4 ms·

> This is how net neutrality dies, if we're not careful. Net neutrality has been dead for a long time. Honestly it was never a reality, and always more of an i

by exelius 11y ago

> This is how net neutrality dies, if we're not careful. Net neutrality has been dead for a long time. Honestly it was never a reality, and always more of an ideal. Transit agreements for CDNs and asymmetric peering arrangements have been commonplace since the mid-90s. > For me, it's strict - the carrier is carrying bits and bytes, and doesn't know/care what they are. I think a lot of people on the Internet also share this belief, but it is incompatible with the way residential broadband connections are currently priced and sold. Residential broadband uses a lot of traffic management tricks to deliver high-performance last-mile access -- and those traffic management tricks drive down operating costs dramatically to the point where it's possible to have a $60/mo broadband plan. At least T-Mobile is being transparent here: they're using a network management trick to allow them to offer unlimited data to their customers at a lower cost. Consumer last-mile access is all about making these kinds of compromises, and at least T-Mobile is giving its customers a choice to opt-in to a network management scheme rather than just using a hard cap. If you want totally net-neutral Internet access, it is available to you in the form of a commercial broadband connection (fiber / metro ethernet). It's also a lot more expensive because the ISPs can't oversubscribe their infrastructure in the same way and still meet their SLAs -- but those customers are paying for a higher level of service.

tentonbricks 11y ago
Opt-out, actually. Everyone got opted-in by default.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  Defaults are a powerful thing, and usually I like opt-in. In this case, opt-out makes sense to me, because the people who care about net neutrality already know about the opt-out by now, and the service needs large scale opt-in to produce real results. HD Voice is similar, it needs wide adoption to start paying dividends, and I hope it starts being opt-out instead of opt-in.
amazon_not 11y ago
> Transit agreements for CDNs and asymmetric peering arrangements have been commonplace since the mid-90s. Neither CDNs nor peering have anything to do with net neutrality. What point are you trying to make? It's entirely another matter that some ISPs use their market power to be rent seekers, but that's an entirely different issue and not directly related to net neutrality. > Residential broadband uses a lot of traffic management tricks to deliver high-performance last-mile access I sure would like to hear about them tricks. Statistical multiplexing and oversubscription aren't exactly novel concepts. Or did you have something else in mind? > At least T-Mobile is being transparent here: they're using a network management trick to allow them to offer unlimited data to their customers at a lower cost. It's not a network management trick, it's just a novel marketing trick to blow smoke up their customers' arse. If T-Mobile can deliver unlimited data for video streaming then they can deliver unlimited data for all content types.
- exelius 11y ago
  > Statistical multiplexing and oversubscription aren't exactly novel concepts. Or did you have something else in mind? They're not novel concepts, but they're hard to pull off at scale. There's no technological "magic pill" here - it's just a lot of continuous improvement on infrastructure. Oversubscription makes it possible to have a 150 mbps connection for under $300/mo. Oversubscription also makes some assumptions in order to make the statistical multiplexing work, and one of those assumptions is a certain level of concurrency and bandwidth usage. Also, keep in mind that one of the ISPs most effective bandwidth management tricks is psychological: if they make you think that data is a limited resource, people will treat it like one and use less of it. Even if they don't end up charging you, the mere rumor that your ISP might charge you more if you go over is enough to get people to at least consider the amount of data they use. > If T-Mobile can deliver unlimited data for video streaming then they can deliver unlimited data for all content types. Because other content types aren't the problem: video is. Video is 70-80% of consumer Internet traffic (sorry, no source that I can share). T-Mobile can only offer unlimited video because they are taking something that accounts for 3/4 of their last-mile traffic and slashing the bitrate by 50%. They're not saying what video you can or can't watch, nor are they changing the content of the videos. And video is only problematic because it needs to sit in multiple "buckets" at once. Generally network traffic is optimized for high throughput or low latency, but video needs a bit of both.

by exelius 11y ago

tentonbricks 11y ago

Opt-out, actually. Everyone got opted-in by default.

sliverstorm 11y ago
Defaults are a powerful thing, and usually I like opt-in. In this case, opt-out makes sense to me, because the people who care about net neutrality already know about the opt-out by now, and the service needs large scale opt-in to produce real results. HD Voice is similar, it needs wide adoption to start paying dividends, and I hope it starts being opt-out instead of opt-in.

amazon_not 11y ago

> Transit agreements for CDNs and asymmetric peering arrangements have been commonplace since the mid-90s. Neither CDNs nor peering have anything to do with net neutrality. What point are you trying to make? It's entirely another matter that some ISPs use their market power to be rent seekers, but that's an entirely different issue and not directly related to net neutrality. > Residential broadband uses a lot of traffic management tricks to deliver high-performance last-mile access I sure would like to hear about them tricks. Statistical multiplexing and oversubscription aren't exactly novel concepts. Or did you have something else in mind? > At least T-Mobile is being transparent here: they're using a network management trick to allow them to offer unlimited data to their customers at a lower cost. It's not a network management trick, it's just a novel marketing trick to blow smoke up their customers' arse. If T-Mobile can deliver unlimited data for video streaming then they can deliver unlimited data for all content types.

exelius 11y ago
> Statistical multiplexing and oversubscription aren't exactly novel concepts. Or did you have something else in mind? They're not novel concepts, but they're hard to pull off at scale. There's no technological "magic pill" here - it's just a lot of continuous improvement on infrastructure. Oversubscription makes it possible to have a 150 mbps connection for under $300/mo. Oversubscription also makes some assumptions in order to make the statistical multiplexing work, and one of those assumptions is a certain level of concurrency and bandwidth usage. Also, keep in mind that one of the ISPs most effective bandwidth management tricks is psychological: if they make you think that data is a limited resource, people will treat it like one and use less of it. Even if they don't end up charging you, the mere rumor that your ISP might charge you more if you go over is enough to get people to at least consider the amount of data they use. > If T-Mobile can deliver unlimited data for video streaming then they can deliver unlimited data for all content types. Because other content types aren't the problem: video is. Video is 70-80% of consumer Internet traffic (sorry, no source that I can share). T-Mobile can only offer unlimited video because they are taking something that accounts for 3/4 of their last-mile traffic and slashing the bitrate by 50%. They're not saying what video you can or can't watch, nor are they changing the content of the videos. And video is only problematic because it needs to sit in multiple "buckets" at once. Generally network traffic is optimized for high throughput or low latency, but video needs a bit of both.