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A concern from ISPs is that they will lose the ability to shape and prioritize traffic, something that is often necessary. A concern from consumers is that ser

A concern from ISPs is that they will lose the ability to shape and prioritize traffic, something that is often necessary. A concern from consumers is that services will be restricted or rendered unusable by throttling selectively driving customers away from services. A concern from Service Providers is that they will have to make deals with ISPs to ensure quality of service. They're valid concerns on all sides and without Net Neutrality we've seen service restrictions, though they're advertised as benefits (e.g. free OTT messaging on flights from certain providers). We've also seen ISPs bully providers like Netflix into paying to deliver traffic their customers are paying to access (double dipping). It hasn't been the doom and gloom that was hyped but has definitely impacted services. Under net neutrality I expect we'll see a degradation of cellular services or forced consent agreements as WISPs will not be allowed to downgrade or shape traffic otherwise. It cuts both ways and I will be surprised if it makes much difference.

dd36 3y ago
Net neutrality is the law in California. ISPs are doing just fine.
hedora 3y ago
Shaping and prioritizing traffic can be done in a service-agnostic way, so the sorts of shaping they can make money off of are never "necessary." The anti-network neutrality thing is just a money grab. Here's a good-enough traffic shaping algorithm: Each user gets their traffic put into two queues. High bandwidth flows go into a the low priority queues. Low bandwidth (video conferencing, interactive) flows go into the high priority queue. You round robin between all the users' queues at the local node level. If the trunk line is saturated by a few users, then their queues will be long, causing their flows to backpressure. Everyone else's queues will have ~ 1 packet in them, leading to no backpressure and negligible latency. It's extremely difficult to do better than the solution I just sketched. It is stateless, and it is also very easy to approximate in hardware. It even handles the "I want to torrent and VOIP at the same time" problem.

dd36 3y ago

Net neutrality is the law in California. ISPs are doing just fine.

hedora 3y ago

Shaping and prioritizing traffic can be done in a service-agnostic way, so the sorts of shaping they can make money off of are never "necessary." The anti-network neutrality thing is just a money grab. Here's a good-enough traffic shaping algorithm: Each user gets their traffic put into two queues. High bandwidth flows go into a the low priority queues. Low bandwidth (video conferencing, interactive) flows go into the high priority queue. You round robin between all the users' queues at the local node level. If the trunk line is saturated by a few users, then their queues will be long, causing their flows to backpressure. Everyone else's queues will have ~ 1 packet in them, leading to no backpressure and negligible latency. It's extremely difficult to do better than the solution I just sketched. It is stateless, and it is also very easy to approximate in hardware. It even handles the "I want to torrent and VOIP at the same time" problem.