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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

I find NN to be a tricky issue because the devil is very much in the details, and the history of "platforms" and "networks" in the abstract is a rich text (especially viz. some pretty obnoxious examples of brinkmanship where multiple parties were all convinced that they were the pivotal gatekeeper to the audience/customer base, e.g. [1]) .

I don't think there's necessarily a problem with having multiple service tiers where low latency/jitter or high throughput is only guaranteed on a higher tier. But if the network is rigged so that low-tier customers get a bad experience even in low-demand conditions, there's almost certainly some unethical fuckery going on. Basically, there's probably some point where "best effort" needs to be imposed as a baseline rather than a premium option.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...

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Nah. Real time gaming only transfers a minimal amount of bytes over the line so in reality your several hours of FPS fragging is only like 30 megabytes over the line. It's less than 1% of typical household internet usage. When the pipes are as thick as they are these days there's no excuse not put those gaming packets at the beginning of whatever throughput priorities there are. The bittorrent traffic doesn't care about waiting an extra 30 ms and the Netflix traffic is buffered so even a 2000 ms lag won't change the experiance in anyway. Amusingly all day of gaming (minus any updates) would be less than 10% of one episode of a show in 4K quality.

Gamers have no idea what they are talking about. They will blame the ISP, the gaming company, the "servers", the "net code", or anything other than themselves. They will tie up your support lines until you just give them this little win so you're not wasting all your money listening to them complain.

I agree with this, it is a bit more than 30MB but we're splitting hairs at this point.

For gaming traffic, it should absolutely be prioritised because reduced lag provides the best experience.

Having said that, given there is such a small amount of traffic produced from gaming, why not just make it prioritised already?

"Why give something away for free if you could charge for it?"

Exhibit A for why ISPs should be classified as utilities.

I think as another person pointed out

I don't mind so much if I can pay for improved latency, but if the standard service provided is purposefully degraded to justify it then that's when it's iffy

There would also need to be some serious data to support an actual benefit compared to the standard latency

Cool, since gaming is not important they are going to charge 200$/month for it. How do you feel now?

Because that's what's happening with datacaps, they are charging hundreds of dollars per month because there is no unlimited data on gigabit connections.

Meanwhile, in Italy you at 5€/month for 50gb of phone internet. And that's sticker price!

Sure, but what happens when linksys sells the megaspeed router that adds the qos bit to every packet?

Yep, client abuse of the IP QOS is an issue, the idea would be to split the traffic on 2 lanes:

1 - high priority, but very and really small bandwidth (usually depending on the line tech: xDSL, cable or fiber). Usually enough bandwidth for an handful of audio calls/game traffic streams. The client is in charge of that QOS on its domestic network though.

2 - the best effort lane.

Namely, the ISP would have to enforce that QOS at the modem, or line collect, namely as close to the client as possible.

IPv[46] has the TOS field for that with diffserv (other?). IPv6 could tell the ISP fine grained traffic requirements with pre-defined standard IPv6 labels.

There is no reasonable reasons the ISP would charge for the "fast lane". It should be default and neutral to as many ISPs as possible and ISP transits/peerings should keep the priority of the fast lane.

Since the bandwidth would be limited early the network hierarchy and omega shmol, this means little to no incentive to cheat on it.

That would unlock "for almost sure" high quality audio communications (with the encrypted audio stream protocol chosen by the user software/hardware) and ultra fast gaming on domestic line internet.

This actually makes sense. Sadly I think my Roku TV would find a way to hog all of my low-latency QoS quota for data collection and advertisement purposes. But I really love the proposed paradigm a lot where everyone gets the same x% of their data as "fast-lane" and can use it for whatever they want.

It's still "neutral" within the rationale of net neutrality, because the ISP isn't enforcing what lanes get used for what, the customer has total control.

This is why Windows resets all DSCP bits to zero. Unless the PC is domain joined or you’ve manually set Group Policy. Otherwise every program would mark EF or CS7, kind of like how every smartphone app abuses notifications and wakelocks.

With this 2 lanes setup, if too many apps are abusing or dysfunctionning there, they won't work properly since the bandwidth would be severely limited as low as possible in the network hierarchy. People will mecanically drop those apps, unfortunately including the apps not abusing.

There's actually a new (experimental) standard to do this, called L4S. It mandates that the high priority lane apps use a more responsive congestion control algorithm so that they build a much smaller queue (not just on average, avoiding occasional spikes too)

Tell the customer they can mark 0.5 Mbps of their upload traffic with EF. Anything more than that gets dropped. So if they set their BitTorrent client to mark EF they are only hurting themselves when their actually latency sensitive traffic suffers severe packet loss.

Probably nothing. The QoS bit is likely ignored as soon as the packets leave the ISP's network.

Depending on the game, it can definitely eat a Mbps on average with spikes higher and lower, especially for competitive games with 64 or 128 refreshes per second (Or more with opportunistic updates). Recommended bandwidth for Counter Strike is 1.5Mbps, Overwatch is 3 Mbps.

It's not much in comparison to watching 4K footages, but it's an order of magnitude higher than 30megabytes.

> But if the network is rigged so that low-tier customers get a bad experience even in low-demand conditions, there's almost certainly some unethical fuckery going on.

On any tiered system with enough adoption there's a strong incentive to make the lower tiers worse to upsell to the higher tiers. It's going to be like the TSA tiers.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with charging more for a better product, even if you are capable of delivering that product to more people. McDonald's doesn't owe its fries customers free burgers just because the burgers are going stale soon.

The problem is when there is no effective market for price competition.

With a competitive market, prices will naturally drop to approximately efficient resource allocation

just like the texas electric grid right? poster child of free market infrastructure

assuming there is a fixed-size pipe owned by a third party which doesn't use statistical multiplexinging, with open access rules to logical providers that charge for things like QOS and transit...then sure. otherwise you're talking about a spherical cow

It's a bit like health insurance. Instead of grouping everyone into a big bucket and charging the average price, you start classifying people in smaller and smaller buckets: sex, age, weight, family history, genetics, parent's genetics, history of illness, occupation, zip code, building age, hobbies, partner's hobbies ... until you are basically subsidizing yourself plus a cut for the middleman.

And McDonald's can charge more for people who roll through the drive-thru in expensive cars, then do a soft-pull through the payment processor, then pay a 3rd party for your current income, then get your credit score, then scan your twitter history for controversial posts, then lower prices for customers who spend equally at Burger King, then raise prices for people who are bad for the bottom line such those who vote for more govt regulation... or maybe democrats in general.

I mean, the goal is to maximize profits, so there's nothing wrong with that. Everybody needs individualized probing to determine the price they can bear as individuals. That's market competition for you - efficient resource extraction.

Thanks for the wonderful ideas!

It's not a better product, you're just going against net neutrality and charging more to "unlock" your bandwidth.

For me, as someone who works in streaming, I/we have no interest in stopping/hindering competition and that's something that certainly gets raised by people who advocate for NN.

What companies want, is to be able to invest with ISPs to ensure they have optimised capacity available to ensure their service works well. Now, the issue then becomes: does the ISP use that as an excuse to neglect their own investments in public peering, or backhaul and only optimise for paying partners?

In that respect, as an internet user and competitor to others, I'd definitely want all ISPs to be accountable for ensuring their networks have capacity to meet the demands of their users at a baseline level. But if someone wants to invest over and above that, then I don't believe that's a bad thing.

What I also object to is ISPs holding us, as services, to ransom, saying "if you want to deliver to our customers, you have to pay for transit." this is increasingly something that ISPs are pushing for around the world. In theory they want it to be a tax on content providers that funds their networks, ultimately the customers pays, but it's the ISPs double dipping. They charge consumers for their internet connection and then want to charge the content providers for you using it.

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