F.C.C. to Try Again on Net Neutrality
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The only solution is for Congress to pass these regulations and enshrine net neutrality as a fundamental principle of internet regulation.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_ad_hoc_network>
The instability of the network requires a bit different approach to networking in general:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networking>
In short: you can do email, with high probability, but more often than not can forget about VoIP.
There are a lot of options, each with their advantages in different situations. It's not so clear cut. It can be fast or it can be slow. It can be stable or not. It very much depends on the particular network protocol and setup.
I agree that right now it's not going to happen, no matter how many different efforts there are out there. For it to really happen I think we would have to come up with a plan that would actually work, in terms of creating a massive world-wide mesh network. There would have to be a lot of consideration for things like security, DDoS mitigation, speed, standards and upgradeability.
If developing a viable mesh network for the task weren't tough enough, there would also have to be a plan for migration which is really the hard part. Getting everybody in the world moved over to a new network would be nothing short of a miracle.
Would you accept return to text-only communication, not always instantaneous?
If so, mesh nets are there for us.
Also, did you see this (one of many interesting efforts): http://openlibernet.org/faq.html
All that said, even if we just had a functioning alternative (even if it were significantly slower), it would give us options when we need uncensored, unregulated communication. It's better than having absolutely no options when your government oversteps its bounds.
Speaking of which, a nice incentive. I see FAQ expresses everything that should be told, in an honest way. Good read for someone who wants to know about mesh networks.
I would also love something like it to become commonplace. But as it is not a viable alternative to the Internet and does not add anything while the system has not went mad... I don't see it happening any soon.
I don't think this is true, at least not using Wikipedia definition of "mesh network".
Mesh Networks are where each node relays data to other nodes, with data "hopping" from node to node.
That does not happen on cell networks. Each phone relays data to a cell tower, but thats it. There's no "hopping" from phone to phone, or from tower to tower. (Your phone might move between towers, taking a phone call from one tower to another as you drive, but there's never more than one "hop". Your phone call never jumps through three cell towers before hitting backhaul, for instance.)
For the same reason that having a few Wifi hotspots backhauled in a building isn't a "mesh network", a cell phone network is also not a "mesh network".
The cell phone is answered. So, it goes from switch O (the caller) to switch A (where your cell phone is associated with). Eventually, you'll move out of range of towers for switch A, and come into range of towers for switch B. But because the phone network is circuit switched, you can't just create a circuit from O to B. No, what happens is that A forms a connection to B, so now the call is going O -> A -> B. Talk long enough, and eventually, your call may end up going O -> A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F.
So while it's true that your call doesn't go through multiple towers, it does go through multiple switches (as long as you are talking on the cell phone, and the cell phone is moving).
I'm happy to get 100 kbits/talker in that scenario with todays FHSS technology, 500 meters/hop, 1 watt power, 200 kHz channel width and 20 MHz of spectrum in the ISM band.
Of course, the advantage of Mesh Networks is they require little in the way of infrastructure, and scale up into the millions of nodes, with 50 million active node networks practical. But high data rates are not one of the properties of such networks.
a new circuit is established from O to B,
O tells A to tell the handset to move over to B-owned network infrastructure,
the handset roams over to B,
O drops the circuit to A.
This is a special case of Inter-MSC Handover, and you can read the spec at https://archive.org/stream/etsi_ts_123_009_v03.03.00/ts_1230...
The relevant section is Sec. 7.3.2, "Description of the subsequent handover procedure ii): MSC-B to MSC-B'".
(They call your "O" by "A", your "A" by "B", and your "C" by "B'" (B prime). And an MSC is a Mobile Switching Center that usually handles about half a city's worth of towers.)
Or the instructor I had taught us outdated information.
Actually, lol at just passing laws, Congress didn't do anything but name post offices the past year.
The only regulation we are going to get in the next decade is anything that can do an end-run around congress.
If Google Fiber comes to an area that's controlled by TimeCast (ComWarner?) will Google enter into an aggressive pricing war? I mean there were rumors several years ago that they intended to license the dead air waves to use as free internet. And I'd let Google inject ads into my browser if it meant getting that insane bandwidth - especially if it's for free.
Government enforcement of "net neutrality" is a great idea if we want to cement the role of the incumbent operators.
There's nothing in a net neutrality demand that would change Google's costs as such. One might argue that neutrality might impact Google's potential profits - but since Google already has such a large portion of the net's traffic, it's main business model has involved a neutral net and they have been a strong advocate. Since they profit from a large portion of Internet traffic, their aim has been to increase this traffic to thus increase their profits (IE, the ability to shake-down Netflix is not worth anywhere as much as the other ways Google makes money - see: "world's largest advertising company").
On the other hand, some of their motive for entering the ISP business has been make sure the current operators respect net neutrality and don't engaging in sleazy that exploit their monopoly (throttling, ad-substitution, etc). If net neutrality were guaranteed, Google might feel less urgency in entering this business. On the other hand, they aren't doing this at a loss so they may well continue.
Also, Google has a vast internal network that carries it's internal traffic. This network isn't part of the Internet at all and won't be affected ever by net neutrality issues.
( I mean, yes, the regulations outlawing new nuclear plants obviously, but those regulations came about because most people judge the previous regulations to be inadequate. I don't agree with them, but I don't think deregulating the nuclear industry would help anyone. )
I'm not knee jerk opposed to regulation. But the best regulation identifies a market failure and addresses it in targeted way. Net neutrality regulation doesn't do that. It just implements some group's ideal of what the industry should look like.
I pay for the pipes on my end, I want the same data-rate regardless of whether the data originally came from a netflix server or a NBC-affiliated company's server.
If netflix needs to beef up their peering arrangements in order to get the data to comcast's network, that's one thing, but they absolutely should not have to pay an additional fee to comcast to protect themselves from being penalized.
Being able to pay other companies to give you better service is an intrinsic advantage to being big, and is not the product of a market failure. For example, Amazon works out a special deal with the USPS for Sunday deliveries. That still gives a huge benefit to Amazon versus smaller competitors who can't afford to pay up. Being small comes with penalties, and the FCC shouldn't impose an ideological view of the internet that artificially removes these disadvantages.
When I purchase internet connectivity, I want internet connectivity. I don't want varying grades of speed depending on who I'm talking to, I just want a dumb pipe. That's what I'm paying for. How is legislating the dumbness of the pipe 'imposing ideology'? The market is allegedly $/gb/mo, let providers compete on service, price and speed. If they can't deliver those GBs for those $s, they're free to charge more to consumers. The only ideology there is capitalism. What am I missing?
Note that I said in my original post, if Netflix doesn't have good enough peering arrangements on their end, then that's their problem and nobody thinks there should be legislation guaranteeing them cheap bandwidth. But most of us think they should be able to buy bandwidth to the consumer networks, via peering, at the market rates that everyone else pays, maybe with discounts for volume.
A better legislative approach would be something like having municipal utilities own the last mile coax, and allowing different ISPs to plug into it. That would eliminate the market failure directly, and allow the industry to evolve into whatever structure makes sense. I think you wouldn't see them end up as dumb pipes in a competitive market. Some ISP would come along and make a deal with the NFL to have high quality streaming only on their network, etc. Just like how there's no monopoly in shipping but Amazon still has an advantage by being able to cut special deals.
I'd consider a patchwork of different providers with the same problem ("well, sprint has fast netflix but comcast has fast amazon") to be just as much of a market failure. That's bringing huge distortions to internet business, whether or not there's a monopoly on the last mile.
How about if we split it like so?
* Content-neutral QoS and prioritization isn't a market failure.
* Throttling netflix because they strategically threaten NBC (owned by comcast) is a market failure.
Would you agree with that sort of categorization?
How about the following?
* Throttling whichever service your customers are using the most so that you don't have to provide the bandwidth you sold to them under a contract, also a market failure.
If you eliminated the last mile monopoly, which is an economically valid reason to regulate, with a targeted regulation, I still think you'd see a lot of the sort of activities that HN-ers dislike. There would still be a huge incentive for ISPs to vertically integrate and buy up content companies and cut special deals. What does Comcast care if they don't own the actual coax into my house, just everything leading up to it? Who can compete with them when they have a "killer app" like Hulu and their competitors don't?
Is the next phase of this discussion "the free market will create incentives to start new telephony companies that don't throttle your favorite website"?
For an analogy, should the electric company have a say in which brand CPU I use? Or should they just sell me watt/hours?
Heck, I'd even put mobile service as being closer to a normal consumer good than wired internet. Wireless they just need one tower every few miles.
The ideology is what you think is the result of the market failure, whether it's being used as a "hook," or something else. Heck, whether it can even be defined as a market failure can been argued to be a value judgement these days.
Probably the same number that dream of going to work at the intensely-hated digital utilities, aka cable companies.
Who in the world has ever said "My dream is to work at Time Warner Cable"? I wouldn't tell people I worked for them. My house might get egged.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if companies that design and operate water treatment plants aren't often more innovative than a company like TWC that has no competition on many of its markets.
Since 2002, the internet speed at my parents' house in Virginia has increased from about 256 kbps (SDSL) to 50 mbps (fiber). That increase of 100x isn't quite in keeping with Moore's law, but it's pretty damn impressive and talented people at those "intensely-hated digital utilities" are the ones behind it, backed up by the tens of billions of dollars those companies are throwing at the problem.
The future has been here for decades (see South Korea, or much of Europe, or...), it's just very unevenly distributed.
The future is here, in the U.S. too: http://www.akamai.com/dl/documents/akamai_soti_q213.pdf?WT.m... (see page 13). The U.S. ranks 8th in average connection speeds. It can't compete obviously with places like South Korea, where half the whole country lives in the Seoul metro area, but is better than much of Europe.
I've heard the population density argument, before.
It's bunk. If it wasn't, we would expect to see reasonably priced 100mbit+ residential fiber service in NYC, SFO, SEA, and other densely populated metro areas. Instead, we see somewhat reasonably priced 1gbit residential service in Chattanooga, TN (1/10th SFO's population, and 1/20th NYC's), wherever Google deigns to pick a fight, and places like Sebastapol, CA (with a population just under 8,000 people).
My personal situation: My Internet is the worst it's been in years, more expensive than it's ever been, and I have no other option than Cox in my area. I know very few people who have seen any notable improvements in the past 10 years.
The examples you cite (coal plants staying open forever, water pipes, etc) are massive capital investments. That's the primary reason they've stayed open / haven't changed for so long, once you spend that much money you want to milk it for every penny it's worth.
Utility regulation is burdensome and costly, but I don't think it necessarily kills innovation in industry like you intimate.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor 2. https://www.americaspower.org/our-commitment-clean-energy-fu...
Research isn't industry. The regulations don't prevent people from designing reactors; just from building nuclear power plants.
Nuclear is a significantly more regulated industry than coal and natural gas. Consequently, it is cheaper to run coal and natural gas plants, just because there are large external costs associated with natural gas and coal (emissions, environmental damage) which are passed on to the taxpayer instead of the consumer.
It is quite possible that if natural gas and coal were forced to pay for their externalities (via regulation) nuclear would be more cost-competitive, and you'd see more advancement of nuclear technology in industry.
In a privatized scheme, it is unlikely that infrastructure would be upgraded unless those upgrades paid for themselves in some way or were compelled by law. We are already seeing that telcos don't seek to improve the quality of infrastructure in many cases and instead seek a way to increase margins without having to make significantly expenditures on infrastructure.
This is misleading oversimpliication. The issue is the viability of competition, not really the "need" of the consumer. In the case of cable/telcos, competition is precluded by a variety of non-market barriers. These barriers create problems for functioning markets to capitalize competing entities, regardless of availability of capital, technology, or managemnet skill. So, in a sense the government is responsible for the "mess" of limited cable and telco competition. And they are (as a result) on the hook to limit the damage of their anti-competitive public policy. The logic of limiting competition is some variation on the theme of "natural monopolies"; this is the origin of "utility status". In other words, it is almost strictly speaking a supply side issue and a government policy issue. The levele of demand is really only a second-order part of the equation; although internect acesss is being blurred in a sense of becoming a <perceived> public good (like infrastructre). But in a certain sense, it is not really a public good. The latter are typical removed from the market altogether. ie, Roads are for the most part free. Telephone and cable service, have not really been treated this way. What is sort of different is that the Internet has been priced more like a road thank like cable service. The cable companies are of the view they are "entitled" to price it like a cable service because their strategy is to monopolize access and to extract rents from their "entitlements". The public interest, from a cultural and economic perspective, therefore of what goes over the pipes can be sepertated from the pipes themselves. The pipes should and could be treated like "servicies" for which people pay. But the cable companies could and most likely should be denied and access to the data and the economics that flow down the pipes. The government could legislate the cable companies asset value to zero, if they need to. They could pass legislation to destroy copyright's perpetuity value {etc}. There is plenty of leverage to bring the cable companies to bear to a public interest position. At least technically. In reality, we know who is already in the pocket of the cable companies though +D.
Once people start talking about CDNs and peering agreements, and all those massive middleman infrastructures most consumers don't even know exist, this issue gets orders of magnitude more complex. It seems unregulatable.
What is Netflix supposed to do if Verizon just passes data around its network to keep it "full" all the time and refuses to open up good datalines to Netflix CDNs? What is the network supposed to do if a major data provider ends up choking the lines just to move from one endpoint to the other, not even stopping at customers?
I doubt any rules would work here except for actual enforcement of anti-monopoly regulations on a locality by locality basis. Maybe Netflix needs to start rolling out fiber and competing directly with ISPs (most of them are already competing by providing content anyway).
It should be by the people, for the people.
That's the problem.
I'm not suggesting that this will work, I'm disputing that the people don't have any power. People almost always have some influence over their situation. That doesn't mean they have a magic bullet, but there is almost always hope.
1) Internet isn't a luxury anymore, it's a necessity. One can't live in society today with much success without some form of Internet access.
2) The free market is not at work when it comes to the proverbial "pipe" that's been laid - the Internet backbone. Getting a fiber cable to your house, to your neighborhood, and to your city was a task that cost a lot of money, and was paid for in part by the US government and state governments. Despite this fact, companies like Time Warner do not share "their" infrastructure to 3rd party ISPs. This, in turn creates an artificial monopoly where Time Warner unfairly benefits from publicly funded infrastructure.
People can't avoid Time Warner, because in many places, they have literally no other option. There is no hope for these folks.
There is competition in the residential Internet business.
If you say that "all those alternatives are too slow," I say: too slow for what? Too slow or too throttled for Internet video: perhaps. But the argument you are making is that "one can't live without some form of Internet access." Most people have Internet access available, in multiple forms.
I agree that Internet is not a luxury, but 10 or 50 megabit Internet is. True, you need Internet to apply for jobs and even in some cases to interact with your government. Do you need 50 megabits for that? No.
People can avoid Time Warner. They might not get their Netflix with their slower Internet, but the government should not be getting involved to preserve something as trivial as streaming video.
Different product, same problem, possibly even the same company. Switch out "Time Warner" with "Verizon" (a reality for some), and the problem exists anew.
There is not competition in the residential Internet business.
It's like having a gas station in the middle of a desert, with no roads within a 50 mile radius.
I agree, but I'm not sure how you can maintain these things without being owned by the people (govt) or a corp. I guess a regulatory body like the FCC then?
Assuming we completely de-regulate, you'd still have municipal governments striking these anti-competitive monopoly deals. In fact, there'd be no barrier to it at all, since we're de-regulated in this case.
Don't like Comcast? Better not move to City A, because they "own" it, even though some of the fiber was paid for by the residents.
And it's more sensible, since competition is a cure-all, than federal 'neutrality' rules about what services are allowable.
> I'd prefer that government entities remove themselves from open Internet pursuits entirely.
What you are describing doesn't follow this. You are in support of regulation, the thread OP isn't.
The wireless technology keeps improving. New wired infrastructure can be run – as with Google Fiber or other initiatives. The sensors and robots for such installs also keep improving. And for sticky 'last mile' wire bottlenecks, sharing of that conduit could be required, or a 'minimal universal neutral' service option be required where there are no other options.
Instead, the FCC seeks to limit how all broadband services, everywhere, must work, to respond to an abuse threat that remains almost entirely theoretical. That itself is an anti-competition, anti-differentiation move. It also adds another lever of power by which the FCC's other regulatory tendencies – such as censoring indecency or enabling wiretapping – could be applied to the internet. (In the UK, Australia, and South Korea it is agencies like the FCC which maintain compulsory national internet black-lists.)
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
This kind of dispute is not really anything a Network Neutrality regime as currently proposed could fix.
1. You state that it is "your experience" that "all" recent Netflix slowness is a result of peering contract disputes. Unless you are a network operations engineer at one of these companies how could you have this experience?
2. You link to the WSJ, which is not a credible source when discussing big media companies.
That said, you may well be a real person, in which case I would recommend changing your wording on commonly astroturfed topics.
Basically it's a play on "grass roots" movements. Powerful groups attempt to mimic grass roots, populist movements by hiring a bunch of employees to pose and regular people and write comments on forums, etc. And as you know, astroturf is fake grass.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/fe...
Since then, it's been easy to correlate poor performance on my Netflix streaming with a a 60ms+ drop across a Cogent/Comcast peering point when I ping one of my company's servers from home.
There have been several articles on tech news sites discussing this dispute[1][2]. I linked to the WSJ article because it was fresh this morning and provided a good summary of the state of play.
On the other hand, accusations of actual throttling of Netflix traffic on a broadband provider's own network have been frequent but I haven't seen definitive evidence that it's happening on Comcast or Verizon.
Personally, I'm pretty pissed that Comcast is taking my $70/month and failing to provide within a factor of 50 of advertised rates to one of the internet's most popular services. They seem to be playing chicken with Netflix and their own customers. It would rebound badly on them if they had decent competition, but franchise agreements are what they are.
I don't count "internet points" very often, but it's pretty amusing for someone with a grand total of 137 HN karma to accuse me of being a shill.
[1] http://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/verizon-that-peering-flap-about...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizo...
I said it once, I will say it again it is Netflix' fault for not shaming bad ISPs. Netflix controls the source code for their media player and they control their servers. With 99% accuracy they should be able to detect which ISPs are screwing them and release this in a report to consumers.
Netflix does publish ISP numbers, and the trend over the past 6 months for Comcast and Verizon has been awful, as is shown in the "not credible" WSJ article I linked.
Net Neutrality should be about how we come to terms with companies that are pure ISPs trying to deliver data their customers want vs companies that stand to increase profits and hurt competitors through active throttling or, in the peering case, simple inaction.
Second, the VPN trick doesn't really tell you anything except that the end point of the VPN has a better path to Netflix's CDNs than the route your ISP is using. Your ISP doesn't have to act overloaded routes to the content, which they want Netflix to pay to upgrade.
2) VPNs add latency and are still limited by the bandwidth of your connection. Given that Netflix has a decent CDN, in theory your VPN-box shouldn't have all that much better a path to a Netflix server than you do. So, assuming that the paths to netflix are mostly equal, a fast VPN-Netflix experience vs a crappy local connection one would imply the ISP is to blame (for whatever reason malicious or not).
That is, they're probably "decent" (quite good, I'd even imagine), but the load is so high so as to cause traffic problems anyway. The question was "how can I tell if it's Netflix or if it's my ISP?" and the answer is, "You can't."
This appears to be the only reliable way to stream video during peak hours in my neighborhood, and I'm done with my ISP's suggestion that the problem would go away if only I'd reboot my modem again.
I know it's fun to blame ISPs for all the problems under the sun, but it's actually rarer than one might think that the ISP itself is the cause of a home networking issue.
While streaming in Firefox, reported speed rate jumps to expected (i.e. non-peak rate) when running through a proxy server outside my ISP's network. Speed drops instantly when the proxy setting is disabled. Flipping the proxy switch on/off literally changes my observed speed by ~10+ Mbps. This experiment has has been confirmed over weeks, different devices, etc.
So...I'm not blaming the ISP, but using a proxy server clearly works for me. So I'm going to do that so I quit wasting time trying to figure out why it doesn't work. I just need to be able to do it at the router level and not the computer level so it works for e.g. the Apple TV.
We can't say the ISP is in any way at fault here.
Try installing DD-WRT onto your router. It has features for things like this.
FWIW though -- I'm not blaming my ISP, specifically because I don't have enough data and don't care enough about assigning blame to get it. It wouldn't matter anyway, I'm basically stuck with this ISP.
Thanks for the DD-WRT rec, I'll try that out.
What would happen if consumer ISPs were required, for each customer, to choose a single point (at the metro level, probably) where they are required to peer openly? That allow all Netflix-like companies access to customers, but since it's a point local to the customer, would not impose any long-distance bandwidth requirement on the ISP.
Anything else is a band-aid on top of an injury (the ISP monopolies) that actually requires surgery.
Or a bunch of satellites in low orbits, which is something Google wants to do. A number of companies have tried this idea, so far without economic success, but as time passes it's becoming more practical, and eventually it will probably become feasible. Once it does, many companies will do it, and you will be able to choose which company you want to get satellite Internet service from. Finally there will be competition.
I am so looking foreword to satellite Internet, mainly because my new home is off the grid, and I have no Internet at all there. The best option I found so far gives me 25 gigs per month for $70. I would gladly pay $140 for 50+ gb but that's not even an option. Unlimited, fast, and ubiquitous Internet would be amazing, but in my research I have yet to see any company that's even close to offering that.
If any one can recommend a satellite Internet company with high or now bandwidth caps, I am all ears. My budget is something under $200/m for unlimited or 200+gb/m.
Yes, and system congestion, which you also mention. This is why so many different ideas are being considered -- balloons and solar-powered high-altitude drones to name two. But satellites, in spite of their drawbacks, at least in principle would have longer lives and wold present a lower per/subscriber cost.
Because of the propagation delay you mention, satellites work very poorly with VOIP, in fact existing synchronous-orbit satellite methods won't work with VOIP at all. Future low-orbit satellites might be more acceptable, but propagation delay will always pose a problem for anything but terrestrial fiber.