[Bloat] AQM & Net Neutrality

[Jonathan Morton]

>> Maybe the worries I have heard just points out the need for more education/awareness about what delay is and why things like AQM are not prioritization/QoS? I appreciate any thoughts.
> 
> I'm pleased to help with education in this area.  The short and simplistic answer would be that AQM treats all traffic going through it equally; the non-interactive traffic *also* sees a reduction in latency; though many people won't viscerally notice this, they can observe it if they look closely.  More importantly, it's not necessary for traffic to make any sort of business or authentication arrangement in order to benefit from AQM, only comply with existing, well-established specifications as they already do.

There is one more point I'd like to touch on up front.  Net Neutrality first became a concern with file-sharing "swarm" protocols, and then with video-on-demand services.  The common feature of these from a technical perspective, is high utilisation of throughput capacity, to the detriment of other users sharing the same back-end and head-end ISP infrastructure.

Implementing AF-AQM or FQ-AQM within the backhaul and head-end equipment, not to distinguish individual 5-tuple flows but merely traffic associated with different subscribers, would fairly share out back-end and head-end capacity between subscribers.  This would reduce the pressure on the ISP to implement policies and techniques that violate Net Neutrality and/or are otherwise unpopular with consumers, such as data caps.  This assumes (as I believe has been represented in some official forums) that these measures are due to technical needs rather than financial greed.

I'm aware of some reasonably fast equipment that already implements AF-AQM commercially.  My understanding is that similar functionality can also be added to many recent cable head-ends by a firmware upgrade.

 - Jonathan Morton