Comcast is rolling out 'ultra-low lag' tech that could fix the internet

> The IETF's Transport Area Working Group (TSVWG) has finalized experimental RFCs for Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput (L4S) and new Non-Queue-Building (NQB) per hop behavior. These documents describe a new architecture and protocol for deploying low latency networking.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-livingood-low-latency...

Found in their press release:

https://corporate.comcast.com/stories/comcast-kicks-off-indu...

Apparently it relies on ECN, so that makes sense:

> It uses the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) protocol... Because ECN support is essential for L4S, senders use the ECN field as the protocol that allows the network to identify which packets are L4S and which are Classic.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9330/

> I'm no network expert but I thought it was relatively solved and problems are due to underprovisioning.

Protocols like TCP will ramp up to use all available bandwidth, ensuring there's congestion somewhere along the path. So you cannot simply blame everything on "underprovisioning". Bufferbloat is mostly solved in theory by AQMs like CoDel, but is still a problem in practice due to spotty deployment, especially for wireless links where congestion management is more complicated, and sometimes backbone links that are fast enough any congestion management needs to be implemented in hardware.

I am rarely limited by the speed of light, even considering that it's much lower in fibre than in vacuum. On a good day I get pings twice as high in most online games; playing with friends on the other side of the Atlantic (which should be ~90ms for a round trip but often is 200) results in at least 10 additional frames worth of latency at 120Hz. Reducing the delay down to merely the speed of light would be a dramatic improvement!

(I'd still lose, but at least I wouldn't be able to blame it on lag any more... maybe not an improvement after all, hm.)

> I thought it was relatively solved and problems are due to underprovisioning.

You are right, ~universally so. However, the author is trying his middle-school best to convince us otherwise.

    While bandwidth upgrades (ex: d/u to broadband) have increased the amount of information transmitted, this change will actually make the internet feel faster for once.

What made my home internet feel faster was going from cable to fiber. Because fiber is faster in capacity and latency. And my fiber is faster all the time, not just "for once".

Bufferbloat is a big problem in DOCSIS networks too.

Read the article "As Mitchell explains, it can’t bend the laws of physics to make data travel faster than the speed of light, but it can reduce the extra delays in the middle that have been slowing your connections down."

Your latency issues aren't due to the speed of light

Most latency isn't caused by SOL restrictions. It's usually the repeaters, firewalls, routers, and packet queues that slow things down. It only takes 103ms for light to circumnavigate the globe. However, latencies at only half that distance are over 500ms due to router latency.

Starlink is pretty good for communicating with the other side of the globe because of their routing over laser comms. I've known professional gamers that use it to reduce latencies to servers in Asia and the Middle East.

Most won't even see improvements because they have been paying $10 a month for the same router from the ISP for 15 years.

Because that's what it is.

Now that they know they can charge extra for it, they decided to make the investment.

Comcast's technical side does a lot of interesting work: they were one of the first big ISPs to roll out IPv6, for instance. Not saying they're on the whole a benevolent (or even trustworthy) corporation, but these sorts of things don't need to warrant immediate suspicion.

No, it's just some incremental improvement. Anyone forwarding traffic needs some kind of congestion control system. This is just another implementation of it.

> explanation for repealing net neutrality ... You want to ship some cargo over plane, some over ships, and some over trains - so why wouldn't network packets be any different?

To make this analogy fit better, let's re-imagine each transport method as having similar cost.

    The answer is that neutrality would prohibit cargo corp from rerouting cargo over slower ship...
    1) when there is no logistical necessity to do so 
    2) because there is loads of available air-transport capacity.

    Even if doing so yields fatter dividends for stockholders and execs.

Yes.

>Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.

I have no idea why Comcast gets to take the credit for "fixing the internet", whatever definition they use for that. Among several other companies, Comcast Innovation "partly funded" the work that went into the RFC (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9330/), and that's it.

Nokia, Vodafone, Apple, Intel, and others have been pushing for L4S (and implementing it in some areas) for a bit now. Comcast isn't even the first.