From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-02-iad.dyndns.com (mxout-250-iad.mailhop.org [216.146.32.250]) by lists.bufferbloat.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 522352E0182 for ; Sun, 6 Feb 2011 08:42:33 -0800 (PST) Received: from scan-02-iad.mailhop.org (scan-02-iad.local [10.150.0.207]) by mail-02-iad.dyndns.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9A21E8332B0 for ; Sun, 6 Feb 2011 16:42:33 +0000 (UTC) X-Spam-Score: 0.0 () X-Mail-Handler: MailHop by DynDNS X-Originating-IP: 76.96.30.24 Received: from qmta02.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net (qmta02.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net [76.96.30.24]) by mail-02-iad.dyndns.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 14334832E13 for ; Sun, 6 Feb 2011 16:42:32 +0000 (UTC) Received: from omta21.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net ([76.96.30.88]) by qmta02.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net with comcast id 4ggv1g0091u4NiLA2giXwm; Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:42:31 +0000 Received: from [192.168.1.119] ([98.229.99.32]) by omta21.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net with comcast id 4giV1g0070hvpMe8hgiWWM; Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:42:30 +0000 Message-ID: <4D4ECF74.9080305@freedesktop.org> Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2011 11:42:28 -0500 From: Jim Gettys Organization: Bell Labs User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101208 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [Bloat] How do we shift the market? X-BeenThere: bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.13 Precedence: list List-Id: General list for discussing Bufferbloat List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:42:35 -0000 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