[Bloat] A quick report from the WISPA conference

Mon Oct 17 23:15:22 EDT 2022

On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 7:51 PM Sina Khanifar <sina at waveform.com> wrote:
>
> Positive or negative, I can claim a bit of credit for this video :). We've been working with LTT on a few projects and we pitched them on doing something around bufferbloat. We've seen more traffic to our Waveforn test than ever before, which has been fun!

Thank you. Great job with that video! And waveform has become the goto
site for many now.

I can't help but wonder tho... are you collecting any statistics, over
time, as to how much better the problem is getting?

And any chance they could do something similar explaining wifi?

...

I was just at WISPA conference week before last. Preseem's booth
(fq_codel) was always packed. Vilo living had put cake in their wifi 6
product. A
keynote speaker had deployed it and talked about it with waveform
results on the big screen (2k people there). A large wireless vendor
demo'd privately to me their flent results before/after cake on their
next-gen radios... and people dissed tarana without me prompting for
their bad bufferbloat... and the best thing of all that happened to me
was... besides getting a hug from a young lady (megan) who'd salvaged
her schooling in alaska using sqm - I walked up to the paraqum booth
(another large QoE middlebox maker centered more in india) and asked.

"So... do y'all have fq_codel yet?"

And they smiled and said: "No, we have something better... we've got cake."

"Cake? What's that?" - I said, innocently.

They then stepped me through their 200Gbps (!!) product, which uses a
bunch of offloads, and can track rtt down to a ms with the intel
ethernet card they were using. They'd modifed cake to provide 16 (?)
levels of service, and were running under dpdk (I am not sure if cake
was). It was a great, convincing pitch...

... then I told 'em who I was. There's a video of the in-both concert after.

...

The downside to me (and the subject of my talk) was that in nearly
every person I talked to, fq_codel was viewed as a means to better
subscriber bandwidth plan enforcement (which is admittedly the market
that preseem pioneered) and it was not understood that I'd got
involved in this whole thing because I'd wanted an algorithm to deal
with "rain fade", running directly on the radios. People wanted to use
the statistics on the radios to drive the plan enforcement better
(which is an ok approach, I guess), and for 10+ I'd been whinging
about the... physics.

So I ranted about rfc7567 a lot and begged people now putting routerOS
7.2 and later out there (mikrotik is huge in this market), to kill
their fifos and sfqs at the native rates of the interfaces... and
watch their network improve that way also.

I think one more wispa conference will be a clean sweep of everyone in
the fixed wireless market to not only adopt these algorithms for plan
enforcement, but even more directly on the radios and more CPE.

I also picked up enough consulting business to keep me busy the rest
of this year, and possibly more than I can handle (anybody looking?)

I wonder what will happen at a fiber conference?

> On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 7:45 PM Dave Taht via Bloat <bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 5:02 PM Stuart Cheshire <cheshire at apple.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > On 9 Oct 2022, at 06:14, Dave Taht via Make-wifi-fast <make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > > This was so massively well done, I cried. Does anyone know how to get in touch with the ifxit folk?
>> > >
>> > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UICh3ScfNWI
>> >
>> > I’m surprised that you liked this video. It seems to me that it repeats all the standard misinformation. The analogy they use is the standard terrible example of waiting in a long line at a grocery store, and the “solution” is letting certain traffic “jump the line, angering everyone behind them”.
>>
>> Accuracy be damned. The analogy to common experience resonates more.
>>
>> >
>> > Some quotes from the video:
>> >
>> > > it would be so much more efficient for them to let you skip the line and just check out, especially since you’re in a hurry, but they’re rudely refusing
>>
>> I think the person with the cheetos pulling out a gun and shooting
>> everyone in front of him (AQM) would not go down well.
>>
>> > > to go back to our grocery store analogy this would be like if a worker saw you standing at the back ... and either let you skip to the front of the line or opens up an express lane just for you
>>
>> Actually that analogy is fairly close to fair queuing. The multiple
>> checker analogy is one of the most common analogies in queue theory
>> itself.
>>
>> >
>> > The video describes the problem of bufferbloat, and then describes the same failed solution that hasn’t worked for the last three decades.
>>
>> Hmm? It establishes the scenario, explains the problem *quickly*,
>> disses gamer routers for not getting it right..  *points to an
>> accurate test*, and then to the ideas and products that *actually
>> work* with "smart queueing", with a screenshot of the most common
>> (eero's optimize for gaming and videoconferencing), and fq_codel and
>> cake *by name*, and points folk at the best known solution available,
>> openwrt.
>>
>> Bing, baddabang, boom. Also the comments were revealing. A goodly
>> percentage already knew the problem, more than a few were inspired to
>> take the test,
>> there was a whole bunch of "Aha!" success stories and 360k views,
>> which is more people than we've ever been able to reach in for
>> example, a nanog conference.
>>
>> I loved that folk taking the test actually had quite a few A results,
>> without having had to do anything. At least some ISPs are getting it
>> more right now!
>>
>> At this point I think gamers in particular know what "brands" we've
>> tried to establish - "Smart queues", "SQM", "OpenWrt", fq_codel and
>> now "cake" are "good" things to have, and are stimulating demand by
>> asking for them,   It's certainly working out better and better for
>> evenroute, firewalla, ubnt and others, and I saw an uptick in
>> questions about this on various user forums.
>>
>> I even like that there's a backlash now of people saying "fixing
>> bufferbloat doesn't solve everything" -
>>
>> >  Describing the obvious simple-minded (wrong) solution that any normal person would think of based on their personal human experience waiting in grocery stores and airports, is not describing the solution to bufferbloat. The solution to bufferbloat is not that if you are privileged then you get to “skip to the front of the line”. The solution to bufferbloat is that there is no line!
>>
>> I like the idea of a guru floating above a grocery cart with a better
>> string of explanations, explaining
>>
>>    - "no, grasshopper, the solution to bufferbloat is no line... at all".
>>
>> >
>> > With grocery stores and airports people’s arrivals are independent and not controlled. There is no way for a grocery store or airport to generate backpressure to tell people to wait at home when a queue begins to form. The key to solving bufferbloat is generating timely backpressure to prevent the queue forming in the first place, not accepting a huge queue and then deciding who deserves special treatment to get better service than all the other peons who still have to wait in a long queue, just like before.
>>
>> I am not huge on the word "backpressure" here. Needs to signal the
>> other side to slow down, is more accurate. So might say timely
>> signalling rather than timely backpressure?
>>
>> Other feedback I got  was that the video was too smarmy (I agree),
>> different audiences than gamers need different forms of outreach...
>>
>> but to me, winning the gamers has always been one of the most
>> important things, as they make a lot of buying decisions, and they
>> benefit the most for
>> fq and packet prioritization as we do today in gamer routers and in
>> cake + qosify.
>>
>> maybe that gets in the way of more serious markets. Certainly I would
>> like another video explaining what goes wrong with videoconferencing.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> >
>> > Stuart Cheshire
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
>> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
>> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bloat mailing list
>> Bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat

-- 
This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC