12 ms·
Realistically, are network operators going to add artificial delay to packets going through their network? If they don't get their bit, and they start slowing
by anameaname 9y ago
Realistically, are network operators going to add artificial delay to packets going through their network? If they don't get their bit, and they start slowing down communication, it would seem like market correction would solve it.
- mhandley 9y agoI've no idea what techniques will actually be applied by operators - I never expected middleboxes to go to the extremes they currently do either. But the technique I mentioned, of briefly delaying a short burst of packets, if done only occasionally, isn't really going to be noticed during a large transfer. I'm not claiming its a good idea though!
- anameaname 9y agoLarge transfer's wouldn't be the place where the effect would be noticeable, it would be JSON payloads that can fit in a few packets. If operators would do this seldomly enough to not be noticed, why do they need the bit at all? It feels like a blank (albeit single digit) check.
- bsder 9y agoSarcastically: who will even notice a 200ms hiccup, nowadays, given the enormous waste of time that everybody shoves into their Javascript ad networks. Personally, I don't want them to expose anything. The RTT on my packets is yet another piece of metadata capable of being abused. In addition, I hope that the whole QUIC thing is a nice reboot of actually getting end-to-end connectivity back on the Internet so we can get some protocol experimentation moving again.
- slededit 9y agoThat's 200ms that could be used loading more tracking scripts.
- supertrope 9y agoSounds like AMP. Improve performance to fit more bloat instead of not adding superfluous elements in the first place. What else would you expect from an advertising company?
- zero_intp 9y agoAssume there are a minimum of three network operators involved in every flow; source, destination, and transport. It is highly likely that either the source or destination operator will have opportunity and motive to do said inspection/detection.
- Buge 9y agoAren't network operators already adding artificial delay? I pay for X Mbps download speed, and my ISP artificially limits my download speed to that, even though their network is perfectly capable of providing me with more.
- tialaramex 9y agoNo. Bandwidth limits and delay aren't the same thing. CPE (the WiFi router or similar in your home) often adds delay because a few megabytes of RAM is cheap and the people who built it don't understand what they're doing. This is called "buffer bloat". But inside the network core this rarely comes up.
- ksec 9y agoDoes anyone know how much buffer bloat or delay is added in the router, or CPE or Modem? I assume they are less then 1ms? I have been trying to figure this out for a while but information aren't really available.
- tialaramex 9y agoBufferbloat is potentially almost unlimited, assuming that the people who built it are idiots (a safe assumption for most consumer gear) it basically just depends how much they were willing to spend on RAM. For example, let's say we can move 10Mbps, and we've decided to use 10 megabytes of buffers to make our new WiFi router super-duper fast. Do a big download, the buffer fills with ten megabytes of data, that's eight whole seconds of transmission, now the latency of packets is eight seconds, so that's 8000 times larger than your "I assume less then 1ms". {Edited to correct numbers}
- mikeash 9y agoBack around 2006, I had a RAZR that I figured out how to use to tether my computer onto Verizon’s 1xRTT service. I’m not sure which part of the system was to blame, but something had massive buffers and a strong aversion to dropping packets. If the connection got saturated I could easily see ping times of two minutes or more.
- floatingatoll 9y agoYes. Market correction isn’t applicable in most US markets, which have either a broadband monopoly or duopoly for broadband service.