[Bloat] How do we shift the market?

[Jim Gettys <jg@freedesktop.org>]

A) Today, "speed" has been conflated with "bandwidth", where we now know 
that that is naive and hurtful, and that latency under load is key for a 
large variety of applications.

Shifting this discussion from speed == bandwidth in the marketplace to 
something more nuanced and sensible is key; ultimately money talks.


B) Tests demonstrate the problems anyone can run.

There are several tests likely to come on line over the next months to 
help the situation:
	o The FCC SamKnows tests are putting in/have put in a latency under 
load test; I don't know when early results will appear.
	o at sometime later this year, the Ookla folks (e.g. speedtest.net) may 
add a test; they are in the middle of a major platform upgrade though, 
and the dust from that needs to settle before they can put effort there.

I'd really like to get really good easy demonstrations on-line and not 
wait/rely on others here.

Unless people can easily see if they are suffering, it remains a 
hypothetical.  The sooner they can reliably induce suffering on 
themselves, the sooner it becomes concrete.

Also note that both of the commercial tests above don't help network 
operators much (e.g. corporate networks), with diagnosing *where* the 
problems are.  That's why something like pingplotter is sooo important, 
we want heat going toward the right problems, not simply heat entering 
the system without pointing a finger where the problem is located!

C) direct market pressure:

The challenges I see include:
	a) ensuring that various manufacturers understand that their feet are 
going to be held to the fire on this metric so that maybe they start 
putting engineering resources into fixing their product. When they do, 
having working examples (e.g. OpenWRT, and 3g home gateway and others) 
that shows why it can be a competitive differentiator in the short run 
and will become and existential issue in the long run (you won't be able 
to sell bloated hardware any more).
	Certainly we need to hit up both the engineering press, but also 
mainstream business press so that the senior management of those now 
very large companies start to pay attention.
	b) make sure those who do testing and recommendation of products to 
consumers understand and start shining the light of day on the latency 
problems. So there's a lot of work to do to talk to and educate the 
likes of cnet, pcmag, smallnetbuilder, andatech, Tom's hardware etc.

It's not clear to me that this to reach out to the consumer kit 
reviewers should be started until we have at least existence proofs of 
properly working debloated kit in hand.  But as soon as we do, I'd love 
to put a properly working router into the hands of such people, and say: 
run this simple test on both this kit, and the other stuff you 
review.....  Bingo, the case gets made...

D) apropos of other discussions here: A lot of SLA's only talk about 
bandwidth, or packet loss (currently preferably zero with all that 
implies); education toward those who write those agreements that latency 
under load must be a metric in those agreements.

But if we don't shift the market discussion, bufferbloat won't get 
fixed, nor avoided in the future.
		- Jim