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Comment by innocenat | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about differences between gQUIC and new QUIC, but I always hate gQUIC to the level that I always disabled it on my machine. Main reason being that my ISP always prioritize TCP over UDP, so during congested period (6-10pm), gQUIC is useless.

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Should't that hate be directed to your ISP?

Yes, but being that most people have very little choice in their choice of ISP, so much hate has already been directed at them with little change in outcome, directing hate at any other group is more effective.

Only if I don't have work to do during that time. Otherwise, anything to get the work done is first priority.

I had a funny problem with my router QoS a couple of years ago. It was classifying unknown UDP traffic as junk, and QUIC counted as unknown. This problem was entirely self-inflicted, I was using crappy firmware and I misconfigured it. But I can easily imagine other network infrastructure treating UDP traffic poorly.

Which is a mistake. A lot of UDP traffic should be priority for low latency; games, for instance. The problem is that there's also a lot of bulk transfer happening over UDP, like Bittorrent. Long story short, traffic shaping is hard.

The BitTorrent protocol uses UDP only when using a congestion control mechanism on top of it (uTP). In fact uTP is aware when the send buffer is filled and when latency is introduced so that it automatically back-off and let interactive traffic some time to be exchanged in priority.

The standard BitTorrent protocol uses TCP by default and is arguably worse: since it uses more TCP connexion by nature compared to a client-server file delivery, it have more chances to be prioritized.

So BT over UDP with uTP transport protocol is in fact a clever way to balance heavy traffic and interactive one.

If I were an ISP and the the network is congested, I would too drop UDP before TCP as UDP likely won't get resent.

Customer service can play dump and say the internet (== WWW) is working fine. And since we customer usually don't have choice anyway.

I think you're missing the point that this is a type of ratchet in getting the intermediates to stop doing arbitrary traffic shaping/queueing/etc. (Ideally it would end up being a ratchet for net neutrality, but let's see...)

A lot of Chrome traffic is already QUIC-based[1], and I think people will be pissed off it their experience is suddenly degraded because some asshole ISP decided to wholesale drop UDP over TCP.

Regardless of any of that -- the only way forward for privacy is end-to-end encryption and QUIC helps achieve that, up to "secret key availability"[2].

[1] I think Firefox is also experimenting with it?

[2] That is, any entity serving you a page must have the right secret keys. This is basically the case with SSL-only web sites already.

I would too drop UDP before TCP as UDP likely won't get resent.

A great example of intuition going wrong. VoIP won't work at all during congestion even if it's not causing the congestion. If anything, dropping TCP before UDP is likely to be more helpful since TCP will back off. But now that uTP and QUIC exist, such L4 discrimination is probably just counterproductive.

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