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Yet another network provisioner's marketing department trying to spin the 'network neutrality is bad' spiel as if life would be so much better if only those pes
by PeterStuer 7y ago
Yet another network provisioner's marketing department trying to spin the 'network neutrality is bad' spiel as if life would be so much better if only those pesky regulators would allow any means for ISP's to extract the maximum profit out of every packet, even if that means creating artificial scarcity.
It's like hearing Nestle arguing how the availability of drinkable municipal tap water is bad for their bottled water business.
- ReptileMan 7y agoWhy do people confuse QOS with network neutrality? Those are two completely separate concerns. Still baffles me to this day.
- pjc50 7y agoThe fear has always been extortion: pay or we'll traffic-shape your application into uselessness.
- ReptileMan 7y agoYeah but my videochat needs low ping, my torrents and netflix - not so much. I am totally fine with having two lanes - fast for sensitive traffic and slow. Pay as much you consume. This can be mandated to be neutral.
- pjc50 7y agoWho gets to control the "sensitive" label and the pricing? How does pricing work in markets where there is only one viable choice of consumer ISP?
- londons_explore 7y agoOne could easily imagine lanes controlled by the end user. For example, "You pay $60 per month for a 50Mbit cable connection consisting of 1 Gigabyte of low latency traffic and unlimited regular traffic". Then the user can set certain programs to be "low latency" using an app available from the cable company. If they want more low-latency traffic, they can pay extra. Actual implementation through CGNAT could simply involve having different source port ranges for low latency traffic.
- m000z0rz 7y ago> An app available from the cable company That will be filled with spyware and antipatterns.
- pjc50 7y agoNow the key thing is: does traffic not specially marked as "low latency" get artificial latency imposed on it in order to maintain the value of the low latency offering? You can imagine all sorts of things that would be great, but you have to acknowledge the reality that market forces don't work brilliantly on ISPs in many places.
- Spivak 7y agoI feel like this problem only exists in the minds of programmers since in the realm of law you get to take intent into consideration.
- pjc50 7y agoWhat law, though? That implies a consumer-friendly regulatory regime that can be persuaded to keep up with all the different attempts to game the system. The idea behind net neutrality would be only having to have this fight once to assert that all traffic is of equal value. Edit: this comment expresses exactly what I want to say already https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21762679
- ReptileMan 7y agoSoftware vendor and end user. Not the ISP You pay 20 euro for 70-100 mbit slow lane and pay couple more for the low latency bandwidth that you need.
- LoSboccacc 7y agoisn't that already happened at peering level? Netflix shaping was doing the rounds on the news some years ago.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoNetflix is a very special case. When your service comprises 10% of all Internet traffic, a lot of network management things that are normally irrelevant at the application level start to have shaping effects. A typical website won’t be affected at all by, like, Comcast’s peering policies.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoThey're not saying net neutrality is bad, but that it isn't well suited for latency sensitive applications like gaming. Which appears to be true; it's the whole reason Riot has their own network, after all.
- Retric 7y agoThe speed of light prevents people on the other side of the planet from having low latency. Networks can’t significantly improve latency at those distances. So, games need to avoid latency being an issue through game design or split things into separate instances. In the end it’s just a question of where the servers are relative to you and nothing else really matters. Private networks tend to make things worse by having fewer paths available increasing the average minimum distance.
- tapland 7y agoIt takes <67 ms for light to travel half the circumferance of earth. From my location in Europe to Chicago it takes 26 ms. Cables aren't laid out straight, but network infrastructure adds a majority of the cross continental latency. But gaming from the moon would not at all be feasible using light. I wonder how we could solve this for future space communications.
- imInGoodCompany 7y agoShort answer is: we can't :/ the speed of causality is not something we can "solve".
- Retric 7y agoWhen a server sends some state to a player, they player can’t get a response back without a round trip. The same is true in reverse. Further, the path through fiber optical cables is not the strait nor are fiber optic cables a vacuum. Using lasers through a vacuum tube strait from the user to a server on the other side of the planet might hit 134ms of light lag which is already a significant issue for many games. PS: LEO satellite constellations like Starlink have a lower theoretical latency around the world than fiber as the signals are traveling in space, but a longer path. Significantly beating that is going to require magic aka a useful fundamental change in the laws of physics as we know them.
- cyborgx7 7y agoTheir entire business sounds like a way to circumvent network neutrality, by claiming their network of interconnected private networks is something other than the internet.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoOk, and? That’s not a sin or anything. For what it’s worth there is definitely a market for this stuff. Starlink, hello?
- bregma 7y agoThere's definitely a market for human chattel slavery. Some have argued that's not a sin, too.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoJust to make sure I parse your words correctly, you are equating private backbones with human slavery? Yeah that seems very reasonable and obviously not filled to the brim with a ridiculous level of hyperbole.
- cyborgx7 7y ago>Just to make sure I parse your words correctly, you are equating private backbones with human slavery? No, you are parsing his words incorrectly.
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoBullshit. He is clearly equating the market demand for current-day private backbones to society's prior demand for human slavery. That's a ludicrous comparison. If you think these two things are anywhere nearly the same, you are a mega dumbshit.
- 7y ago
- Angostura 7y agoI'm not sure I necessarily find this inimical to net neutrality or a problem. Isn't this more like a way to provision on-the-fly peering agreements based on pricing and latency? Of course, if as a consumer you have a lousy ISP and the problem is occuring in last few miles, I don't see that this can help.
- soup10 7y agoIt's not spin at all though. web devs and high bandwidth users think the world revolves around them since they consume the majority of traffic; but latency is a huge issue in multiplayer games and players and providers are absolutely willing to pay a premium for lower latencies. You sometimes see professional e-sports players actually relocating closer to the servers for better ping.
- RHSeeger 7y ago> they consume the majority of traffic Do you have a source for that? Offhand, I would assume that video streaming would be an overwhelming majority of internet traffic.
- kcolford 7y agoVideo streaming is probably the majority of last-mile internet traffic. Along the public backbone is a different story as most video streaming services serve content at the edge.