[NNagain] Net neutrality and Bufferbloat?

[Dave Taht]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 3:12 PM Ronan Pigott via Nnagain
<nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I read the recent NOI response and it sparked my interest in the relationship
> between Net Neutrality and bufferbloat. I also found [1] which makes it seem
> Net Neutrality is an obstacle to solving bufferbloat in the US, at least. I'm
> just curious about the legal obstacles to bufferbloat solutions in the US. I
> tried reading the FCC rules which I understand changed in 2010, 2014, and 2017
> but theye're kinda vague I think and I am no lawyer nor industry veteran and
> don't think I really understand the implications.
>
> In particular, [1] claims:
>
> > Misapplied concepts of network neutrality is one of the things that killed
> > fq codel for DOCSIS 3.1
>
> Does anyone know more about this?

I quoted from a cable industry insider on that (2013) and at the time,
I too thought that the technology was so new that any number of
objections could be raised to it. Queuing remains ill-industood in
general, the pain points and misunderstandings that fueled the
bitorrent vs voip debacle, still present.

We've since cracked a few billion instances of fq_codel, so... tI long
ago stopped worrying a regulator would take an interest (except
perhaps in helping further deployment!), and even the pro-NN side,
places like public knowledge, have acknowledged the benefit, but it
has taken a huge educational and deployment process to get to where we
are today.

At the time I could hardly imagine the technology to be as successful
as it has been either (apple and linux defaults), and yet I keep
hoping to see deployments where it is needed most, on our wireless
technologies. fq_codel on 5G or starlink would be nice to see next
year!

>
> When looking around, I found more similar claims [2]:
>
> > Finally, some jurisdictions impose regulations that limit the ability of
> > networks to provide differentiation of services, in large part this seems to
> > be based on the belief that doing so necessarily involves prioritization or
> > privileged access to bandwidth, and thus a benefit to one class of traffic
> > always comes at the expense of another.
>
> Anyone know what regulations the authors mean here?

We have done extensive surveys of US and some european law here, and
the consensus appears to be that so long as it is an application
class, not a specific service from a specific provider being boosted
or not, "reasonable network management" suffices.

> I personally run openwrt+sqm/cake in my home router and have found it to be
> effective, so I am convinced of the value of sqm. Is Net Neutrality regulation
> an obstacle to wider deployment?
>
> [1] https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/net_neutrality_customers/
> [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tsvwg-nqb/
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ronan
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Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos