[ NNSquad ] Re: Dave Farber Warns AgainstNetNeutrality (Washington Post)I

On Sep 30, 2009, at 3:33 AM, Tony Aiuto wrote:

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 4:26 PM, Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com> wrote:

Nobody wants a best-efforts network. People want a network that delivers their bits within whatever bounds of latency and price are pertinent to the application that generates and consumes the bits. People don't care about bits, they care about the information that's encoded in the bits.

Richard:

You are almost correct. I want the application on my end of the connection to specify the bounds of latency and price. What I don't want is the network operator to guess what is more important to me. When the network can't deliver the latency I want, I expect it to do it's best to deliver what it can, at an appropriate reduction in price.

It's not about you, it's about us. Networks are shared.

If you're saying that a reduction in price when the network can't deliver is a good way to go, then you never met a WoW priest with a laggy connection.

WoW will average 10 Kbps. BitTorrent tend to average quite a bit more per user - let's say 2 Mbps (which can be on the lower end, but unlike WoW, BT speeds tend to differ greatly depending on where in the world you happen to reside).

In terms of resources, 200 WoW =~ 1 BT. TCP/IP also tend to reward applications that are anti-social over applications that try to behave, which compounds the problem somewhat.

Let's put 200 BT users and 200 WoW users on the same network. 200 WoW users, 2 Mbps. 200 BT users, 400 Mbps. Grand total, 402 Mbps. Now let's limit the available bandwidth on our theoretical network to introduce congestion. Pick a number between 50 and 400.

Prioritizing the bandwidth for the WoW users over the bandwidth for the BT users will yield a negligible impact for the BT users, but will keep countless raids going since the healers and tanks won't be lagged to hell. 200 happy WoW users (not to mention their guildmates) and 200 BT users who didn't even notice.

Sure, it's a very theoretical network with only BitTorrent and Warcraft traffic, but you get the idea.

Of course, there's many ways of skinning that particular cat, many ways of prioritizing traffic and introducing some sort of fairness equation. No arguing there - DPI isn't the holy grail by any means, just a rather useful tool at hand. Traffic management of some sort, however, is pretty much required - 'Some sort of fairness' doesn't happen as if by magic.

A content-indifferent network IS one where the applications can determine the relative worth of packets. Content indifference is the tool that allows the user to perform the transactions they care about. If the network tries to undermine my valuation, it acts as an interfering market maker. Centuries ago, commerce realized that market brokers should not charge different commissions for different transactions of the same class. Networks should not change policy based on their assumption of relative valuations. All bits are just bits, until the user's machine assigns a value to them.

George Ou covered this rather nicely already.