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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

There's absolutely nothing wrong with vendors offering different QoS for different scenarios.

Why would no not what a specialized network option for 'super low latency' for things like games?

Or if you don't use any kind of streaming, then why not get cheaper rates for 'super high latency'?

This is good, it's their job.

Where it gets ugly is if they start discriminating between customers, i.e. Netflix has to pay $X while their parent companies other asset, HBO only has to pay $Y.

Or if you have a 'Facebook package' that optimizes for FB or something like that.

So QoS, yes, content discrimination, no.

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Because in order to sell you onto these bullshit packages they will end up making your regular connection hellish.

So you have an issue connecting to netflix... oh sir for just $14.99/mo you can get our Netflix QoS package added on to your connection and have no further troubles. A few weeks later... oh sir your having issues connecting to youtube, well we have our youtube QoS package for just $9.99/mo extra...

It's content discrimination under disguise.

My favorite is business upgrade. Start dropping VPN every 5 min or so, force you to buy business class service for remote work etc.

I work for an ISP and often encounter the exact opposite of this.

From time to time we get a customer who calls up to order a connection specifically for a VPN. They know exactly what they need. They won't listen. I try to steer them to a less expensive package that is perfectly adequate for a VPN. They'll have none of it. They want a bunch of special add-ons because they have done this all before with other ISPs and they know the ropes. They have no idea how a VPN even works, and they've never even heard of our company before, but they know exactly what they want.

I try to politely point out that I could help them save money and still guarnantee it will work without problems. But I won't argue with the customer. If they want to pay 5x for a bunch of custom stuff they don't need, I can do that.

In the end, they are very happy. They have outsmarted the greedy, conniving ISP, and got themselves a rock-solid service. I make a mental note to try to find a local contact for them with whom we can build a relationship of trust and perhaps persuade down the road that they could actually pay less without compromising their service.

What types of custom things are you talking about? I'm not familiar with that type of internet connection (I've only ordered residential service.

One small, typical example: most of our VPN customers are setting up some satellite that needs to connect to the home office. The connection is initiated from our network to the home office. So the IP address of the satellite doesn't really matter.

This is not always the case, but it is the most common case.

So when a customer demands a dedicated static IP address, I wonder if they really need that. We charge extra for that because we have a limited pool of public IPv4 addresses. We can do it, but it is usually unnecessary, and better to avoid unless you really need it.

The connection is initiated from our network to the home office. So the IP address of the satellite doesn't really matter.

I'd assume they're restricting access further by only allowing certain ips thru a firewall in front of the VPN server, or requiring extra auth factors from unknown ips, or something.

Of course that could be the case. But I don't assume that. I ask. I'm trying to find the optimal solution.

There are other valid reasons for restricting the IP. I ask about those. I'm not arguing with the customer. I'm trying to be helpful.

Unless the customer doesn't want help.

It's not needed but troubleshooting is much easier for the sysadmin from the mothership and 3$/month for a static IP is literally nothing for a business. We also always get a static IP for everything, because what do you do If the vpn doesnt come up after a firewall reboot ans the IP changed?

Okay that makes sense, thanks.

Network connections are much like everything else in life. There are lots of ways to do it. Which way is best depends on your needs. So to match up the most cost effective solution requires a knowledge of your requirements and a knowledge of the options.

When you have a corporate IT rep who is clueless about the options, they are not in a great position to build the optimal solution.

When you have an ISP rep who is clueless about the requirements, they are not in a great position to build the optimal solution.

When you have an ISP rep who is not willing to explain the options, you have a problem. When you have a corporate IT rep who doesn't know the requirements, is unwilling to explain the requirements, or is unwilling to learn about the options, you are unlikely to achieve the optimal solution.

When you have a helpful and capable ISP rep and a cooperative and capable IT rep, the world is a brighter place. But some levels of trust require either naivety or time and shared experiences. That's difficult when every contact between the customer and the ISP involve different people each time.

So, again, just like everything else, try to work with as small and local of an entity as possible to get the job done. This is true for government, auto dealers, ISPs, or anything else. Only scale up when there is an advantage to doing so.

I pay for Comcast business class, because (a) I do work from home, and am on call, (b) the SLA says they need to roll a truck within four hours (we've had trouble in our city with line cards going bad and them not being fixed for months), and (c) when I call their tech support, I get someone who is technically competent, or at least wayyyy more effective than the script-reading drones you get on a consumer account.

It's twice the money for half the bandwidth, but I have enough bandwidth and I sleep better at night. Shouldn't be necessary, but . . .

This is very near impossible to implement, isn't it?

Not at all, they are your ISP! I absolutely expect VPNs to be the first to go; it's hard to do application-level throttling if everyone has access to a VPN.

This is a goldmine for ISPs. Over the last five-ish years they decided to think of themselves as "advertising" companies. FCC repealed the internet privacy rule last April, and what are they doing now? They're functioning as data brokers. We should expect this trend to continue and assume that ISPs will take advantage of Pai's NN repeal as soon as possible.

This is the next shoe to drop.

Comcast currently extracts almost $100 a month from me, in addition to the ~$10 I pay for a VPN exit node to hide traffic from their surveillance machine. Why wouldn't they want another $10 or so to "allow" VPNs, given regulators who are loudly, publicly giddy about screwing consumers?

Why would you think that? It's pretty trivial to do. You could try to obfuscate your traffic but that's just playing cat and mouse (and the ISP could just decide to start dropping anything that it doesn't recognize and seems to consume a significant amount of bandwidth).

I think the most efficient way to hide your service would be to tunnel it over HTTPS given that it's not really realistic to drop that when you're an ISP. Still, a relatively simple traffic analysis tool won't have too much difficulty differentiating between proper web browsing and something fishy over HTTPS even it it just looks at the shape of the traffic.

No, it is not very near impossible to implement.

Sorry, but you are wrong.

It's a 15 minutes task for good admin to start dropping VPN connections (not to block, but to interrupt every 5 minutes, but blocking is even easier).

One important info: - ISP can't see your VPN traffic. But they can see that you are connecting to specific IP (VPN service's IP) at specific port. Once you're connected to VPN you probably pass ALL the connection through it. So ISP can see only single connection to single point. That is more than enough.

So how can they block VPNs: 1) Most VPNs uses standard VPN ports. Just dropping connections to that port is a good start. 2) Dropping connections to a servers when this is your (almost) only, long standing connection. This is a good moment to store that IP as VPN service IP. 3) Reverse DNS on IPs you're connecting to. A lot of services will reveal that they belongs to VPN services. 4) Public list of VPN IPs. Some provides them. Some are already noted somewhere on the internet.

ISPs can even share their databases with each other to be better at VPN dropping.

This is very easy thing to do.

It would be REALLY hard to hide your connection to a VPN service. One thing that came to my mind, to hide your VPN servers you would have to: - use VPN services at random ports - change VPN IP every few minutes at random factor, so dropped connections will occur anyway - in the background you should keep direct (un-VPNed) connections to random servers at random ports, passing random data around (it will look encrypted just like VPN connection)

This would require huge infrastructure though. Really huge.

But still - if ISP notice behavior like that - it means you're probably trying to do something shady, like walk around their VPN dropping rules - so they could just throttle your connections even more, just in case :)

So in general - you're fu^Hat very bad situation. I'm from Europe. I'm "safe" now, but we are also going to have bad law for net neutrality soon.

I think you misread my post and argued the same point. So, uh, thanks?

No. Businesses and Governments do it all the time.

How would ISPs differentiate between VPNs over something like HTTP traffic?

Deep packet inspection.

How about over HTTPS traffic?

You mean your single stream of HTTPS traffic to a known destination 24x7?

What if you only use the HTTPS VPN when necessary, e.g. for streaming Netflix (seeing that they've been a target before), but for regular browsing, email, DNS, etc. you don't?

There are enough differences between HTTPS and VPN protocols to be able to distinguish them using DPI. IDS/IPS vendors even show this as a feature usually.

There's protocols like stunnel that hide your arbitrary TCP traffic in a TLS tunnel that looks like web traffic.

Lack of DNS queries for one small example.

forge certs then mitm.

I wouldn't mind latency being thrown into the typical Mbps marketing jargon, at least it will get some attention (which has sorely been lacking).

If we can open up these rules while radically increasing enforcement of quality of service then this might be a good thing. It might be good to replace "up to 75Mbps" with "guaranteed 50-75Mbps and 5-15ms ping to nearest public internet junction, 95% of the time during peak hours." I'm sure some folks might even sign onto world-beating five-nines performance guarantees too.

But this is probably just a dream and we'll see the ugly product differentiation you're describing.

> It might be good to replace "up to 75Mbps" with "guaranteed 50-75Mbps and 5-15ms ping to nearest public internet junction, 95% of the time during peak hours.

Hell yeah. I would happily pay extra for a decent service that advertised it’s minimum speeds instead of its maximum because in reality, the theoretical maximum speed of my connection is really not a useful metric unless I’m hitting it 99% of the time. I have a fast connection but I still typically get a good 50 Mb/s less than advertised (which luckily still leaves me with 200 Mb/s or so) making the advertised amount completely inconsequential and useless. Telling me the lowest I should expect, on the other hand, is actually helpful and allows me to do some rudimentary capacity planning to see if it’s suitable for me or not.

note that this isn’t a problem with dsl lines. AT&T charges me for 50mbps down and 10mbps up. 100% of the time for the 5+ years they have exceeded these speeds (i have a traffic monitor running constantly to verify speeds)

"Because in order to sell you onto these bullshit packages they will end up making your regular connection hellish. So you have an issue connecting to netflix... oh sir for just $14.99/mo you can get our Netflix QoS package"

No.

A 'Netflix QoS package' is not a QoS package. That's against Net Neutrality.

A 'Video Streaming' package that offers high quality video streaming with low latency, but doesn't care about things like picking up dropped packets - and doesn't discriminate between content sources - this would be 'net neutral'.

"Because in order to sell you onto these bullshit packages they will end up making your regular connection hellish"

This is a completely separate issue and has nothing to do with NN really. They can (and probably do) this already today with their regular package offers.

Let's not confuse general ISP stupidity with actual NN.

"That's against Net Neutrality"

Net Neutrality doesn't exist any more. Did you not read the article? This isn't hypothetical, it was allowed to expire as of today. It's no longer the law, ISPs can legally do whatever they want now, including a "Netflix QoS package".

I am admittedly not a lawyer, but I'm reasonably well informed on the topic and completely open to being corrected if you know better.

Network Neutrality is a concept, not a law.

Yes, the US law requiring a certain kind of Network Neutrality did expire.

The point is: service providers charging for differentiated QoS (such as different packages for latency) is well within the concept of Network Neutrality.

What is 'out of bounds' for NN is charing for customers based on the content of those packages.

So:

> A low latency service (designed for gaming in mind), is NN

> A low-latency service 'for games only' - is not NN

> If the ISP charges you money to access 'Steam' games, but not for others - that is not NN.

Because all I want is a dumb pipe. I don't pay the water company based on how wide their pipes are (backbone bandwith) or how far I am from their treatment center (latency); I pay based on consumption alone, as it should be. Why do you think Internet access needs to be treated any differently?

" I pay based on consumption alone, as it should be. Why do you think Internet access needs to be treated any differently?"

I didn't.

You are saying what I am saying: You pay for 'Quality of Water Service'.

What if you need 5x the flow that the water company normally provides?

What if you needed, for medical purposes 'unflourinated' water (whereas all of their other customers use flourinated).

With water:

+ If you want more water monthly - you pay for that. + If you want higher water pressure - you pay for that. + If you want different kinds of water (hard, soft) you pay for that.

That's 'Water Neutrality'.

What you do not pay for is a higher rate because you're a hospital. Or because you are wealthy and the water company knows they can scam you.

If you do not allow the water company to charge for 'high pressure' or 'hard / soft' water types - then they cannot justify in the investment and no such services will exist

As for networks:

+ If you want a dumb pipe, you pay for that. + If you want a faster pipe, you pay for that. + If you want more data, you pay for that. + If you want higher service level guarantees - you pay for that.

It's like buying AWS, or a new computer, or whatever.

What you should not have to pay for is: $X for Netflix data and $Y for HBO data. Or $X for Facebook and $Y for Linked in data. That's raw price discrimination and it's a problem.

Internet providers have massive equipment and support costs to support streaming video, so if you want amazing streaming at 4K super high quality, well, they can provide that if you're willing to pay. But - they should charge the same irrespective of content (i.e. HBO, Netflix etc)

> Internet providers have massive equipment and support costs to support streaming video

Do they though? Over and above just providing a link with a sufficient bandwidth and contention ratio?

"Do they though?"

It doesn't matter.

Apple can charge you whatever it wants for it's iPhone. You can pay or not.

ISP's can charge you whatever they want for whatever QoS. You can pay or not. That's Network Neutrality.

What they cannot do under NN, is charge you based on who you are, or based on what you use your service for. So, charging you for Netflix usage, vs HBO usage is totally out of bounds.

If they sell you a 'streaming service' with whatever QoS - you should be able to it for whatever on earth you want.

My point is: there is usually an underlying cost-based reality to most of these things, and some of the people on this thread are not actually arguing for 'Net Neutrality' - they are arguing for 'ISP's should only be allowed to bill me in a very, specific narrow way, by law, irrespective of what consumer needs are or what their costs are'.

You've not answered if ISPs are/should be allowed to intentionally degrade traffic deemed to be "video" or "peer to peer", by shaping algorithm or packet inspection, in order to make their service unusable for that purpose unless you buy an upgrade.

NN is clear: you sell QoS, not based on what that service is used for.

So if you buy a QoS from an ISP, they can't throttle you if it's for P2P or for Netlflix or HBO or whatever. That would be against NN and of course outside the bounds of any normal QoS.

It's just like buying form AWS: you pick from any number of configurations, but AWS can't charge you if you are doing 'gaming' vs 'news' on your hosted service. Amazon doesn't bill you based on what you are doing, just how you use the service.

That's NN.

So, under NN, ISP's can definitely sell you a 'low latency' service, as long as customers want that.

>I don't pay the water company based on how wide the pipe is

Eh, this isn't true in most places.

You pay a flat rate since you most likely have a 1"-1 1/2" pipe ran to your residence. Even if you cut the pipe off after the meter and let it run full blast you can only burn up a relatively limited amount of water (compared to what the system can carry). If you have a much larger line it is highly likely that your contract has usage conditions.

True.

But the water company should not bill me differently if I choose to water tomatoes, but not chillies.

Eh, oddly enough, they possibly could. Water usage and restriction laws are weird.

Because priority in a network is a scarce resource and there are situations where people would like to pay for it -- VOIP, video calling, gaming.

If turning on your faucet took an average of twenty minutes before the water showed up you'd probably want a high-cost low-latency spigot in case of a fire.

The analogy is flawed here.

Nobody cares if an ISP wants to offer 2 "packages":

1. High latency, high bandwidth

2. Low latency, low bandwidth

Just like the metaphor of a water pipe, an ISP could offer "normal" where the water takes 20 minutes, or "fast" where it takes a second, but you have to pay 10x or have a much lower limit.

What NN is all about is preventing the ISP from saying HOW you are using the data. In the "water" analogy it would be like your water company saying you can ONLY use their "fast" water in their proprietary "soup making system", then they slow down all other water if they detect you are using it in any non-compliant pots.

I'm more than fine with an ISP that wants to offer a special low-latency VOIP option, but when they slow down all their competitors VOIP services and only allow you to get their VOIP service with low-latency, then it's a problem. Or the all too real possibility of Comcast allowing something like HULU to not apply to the data-caps, while not offering that option to Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Prime Video, or even your own startup or self-hosted option.

That's what I want my government protecting me against, that's the kind of thing that should be heavily regulated.

How do you feel about the middle ground where you pay a fixed price and your bandwidth/latency is determined by the application? VOIP gets low-bandwidth low-latency, web surfing gets the middle ground, and video streaming gets high-latency high-bandwidth with the expectation that over a large enough population that the usage of each type will roughly average out.

I know this forum is full of people who want total control of everything but I would bet this would provide a better experience since it doesn't have to be managed by the customer.

> Or the all too real possibility of Comcast allowing something like HULU to not apply to the data-caps

This doesn't technically fall under NN but I agree it's pretty scummy. I think it's a tough argument to make the ISPs shouldn't be allowed to do this though. If Hulu wants to make a deal with an ISP where they pay for their customer's data usage and pay more to be exclusive I don't see why that should be forbidden.

An example outside of ISPs. Spotify used to integrate Musixmatch into their app which would otherwise cost users $12/year. I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that Spotify can't make an exclusive deal or that Musixmatch must allow GPM to integrate with them as well.

>How do you feel about the middle ground where you pay a fixed price and your bandwidth/latency is determined by the application?

I'm perfectly okay, as long as you are using the word "application" as a synonym for "type" and not as another word for "service or platform".

In other words, it's okay if VOIP service is prioritized via QoS rules, much of the internet as we know it won't work without this kind of thing, and it's a good thing for everyone involved.

What's NOT okay is when ComcastVOIP is allowed low-bandwidth, low-latency, but GoogleVOIP isn't. Or when each VOIP company needs to "apply" to get approved for the special consideration, or there are additional "rules" that have to be followed that deal with where the data is going, what it's doing, or how it's being used (like saying "VOIP that is used for business must pay more" is not okay in my book).

>This doesn't technically fall under NN but I agree it's pretty scummy. I think it's a tough argument to make the ISPs shouldn't be allowed to do this though. If Hulu wants to make a deal with an ISP where they pay for their customer's data usage and pay more to be exclusive I don't see why that should be forbidden.

It may not, but it absolutely should. At this point nothing falls under NN as it's not a law any more, so I'm not buying this "excuse" any more.

un-limiting one companies data is the same as limiting all other companies data in my opinion.

Again, if that data-cap-bypassing stuff works on a protocol level (as in VOIP data doesn't count toward your limit), then i'm perfectly fine with it, but when it deals with who owns the server, what content it's displaying, and who you are paying to get the service/data, then it should be heavily regulated.

>I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that Spotify can't make an exclusive deal or that Musixmatch must allow GPM to integrate with them as well.

neither would I, but that's not what i'm worried about. Bundling and deals including other services is fine, but what isn't is when those bundles bleed over into the actual data being sent. Just like how i'm fine if my water company provides a free water filter service with their water service. But when they start interfering with other companies water filters, or start making their core service (the water itself) cheaper when used with their provided water filter, then it's in what I consider anti-competitive territory.

And I guess that's the core of the problem I have with things like "unlimited for one service" deals. It's not just including another service with your internet, it's the ISP actively changing the price of their own core service when you use another unrelated service.

While I understand that a policy prohibiting this might end up slowing or stopping some innovative or new ways of providing internet access to people how they want it, I truly feel that the upsides of not allowing the ISPs to play gatekeeper (whether intentional or otherwise) will greatly outweigh the lost innovation.

I also want to point out that i'm not calling for these "shady" practices to be outright illegal, just that they should be "heavily regulated". Meaning there should be quite a lot of oversight, time should be spent determining if there is a conflict of interest or if the specific practice will end up harming competition or innovation.

Water is a tough analogy to use here (electricity too). Water just flows downhill, or is pumped up from a few locations and shared in the grid. You generally can't distinguish the water from its source - certain wells, rivers, lakes, etc. It is all mixed into one source.

I have a 3/4" pipe entering the house that I pay for. I can upgrade it to 1" for $50 more a month (and a ton of capex replacing the spur to the service line). I can upgrade it to multiple inches for for $100's more a month as well.

My Internet connection is capable of considerable more bandwidth than I'm paying for. Generally speaking, it's just a software setting on my modem.

I guess you could sort of compare it to having the water provider bringing in a 6" line to my house and tapering the line down to 3/4". But even then, their isn't a way for them to force me on to a specific water well or source, or directly force pricing based upon what I use the water for.

Its really just a tough comparison.

But you do pay the water company based on how much water you use. Why shouldn't certain providers like, say, Netflix, not have to pay more when they use nearly 40% of the pipe? (https://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-bandwidth-usag...).

Netflix only uses 40% of the pipe if the ISP consumers request their data. ISPs are already paid by their consumers to provide them their requested data.

Exactly. How hard is this to understand? The cost is already being met by consumers.

It's like if a football stadium was located near a tollway, and the tollway decided to start charging the stadium itself during sporting events.

That's not a legitimate business transaction, it's a cash grab.

Does Netflix not pay bandwidth charges to their ISP where their services are hosted? AWS, right? Is Amazon giving them free bandwidth? I'd think probably not.

What about all the ISPs in between? They don't get an opportunity to charge you and Netflix...

They do through peering agreements.

> But you do pay the water company based on how much water you use.

Yes, I do as the consumer of that water. In this analogy Netflix would be the dam operator, so why would a particular dam pay more to the pipe company than another dam?

This is why I like the electricity metaphor for Internet access.

You pay your utility bill every month for electricity (probably a base rate, and a fixed consumption rate). Does your utility then go to the provider (A local green power source) and demand they pay the utility as well, since 60% of the requests in the region are for their power? (users opting into to green power on their bills?)

Netflix does pay for internet usage doesn't it?

So do I.

Sounds like it is already paid.

Because it's the consumer at the endpoint who requests the content and it's their allocated portion of the pipe that's being used.

If ISPs want to charge by the byte, that's fine.

What they want though, is to charge data coming in, and data going out.

Do you think Netflix gets internet access for free?? They pay for their bandwidth fair and square like everyone else.

My ISP is not Netflix's ISP. Why should my ISP be able to charge Netflix for bandwidth when I am already paying them for the same bandwidth as their customer?

It's good if there is a competitive innovation that enables a premium service that a customer is attracted to... If it is profit-generation through the anti-competitive creation artificial scarcity then it is not innovation. It is not creating economic efficiency. It is the value-suck of rent seeking. A tumor upon the economy.

You can bet the business cretins will call anticompetitive thottling "innovation," though, and that the people actually innovating probably won't because they can afford to be specific on account of having nothing to hide.

I don't expect things will work out the way you imagine, but having said that

Wouldn't segregating VPN traffic, or gaming, or streaming traffic be its own form of content discrimination? They are picking winners and losers in terms of tech that consumers use right there.

That might be reasonable if their were real competition for high speed internet so that customers could actually vote with their feet if they didn't like their ISP doing that.

I live in the Bay Area and there is only one ISP (Comcast) that offers me more than 5Mbit.

I would be fine with this if the pipe owners (== natural monopoly supported by the state) had to sell access to their pipes to competing providers.

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> There's absolutely nothing wrong with vendors offering different QoS for different scenarios.

Well, the vendor shouldn’t dictate the class of my packets. Offering me “super low latency” or whatever isn’t being a dumb pipe—emphatically my preference—it’s upselling me something I never asked for.

"Well, the vendor shouldn’t dictate the class of my packets."

If it costs the vendor 2x to provide a super low latency network, then they can charge you 2x for that.

Do you understand that there are actual costs associated with providing differentiated QoS?

Selling based on latency is no different than computer manufacturers pricing on GhZ, RAM and any number of other factors.

They should definitely be able to discriminate on the QoS that you want.

They should not be able to discriminate inherently on the content type.

If you buy 'low latency' you can use those packets for whatever you want. Gaming. Otherwise. And of course there can be no discrimination based on content vendor, i.e. game 1 vs. game 2.

But to suggest that vendors can't discriminate based on the service they provide you ... completely defies the notion of what business and entrepreneurialism is.

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