to-day management at Microsoft and a broad view of the Net Neutrality issue. We'll get back to Microsoft next week with a much closer look at the challenges the company faces as it ages and what I believe is a clever and counter-intuitive plan for Redmond's future success. But this week is all about Net Neutrality, which turns out to be a far more complex issue than we (or Congress) are being told. Net Neutrality is a concept being explored right now in the U.S. Congress, which is trying to decide whether to allow Internet Service Providers to offer tiers of service for extra money or to essentially be prohibited from doing so. The ISPs want the additional income and claim they are being under compensated for their network investments, while pretty much everyone else thinks all packets ought to be treated equally. Last week's column pointed out how shallow are the current arguments, which ignore many of the technical and operational realities of the Internet, especially the fact that there have long been tiers of service and that ISPs have probably been treating different kinds of packets differently for years and we simply didn't know it. One example of unequal treatment is whether packets connect from backbone to backbone through one of the public Network Access Points (NAPs) or through a private peering arrangement between ISPs or backbone providers. The distinction between these two forms of interconnection is vital because the NAPs are overloaded all the time, leading to dropped packets, retransmissions, network congestion, and reduced effective bandwidth. Every ISP that has a private peering agreement still has the right to use the NAPs and one has to wonder how they decide which packets they put in the diamond lane and which ones they make take the bus? Virtual Private Networks are another example of how packets can be treated differently. Most VPNs are created by ISP customers who want secure and reliable interconnections to their corporate networks. VPNs not only encrypt content, but to a certain extent they reserve bandwidth. But not all VPNs are created by customers. There are some ISPs that use VPNs specifically to limit the bandwidth of certain customers who are viewed as taking more than their fair share. My late friend Roger Boisvert, a pioneer Japanese ISP, found that fewer than 5 percent of his customers at gol.com were using more than 70 percent of the ISP's bandwidth, so he captured just those accounts in VPNs limited to a certain amount of bandwidth. Since then I have heard from other ISPs who do the same. As pointed out last week, though, there is only so much damage that an ISP can do and most of it seems limited to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone service where latency, dropouts, and jitter are key and problematic. Since VoIP is an Internet service customers are used to paying extra for (that, in itself, is rare), ISPs want that money for themselves, which is the major reason why they want permission to end Net Neutrality--if it ever really existed. The implications of this end to Net Neutrality go far beyond VoIP, though it is my feeling that most ISPs don't know that. These are bit schleppers, remember, and the advantages of traffic shaping are only beginning to dawn on most of them. The DIS-advantages are even further from being realized, though that will start
Re: [WISPA] Net Neutrality article by Robert X. Cringely
Many of us use PPPOE connections for our subscribers. While this is not the same as a VPN, it is similar. Many home routers support PPTP (which IS VPN'ish), so I assume SOMEONE out there is doing it, and I guess would make ONE connection to the AP, and cut down maybe on some of the problems associated with P2P software on the wireless client, where the 802.11x standard makes it tough to deal with hundreds of users and hundreds of connections each. pd Jeff Broadwick wrote: I read through this, and it didn't square with my understanding in many ways. I ran it past one of my senior engineers and this is his response: Cringely clearly needs to learn some more about the subject before he spouts technical pronouncements. Any ISP using VPNs to limit traffic to a customer is crazy as a loon. Maybe they did that in the old days, but certainly not anymore. I'm amazed that he honestly thinks that NO ISPs in the U.S. limit BitTorrent traffic. It was the first sign that he's pretty clueless technically and doesn't talk to very many ISPs. I do agree with him that Net Neutrality doesn't exist now, never existed in the past, and that this will not change. I disagree with a few other points: 1) I don't think that the current system is broken or bad, 2) comparing shaped traffic with unshaped traffic is dumb, 3) comparing optimized BitTorrent traffic with unoptimized is also dumb. Jeff Jeff Broadwick ImageStream 800-813-5123 x106 -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pete Davis Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 6:54 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; isp-wireless@isp-wireless.com; WISPA General List Subject: [WISPA] Net Neutrality article by Robert X. Cringely Sorry for the cross-post. Having not really been following the whole Neutrality Debate, this clarified some stuff for me. I hope you enjoy it. Copied from: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060622.html June 22, 2006 Net Neutered: Why don't they tell us ending Net Neutrality might kill BitTorrent? By Robert X. Cringely Last week's column was about Bill Gates' announced departure from day-to-day management at Microsoft and a broad view of the Net Neutrality issue. We'll get back to Microsoft next week with a much closer look at the challenges the company faces as it ages and what I believe is a clever and counter-intuitive plan for Redmond's future success. But this week is all about Net Neutrality, which turns out to be a far more complex issue than we (or Congress) are being told. Net Neutrality is a concept being explored right now in the U.S. Congress, which is trying to decide whether to allow Internet Service Providers to offer tiers of service for extra money or to essentially be prohibited from doing so. The ISPs want the additional income and claim they are being under compensated for their network investments, while pretty much everyone else thinks all packets ought to be treated equally. Last week's column pointed out how shallow are the current arguments, which ignore many of the technical and operational realities of the Internet, especially the fact that there have long been tiers of service and that ISPs have probably been treating different kinds of packets differently for years and we simply didn't know it. One example of unequal treatment is whether packets connect from backbone to backbone through one of the public Network Access Points (NAPs) or through a private peering arrangement between ISPs or backbone providers. The distinction between these two forms of interconnection is vital because the NAPs are overloaded all the time, leading to dropped packets, retransmissions, network congestion, and reduced effective bandwidth. Every ISP that has a private peering agreement still has the right to use the NAPs and one has to wonder how they decide which packets they put in the diamond lane and which ones they make take the bus? Virtual Private Networks are another example of how packets can be treated differently. Most VPNs are created by ISP customers who want secure and reliable interconnections to their corporate networks. VPNs not only encrypt content, but to a certain extent they reserve bandwidth. But not all VPNs are created by customers. There are some ISPs that use VPNs specifically to limit the bandwidth of certain customers who are viewed as taking more than their fair share. My late friend Roger Boisvert, a pioneer Japanese ISP, found that fewer than 5 percent of his customers at gol.com were using more than 70 percent of the ISP's bandwidth, so he captured just those accounts in VPNs limited to a certain amount of bandwidth. Since then I have heard from other ISPs who do the same. As pointed out last week, though, there is only so much damage that an ISP can do and most of it seems limited to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephone service where latency, dropouts, and jitter are key and problematic. Since VoIP is an Internet service customers are used to paying extra
