Dear ITU, please don't bill Internet use like phone calls
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
By renaming the originating party to the "sending" party, they can redefine YouTube/NetFlix/whoever as the "sending" party even though the user is the originating party. Thus they attempt to justify denying the user the service which they already have paid for unless they receive the appropriate kickbacks^W "fees" from whoever is serving the data.
In other words, when the network is underutilized, all packets would be transmitted with high priority and low latency, with QoS flags allowing packets to jump ahead in packet queues. When the network is heavily loaded, high-QoS packets beyond the customer's quota would be relegated to best effort.
That mean a customers software can balance the use of QoS for time sensitive traffic, and maybe even flag some data as below default to get bonus high priority traffic points. If its the software that runs on the consumers device that decide priority, the software developer can pick the exact needed QoS his program or service need.
The bonus effect here is that if the QoS fail and the program breaks, its the software developer that are liable and not the ISP. Currently, if a ISP QoS software breaks, the ISP is actually quite open for lawsuits from both the user and the service that get effected.
Basically, it's tragedy of the commons. All incoming traffic is going to end up with the QoS flag set, and thus the internet will basically behave as if it didn't exist.
Except people will be expected to pay a premium for it. Ie, it's a glorified rate hike masked as a technical non-sequitur.
TL;DR: QoS may be useful for networking, but it is not useful for inter-networking.
The only use for QoS IMHO is an "emergency lane" for health-and-safety traffic, assuming it carried the same disincentives to abuse (jail) as does 911 and other emergency services. (Not even VoIP is "high-priority" enough to warrant it.)
The other problem with the "sender pays" model is that there's no basis for it. You're not "tying up the line" by sending any more than you are by receiving. You are either online or you aren't. Anything else is rolling backwards downhill, away from the Internet.
I live in Canada, and all of the ISPs wires were subsidized with taxes then handed over to the incumbent carriers to use and sub-let.
A network can saturate, that's fine. I have a link that's either on or off, that's fine too. If the overall network speed is disatisfactory, that means it's time to upgrade the switches -- possibly at my expense (I presume that's what I've been paying for) -- but the Internet has always been best-effort and that's also the point. It automatically load balances. QoS is a solution in search of a problem. The solution has always been at the switch when it's saturated. A CPU process scheduler may boost a process temporarily to increase responsiveness, but only for an instant. The long-term, steady state, is still a free-for all. Nothing stops you from having QoS on your network or PC, but it is not a core service.
ISPs simply need to stop over-selling rates and attempting to "manage" link speed to compensate. Stop saying there's a difference between plan A and plan B if they come over the same wire. There's no basis for telling subscriber A that they get 512Kbps when subscriber B get 3Mbps over the same wire and there's no technical difference... They both have that wire and that wire is paid for, or being paid for, by their subscription. Both subscriber A and subscriber B pay the same rate and compete for the same throughput. The switch balances throughput fairly and it costs the ISP no more than ever. I'm not against creative pricing and free markets, just against single-use networks being called "the Internet." QoS may be a networking technology but it is not an Internet technology.
The whole ISP pricing model is artificial, and moving towards the grossly-overpriced text message pricing. The only reason small ISPs can't offer anything like I have described (anymore) is because they have no choice but to buy service through incumbents who are inflicting these QoS and bandwidth management fictions.
I have run a network for thousands of users (academic; students with torrents competing with instructors with videoconferencing, and administrators with VoIP), and while it may be appropriate to classify traffic (ex, emergency, or non-emergency), when the customer is "the public" and the context is "a democracy" all traffic must be treated equally in the extreme, otherwise it is simply discrimination. Even if you classify traffic as "government" and "non-government", or "porn" and "non-porn" you have big social fall-out.
"The Internet" is best-effort by design and that is more than enough. In my experience well-intentioned administrators without real-world experience come in and try to "solve" the latency problem creating more problems. Latency needs to be fixed at the switch in the same way CPU scheduling is: if a link hasn't spoken recently, it gets a little short-lived priority boost. The user has no say.
These management decisions are coming from the same people who buy "smart" switches that cost 10 times as much so they can use VLANs as a security technique, when it isn't, and when PPPoE would have worked just as well and provided the desired encryption.
We consistently invent little nested versions of our universe (even going so far as to tunnel it all over HTTP, because that's the only port that anyone leaves open now), and we wonder why it's slow and expensive and flaky, and we're no further ahead than we were when we started.
/rant
Of course, that only work inside one ISP and its customers, or between ISP which agree to respect each other limited use of QoS, both this approach would not fall for the tragedy of the commons. So long the end-user who initiate the traffic ends up deciding what priority is needed, limited use of QoS could help solve problem of voip vs bittorent.
The only difference is in the mix and distribution of customer money flows. Some customers will be freeloading to a certain extent, others will be paying over the odds.
Obviously, the kids are going to absolutely trash that 3Mbps.
They were killed by DSL, which gave you way more bandwidth for way less money vs. the T1s. Doing the same thing with DSL at the head doesn't work because QoS works by reordering the packets in the queue. To get packets to queue, you need to know how big your pipe is, and you never know exactly how big your DSL pipe is. (or, at least, that's how it looks to dumb sysadmins like me who only get to play with a server connected to the dsl modem through a ethernet port.)
Anyhow, my belief is that it's turned out to be cheaper to just buy more bandwidth. Bandwidth is incredibly cheap, and it keeps getting cheaper every year.
This and all similar ideas are very dangerous.
Compare pure commercial networks (mobile SMSes, ISDN) with Internet which has academic background.
What is the right direction for Internet? Why we talk about paid QoS packets ideas and not about Google Fiber?
Even with plenty of bandwidth, there's still the buffer bloat issue. If you decrease the buffer sizes and use random packet dropping, your VoIP and gaming packets could get too many dropped. If you leave the buffers as they are, you could have very high jitter. So, either we need a way of saying we want high-priority packets not to get dropped when the buffers are full, or we need a way of saying we want high-priority packets to bypass bloated buffers.
In the same way, internet access is a commodity and the only reason I pay for it is that I need to get to Google or Netflix or such. Where the idea that Google or Netflix get "free ride" comes from? I pay for my access, Google and Netflix pay for their connectivity. If the connectivity is not enough, customers would complain and depending on where the problem is, end up paying for better local access (if they know it's slow for them but fine for the neighbor next door that uses different provider) or have their provider (i.e. Netflix) upgrade their connectivity by telling them to improve delivery or they stop paying/visiting/clicking on ads. This all should work as it works now, where the idea of a "free ride" and additional payments due comes from?
In other words, the ITU is run by people whose job is to run things. The IETF and W3C are run by people whose job it is to do things. Groups of the former category tend to want to control those of the latter.
Edit to add: the different outcomes of the ITU vs. IETF/W3C can also be attributed to the purpose of existence of their members. People who run things (e.g. governments) want to keep running things. Thus, their work tends to result in new laws and treaties. People who do things (e.g. engineers) want to keep doing things. Thus, their work tends to result in voluntary, consensus-based agreements.
20 years ago, nobody cared about the few, the unusual, the networked. 15 years ago, people damned well did care, but everyone was in 'run in circles, scream and shout' mode and business plans were more-or-less optional. 10 years ago it was definitively too late. Does that seem like an eye blink to you? It does to a multinational bureaucracy.
My life fades... the vision dims... all that remains are memories. Looking back over the history of the Internet, from about 1991 to 2001, I remember a time of chaos, bizarre dreams, and the growing suspicion that the average people more-or-less snuck online too quickly for anyone who could have been said to have been 'in charge' to notice.