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as someone who has been involved in a number of moronic ISP designs, operations, and build outs --- asymmetric access networks are designed that way due to actu

by pyvpx 10y ago

as someone who has been involved in a number of moronic ISP designs, operations, and build outs --- asymmetric access networks are designed that way due to actual traffic patterns and physical medium constraints. you can argue "if everything was symmetric, then traffic patterns would be different" and you might be right, but that's not how the market went or how the "internet" started. the client-server paradigm drove traffic patterns, and there was never any market demand or advantage by ignoring it.

loup-vaillant 10y ago
That's not how the market went because the market is often moronic. Case in point: QWERTY. (Why QWERTY is actually the best layout ever is left as an exercise to the occasional extremist libertarian) Yes, traffic patterns at the time was heavily slanted towards downloads. I know about copper wires and how download and upload limit each other. Still, setting that situation in stone was very limiting. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't want to host your server at home because you don't have upload. The ISP sees nobody has servers at home so they conclude nobody needs upload. Peer-to-peer file sharing and distribution is slower than YouTube because nobody has any upload. Therefore everybody uses YouTube, and the ISP concludes nobody uses peer-to-peer distribution networks. And so on and so forth. It's the same trend that effectively forbid people to send e-mail from home (they have to ask a big shot provider such as Gmail to do it for them, with MITM spying and advertisement), or the rise of ISP-level NAT, instead of giving everyone a public IPv6 address like they all deserve (including on mobile). There is a point where you have to realise the internet is increasingly centralised at every level because powerful special interests want it to be that way. Regulation is what we need. Net neutrality is a start. Next in line should be mandated symmetric bandwidth, no ISP-wide firewall (the local router can have safe default settings), public IP (v4 or v6) for everyone, and no restriction on usage patterns (the ISP should not be allowed to forbid servers). Ultimately, our freedom of expression and freedom of information depends on this. They are messing with human rights.
- the8472 10y ago
  > Peer-to-peer file sharing and distribution is slower than YouTube because nobody has any upload. And because IP multicast doesn't work over the internet. If it did, even if merely to some limited extent, some asymmetries would be far easier to stomach.
jacquesm 10y ago
> you can argue "if everything was symmetric, then traffic patterns would be different" and you might be right, but that's not how the market went or how the "internet" started. It may not have been how the market went but it definitely was how the internet got started.
evilDagmar 10y ago
You say this as I look at my positively anemic upstream that makes browsing even simple Nagios pages painfully slow, and my ISP that doesn't offer anything substantively better without a massive increase in monthly costs. The traffic patterns for higher upstream aren't there because they can't be there.

by pyvpx 10y ago

loup-vaillant 10y ago

That's not how the market went because the market is often moronic. Case in point: QWERTY. (Why QWERTY is actually the best layout ever is left as an exercise to the occasional extremist libertarian) Yes, traffic patterns at the time was heavily slanted towards downloads. I know about copper wires and how download and upload limit each other. Still, setting that situation in stone was very limiting. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't want to host your server at home because you don't have upload. The ISP sees nobody has servers at home so they conclude nobody needs upload. Peer-to-peer file sharing and distribution is slower than YouTube because nobody has any upload. Therefore everybody uses YouTube, and the ISP concludes nobody uses peer-to-peer distribution networks. And so on and so forth. It's the same trend that effectively forbid people to send e-mail from home (they have to ask a big shot provider such as Gmail to do it for them, with MITM spying and advertisement), or the rise of ISP-level NAT, instead of giving everyone a public IPv6 address like they all deserve (including on mobile). There is a point where you have to realise the internet is increasingly centralised at every level because powerful special interests want it to be that way. Regulation is what we need. Net neutrality is a start. Next in line should be mandated symmetric bandwidth, no ISP-wide firewall (the local router can have safe default settings), public IP (v4 or v6) for everyone, and no restriction on usage patterns (the ISP should not be allowed to forbid servers). Ultimately, our freedom of expression and freedom of information depends on this. They are messing with human rights.

the8472 10y ago
> Peer-to-peer file sharing and distribution is slower than YouTube because nobody has any upload. And because IP multicast doesn't work over the internet. If it did, even if merely to some limited extent, some asymmetries would be far easier to stomach.

jacquesm 10y ago

> you can argue "if everything was symmetric, then traffic patterns would be different" and you might be right, but that's not how the market went or how the "internet" started. It may not have been how the market went but it definitely was how the internet got started.

evilDagmar 10y ago

You say this as I look at my positively anemic upstream that makes browsing even simple Nagios pages painfully slow, and my ISP that doesn't offer anything substantively better without a massive increase in monthly costs. The traffic patterns for higher upstream aren't there because they can't be there.