[Bloat] fcc's coronovirus guidelines

[Sebastian Moeller]

> On Mar 27, 2020, at 22:41, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "put everyone on a schedule"... sigh

	Sorry to disagree a bit, but I consider this to be conceptually decent advice. If a problem can be avoided by a simple behavioral change, recommending that change seems quite reasonable. Sure, the crowd here on the bloat list, probably has sufficiently competent AQM* in place to not having to change their behavior, but for the majority of links/users/home networks this recommendation seems reasonable. And certainly easier to implement by everybody that recommending to deploy competent AQM...

	Also there are quite some misconceptions floating around, even in tech-circles, about the effect of "cyclically pumped" traffic like "adaptive" streaming on concurrent latency sensitive flows on standard consumer-grade internet access links. Quite a number of voices in Germany criticized the EU/BEREC as uninformed and incompetent  for "convincing" content providers to reduce streaming traffic**, based on the believe in that adaptive streaming is side-effect free as it probes the available bandwidth and would not cause congestion by itself. 
	Alas, on non-fq'd links adaptive streaming is not free of side-effects, but causes cyclic latency increases on the link that sufficiently latency sensitive traffic will expose. So far, it only were on-line twitch-type gamers that noticed this but both remote desktop and video conferencing applications are latency sensitive enough that the newly delegated to home-office crowd takes note as well.


Best Regards
	Sebastian


*) I wonder how well macos devices stack-up here, given that they default to fq_codel (at least over wifi)?

**) What happened in reality, is that the EU/BEREC informed European ISPs under which conditions they would be permitted to use traffic engineering to reduce traffic load caused by streaming video (in short, as long as it is to avoid network overload and applies to all video streaming independent of source, throttling/blocking/policing is considered fair game in the current circumstances). Most major video streaming sources understood that correctly and voluntarily offered to reduce their bitrates; which strikes as both crafty politics by the EU in pro-actively laying out how ISPs could deal with actual overloads, and economically crafty by the content side to realize that voluntary reductions keep the control over the "how" in their court. So, well played by both sides ;)



> 
> https://www.fcc.gov/home-network-tips-coronavirus-pandemic
> 
> 
> -- 
> Make Music, Not War
> 
> Dave Täht
> CTO, TekLibre, LLC
> http://www.teklibre.com
> Tel: 1-831-435-0729
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