[Bloat] Usage Based Billing - It's All About Perceived Congestion

[richard]

Hi Steve

thanks for the feedback.

I guess it comes down to how the various modems achieve "burst"
throughput - by buffering and draining, or by actually increasing the
allocation of bandwidth for a time.

I'll remove that piece until I have more information.

richard

On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 08:57 -0500, Steve Bauer wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 4:56 PM, richard <richard at pacdat.net> wrote:
> > The result is:
> > http://digital-rag.com/article.php/All-About-Perceived-Congestion-UBB
> > It's aimed at the public and non-technical so allow me a few missing
> > things in the explanations :)
> 
> Hi Richard,
> 
> You recommended to your readers:
> 
> "You want to bug your ISP to turn off any/all "helper" buffering in
> your modem that purports to "increase upload speed for short periods"
> since this is buffering and part of the problem."
> 
> I am assuming you intended that to apply to Powerboost.  Based upon my
> understanding of various implementations of Powerboost,
> turning it off would *not* help with latency under load simply
> because the buffer sizes are fixed in today's cable modems.
> 
> So these issues are orthogonal.  There are certainly
> problems, but turning off Powerboost isn't part of the fix.
> 
> Indeed, turning Powerboost off could make the problem worse. A
> buffer that would otherwise have drained if Powerboost was in effect,
> would be more likely to have a queue of packets sitting in it adding
> additional latency to later arrivals.  Again, my key assumption is
> that disabling Powerboost simply doesn't change the buffer size.
> 
> As always, happy to be proved wrong.  :-)
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve Bauer
> MIT
-- 
Richard C. Pitt                 Pacific Data Capture
rcpitt at pacdat.net               604-644-9265
http://digital-rag.com          www.pacdat.net
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