[ NNSquad ] Re: [nnsquad] nnsquad Digest, Vol 4, Issue 299

["David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com>]

I reviewed a number of the sources "cited" by the ATT factsheet and filing, looking for examples where users of  High Speed Internet Access Services (from any provider cited by the ATT document, including ATT, Verizonk and QWest) offered to *residential customers* are able to obtain selective prioritization of packets being delivered to them or from them to entities on the public Internet.

I also read ATT's footnote 17, where it says, verbatim: "When those packets leave AT&T’s network through a peering link with another network, the
prioritization markings are typically not honored by the other network because differentiated service
peering arrangements are not commonly in place today between different backbone providers."

This means no more and no less than the well-known fact that "differentiated services" have not been offered in a meaningful way since the standard was proposed in RFC 2474, *despite* enormous effort.  Perhaps this indicates what many of us believe to be true - that there is nor a real problem to be solved by diffserv that can't be better solved by traffic engineering and sufficient provisioning.  The reason in the end, is quite simple: if you allow packets to build up as congestion in the network, the network performs worse, not better, for all users.  The same applies to this as congestion in city automobile networks: congestion is not a source of efficiency - it is the beginning of instability a suboptimal use of the network.

There is some reasonable argument for a network wide "expedited forwarding" for certain packets.  Even that would be hard to roll out.  That ATT and others do not argue for such a thing exposes the whole argument about diffserv as what it seems to be: a cover for rent-seeking at the economic level, differentiated pricing *without* differentiated value - which is often referred to as a "protection racket".


As a result, I am deeply confused

On 09/06/2010 10:25 PM, nnsquad-request@nnsquad.org wrote:

            NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad

                 http://www.nnsquad.org

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