NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Civil Rights Groups Wants P2P Throttling to Preserve Rights (or something like that)
At 10:18 AM 3/9/2008, Vint Cerf wrote: >It is possible with currently available technology to constrain >consumption rates using traffic shaping and rate limiting. Unfortunately, this does not produce satisfactory results for several reasons. Firstly, we have had many customers who exhausted their allocated capacity, complained that things were slow, and then refused to accept our explanation that they were using up all of the bandwidth they were allowed to have. (Often, they didn't know what the software on their own machines, or on their kids' machiens, was doing.) Secondly, even if the ISP limits the capacity of a P2P node, hordes of would-be downloaders will come knocking on the door asking for files. The ISP can throttle or block these requests, but by that time it is too late; the requests themselves have already consumed far more bandwidth than was allocated to the user. >B is presumably a >function of available capacity and number of active users and will >vary with time. This does not work. ISPs need to provision their networks and cannot change, in real time, the amount of bandwidth they buy. They must buy it by the month, or by the year, or in fact very often via multi-year contracts (necessary to get a good rate). To cover this, they must ask users who are allocated more capacity or who use more network resources to pay more. Absent tiered pricing, they cannot obtain sufficient revenue from heavy users to pay for needed capacity. >The problem is exacerbated by overly optimistic oversubscription of >capacity. I understand that some "broadband" carriers may try to >serve on the order of 300 users on an uplink of 4 Mb/s and downlink >of 40 Mb/s for example. Oversubscription is absolutely necessary to satisfy users. As I have mentioned in previous postings, bandwidth here costs $100 per megabit per second per month, while a typical user wants to pay $30 per month. This would mean that, accounting for overhead, such a subscriber would only be able to get 200 Kbps or less of guaranteed capacity, which is just barely fast enough for one computer to do Web surfing. Only via oversubscription can we let users burst higher. Which is what our ISP currently does. We give such users a guaranteed minimum rate (for non-proscribed activities; we don't guarantee anything for P2P) and then try to let them burst a bit higher. But we absolutely can't let P2P take our bandwidth without compensation, or we must throttle everyone back to that minimum guaranteed rate all the time. And they would NOT be happy with our network's performance if we did that. --Brett Glass