[Bloat] [Rpm] net neutrality back in the news

[Livingood, Jason]

On 9/28/23, 02:25, "Bloat on behalf of Sebastian Moeller via Bloat" <bloat-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:bloat-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>> wrote:
> But the core issue IMHO really was an economic one, the over-subscription ratios that worked before torrenting simply did not cut it any more in an environment when customers actually tried to use their contracted access rates "quantitatively". 

It was more complicated than that. At least in cable networks it came at the end of single channel DOCSIS 2.0 devices, as cable upgraded to channel bonding in DOCSIS 3.0 - which to your point brought dramatic increases in capacity. That was happening at the same time P2P was becoming popular. On the other hand, customers were congesting their own connections pretty pervasively - trying to use VoIP while their P2P client was active. At the time the P2P protocol tended to be pretty aggressive and smothered real-time apps (if you gave the client 1 Mbps US it would use it, if 10 Mbps - used that 100% as well, 25 Mbps - same, etc.). 

The answer ended up being a mix of more capacity, apps being more responsive to other LAN demands, and then advancements in congestion control & queuing.  But there were many customers who were basically self-congesting w/P2P and VoIP running in their home. 

> but this is why e.g. my bit torrent could affect your VoIP, simply by pushing the whole segment into upload capacity congestion... (ISPs in theory could fix this by plain old QoS engineering, but the issue at hand was with a non-ISP VoIP/SIP service and there QoS becomes tricky if the ISP as these packets need to be identified in a way that is not game-able**)

Sure - for their own (nascent & small scale) digital voice products. But to 3rd party VoIP - no one then was really doing inter-domain DSCP marking end-to-end (still are not). The non-ISP offering here was the big driver of consumer complaints.

> ****) This is not to diss the press, they are doing what they are supposed to do, but it just shows that active regulation is a tricky business, and a light touch typically "looks better" (even though I see no real evidence it actually works better).

It's not made easier in the US where one can strongly support formal national NN rules but be against putting it under Title-II regulation vs. Title-I. IANAL so cannot properly explain the nuances. Ultimately legislation is the best solution, as this will just be in the courts for years, but our US Congress is not the most functional body these days and people have tried to do legislation for many years. 

Jason