WTF is Net Neutrality, anyway? And how can we make everything better? This weekend, earnest young men - several of whom appear to have beards - are camping out in Washington DC. They're protesting against "plans to allow a pay-for play internet". In fact, we think there genuinely are some serious competitive concerns about recent developments in the ever-changing business of carrying bits of data …
tgm, has DSL not been available from any of the telephone companies where you’ve lived in the States? Even here at Deficient House, in a county with the same population density as Shetland, we have a choice between the telephone company and a cable company. (The speeds available here are nowhere near first rate, but it is still a choice.)
Sometimes, Andrew, I wonder why you're paid for what you do.
4G, WiMAX and 5G should be frightening the crap out of the incumbents. Why aren't they?
Mostly, it's because the incumbents have most of the power in wireless. AT&T and Verizon have the most spectrum, as sold by Congress and regulated by the FCC. It's difficult for a competitor to arise. Wireless is a shared medium, so you aren't going to stuff many household-Netflix-worths of traffic through it. I recently tried WiMAX, and the latency is through the roof, and there is a lot more packet loss than wired.
The carriers welcome wireless. It's a way for them to claim that there is competitive broadband. But unlike real broadband, where you really have to work to hit the multi-hundred-GB bandwidth cap, wireless has a cap of like 0.5 GB to 2 GB. A 4G connection lets you use an entire month's allotment of data in less than a day. If you use more data, you pay dearly. And if they can get Congress to allow them to let go of wireline, then they will happily stop maintaining the wires and force everybody onto cell phones, like a third world country.
FYI, just as a technical note, Comcast quietly dropped the bandwidth limits about the time they started rolling out their dual-channel wireless routers and expanding the xfinitywifi network. Unbeknownst to most who lease one of these new devices, they are now subsidizing Comcast's wireless network through their electric bills.
"I recently tried WiMAX, and the latency is through the roof, and there is a lot more packet loss than wired."
I used WiMAX in Yangon last year - it had been heavily promoted for both voice and data in the prceeding 18 months - and voice service was so bad people had given up on it. Data was at dialup speed even for local resources.
Wireless services don't scale unless you use microcells and as soon as you do that you need to backhaul - at which point the monopoly incumbents have you over a barrel.
It's the same situation as the one I faced in the 1990s which had 2Mb/s circuits from San Francisco to Auckland costing $900/month - and delivery within New Zealand costing $20,000/month.
Sadly cable and dsl don't really keep each other honest here. The dsl provider bounces in and out of bankrupcy manages a minor upgrade which prompts the cable company to just about beat them, then they head bank into bankruptcy. To be fair geography kills the dsl here, theres no dense grid of housing but rather long lines along the coast. DSL is alright for the few properties near the exchange but we are half an extinct volcano away and they will only sell you dsl if you beg and accept it will be a sub 1mbps speed. They did roll out fiber on another island though. If they can manage that on all islands we may finally have a decent fight between cable and the local telco. As it was DSL was just at a significant disadvantage technology wise and the cableco had no incentive to do better than it was.
LTE & wimax (officially CTD now) aren't really a huge threat for moderate to heavy users because of contention. If and when DISH finally uses some of that massive haul of spectrum they have things may change. Sprint is also dabbling with fixed antenna LTE and their 25\2600 MHz spectrum which might change things (an external yagi would overcome many issues with higher dial spectrum).
Honestly, the two larger celcos don't want to really offer much by way of home wireless internet because how can you justify selling something price competitive in the home market with say a 100GB cap, but a higher monthly charge for 4GB of cell phone data? One spectrum has been refarmed away from 2.5/3/3.5G technologies and additional spectrum has been auctioned there could be a market for it but I'm thinking by then the cable companies will have upped packages again and moved the goal posts. Thats also before we get into backhaul issues with celcos (imagine just how quickly AT&T respond to a request from Sprint for backhaul?! :) ) and permits (up to 18 months in some places) slowing down progress.
In the US, ask about DSL and the likely retort will be "No, we've moved past using phones to connect our computers." Not fair, but there it is.
For the most part, the phone companies quickly realized they weren't going to be able to build out the infrastructure using DSL. Population density is too small for too large an area. So they switched to fiber optics early on. But in rural regions a combination of real costs and political opportunism at the local level has pretty much left only 1 wired competitor in most areas. You may have a wireless option, or a satellite option, which the FCC has counted as competition. Which is why AC above is getting so many downvotes. Even those of us who believe the market CAN provide the competition, know it isn't because of the political angles.
I live in the capitol of america and i have only 1 choice for wired internet, COMCAST!! satellite internet is even more expensive and a hassle .
the providers are trying to get more money from the public, and I WILL be among those protesting in D.C., BEARD AND ALL!!!!
btw, the author seems to be one of those wimps that either cannot grow a beard or lets the effeminate part of society dictate what men should look like.
Yeah, pretty sure the 89% quote is an aggregate based on areas that have, typically, a choice of exactly one cable provider (for actual high-speed access, but speeds that will never improve), and a bunch of other ISPs that are either much more expensive and/or have slower speeds. Not sure how you can vote with your wallet in that scenario.
Anonymous Coward, apparently the source of that 89% figure is the NTIA’s National Broadband Map of January 2013, as noted in this report (from a K Street lobbying firm). The report quotes the NBM as having stated that
89 percent [of] Americans have a choice of five or more broadband providers, including wireless and satellite
where broadband has the OECD definition of at least 256 kb/s, both upstream and downstream.
I have the lucky "choice" of Comcast (cable) or CenturyLink (dsl). Problem is, DSL maxes out at 7mbps in my area, but I'm lucky to get 1,5Mbps. Cable has a minimum of 30Mbps, up to 105Mbps. 30Mbps cable or 1.5-7mbps dsl (no real difference in price). Not really any "choice" there, unless you enjoy watching paint dry.
While I've lived in the same town for >25 years now and have limited actual experience, I agree completely with you. I suspect my situation is very common.
Actually, in theory I >do< have a choice of broadband: Cox, which has a territorial cable monopoly granted by my town in exchange for the "overhead related to provisioning the city" for its cable operation, and AT&T which is my land-line phone provider.
However, I am over 17000 feet (?meters?) from the Central Office, and my useful DSL speed is not fast enough to support even the lowest quality video stream. And it would cost about the same as I'm paying Cox for roughly 20 MB now ($65/month).
I could probably switch to a satellite ISP, but I understand that although streaming can be effective, latency becomes a serious problem for general browsing in this era of highly complex dynamic pages (after enabling JavaScript for forums.theregister.co.uk, NoScript informs me that there are scripts from four other sources waiting to be enabled, and I expect some of those to call from yet other sources - with a half a second roundtrip for each call, this page would take some serious time to completely load).
So I second the call for support for the claim that "89% of Americans have a choice" of broadband provider. Not when "choice" is defined as equivalent service!
Pretty standard, but don't blame the FCC. It's the local govt officials who granted these monopolies. Most of the "broadband" providers are still cable TV providers using their original lines. The monopolies were granted in the 70's.
The main choice just about anywhere is cable broadband or ISDN with the phone company.
Daed, your local municipality has been prohibited since 1992 from making cable a monopoly franchise. Other cable companies are allowed to have franchises too. Of course it's meaningless -- the economics of cable mean that a second cable company -- it's called an overbuilder -- is almost certain to go bust.
And ISDN has been off the market in most of the US for years.
In southwest Houston, I have Comcast for Internet (averaging 20-25 Mbps download), DirectTV for satellite TV, and T-Mobile 4G averaging 3-5 Mbps, AT&T was a bit of slug upgrading U-Verse in my neighborhood, which is populated mostly by retired folks. I briefly tried Clear (now being absorbed by Sprint), and businesses in tall buildings with good lines of sight can use MetroPCS. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon compete against T-Mobile for cell phone service.
My guess is the set of options in the hinterlands is not as good.
Good article, by the way.
"Some 89 per cent of Americans have a choice between at least two broadband companies - so why not switch?"
I currently have a choice of 5 or 6 different broadband providers. The two best ones mostly don't suck, and one of the two charges outrageous fees based on the amount of data used. You could say that I have a choice (and in reality I realize that I do), but it's really not much of a choice.
I have one cable company and one big telco to choose from, along with a couple small ISPs. Problem is, those small ISPs resell DSL from the telco, so it isn't really different even though it counts me as among that 89%.
I wouldn't count satellite internet as a choice at all, unless it is your ONLY choice. For all practical purposes, I have two choices, cable and DSL. Both offer 40Mb+ so at least they're two good choices, unlike a lot of areas where people have either slow DSL or oversubscribed cable that effectively limits them to one choice if they want decent speed.
I'll bet the real number in the US is 50% at best, and 90% of that is probably in metro areas with populations of over 500,000, so while it may be half the population, it is probably a few percent of the US by area.
There IS no ISP competition! Crap Service A or B, how is that a choice? People leave them constantly! It does no good, since they only go to another crap ISP that someone else just fired, and the average number of subscribers does not significantly change.
TOS headers didn't get used much, but there is a lot of jockeying around within networks. Put more capacity here and not there, use MPLS for this and not that, etc. The point is that the design was never meant to be "all packets are equal", and in practice that would drastically favor some (shorter paths) over others anyway. Which explains why CDNs are so popular.
TOS bits are used extensively, or more accurately the IP Prec bits. TOS morphed into DiffServ/DSCP, the networks morphed into MPLS. The IP Prec bits get mapped onto the MPLS EXP bits and voila, IP Networks have a QoS capability as envisaged all those years ago in RFC791. Only the first 3 bits matter, the rest get TOSsed. These are also the bits some Net Neuts want to ban so the Internet can remain best efforts.
Shortest path also doesn't really matter for Netflix-style streaming. Shorter the path, the lower the latency so mostly relevant for real-time apps. CDNs are/were popular not to reduce latency, but cost. Stick a CDN box in an IX location and your connectivity costs drop to the cost of patching and peering/transit across a building vs sending lots of copies of the same content across a mass of expensive connections from a centralised server farm. Which may be somewhere stupid like Ireland. Nice for tax reasons, not so good if you're intending to push packets across the whole of Europe cheaply.
>>"The "other way" is all packets traveling at the same priority. Care to start a network that operates on that basis? :)"
When you say all packets travelling at the same priority, are you saying all streaming video packets travelling at the same priority as all everyday tweets and emails? Because that is justifiable. But I think you're then using that fact that packets are handled differently to sleight-of-hand into it being okay that streaming video packets of company A can be treated differently to streaming video packets of company B.
Saying that all types of packets cannot be / are not equal is one thing. Saying that all senders / receivers are not equal is a very different thing. It is wrong to abstract both and just say "packets cannot be equal" as if there is no difference. Network Neutrality is about the latter, not the former.
Does anyone else remember Token Ring? Well now THAT is what is needed to bring this argument to a close! We make it the law (we seem to be good at altering physical reality that way) that all traffic providers interconnect that way. It may also provide some relieve in the unemployment area as production ramps back up for that weird 4 prong connector that looks like some kind of plug from a toaster fr a third world country that decreed its own kind of electrical connector. (I hope the traveling world is feeling me on this one)
Actually the reason the original RFC 791 type-of-service never got much use is that it was fairly useless, except for giving absolute precedence to routing-protocol traffic, which was (and is) quite widely supported. But don't worry, help is on the way. RFC 2474 defines a replacement called "differentiated services" that works identically for IPv4 and IPv6, and allows a network to support various classes of service (such as one class for audio, another class for video, etc.). That's completely neutral as far as service providers and content providers go, but it avoids things like a big file transfer screwing up your phone call. It's used quite a lot to support IP telephony within enterprise networks, and is slowly, slowly getting attention from ISPs (who are far from early adopters of anything these days). There are even recommendations on how to make differentiated services work for traffic between different ISPs. And drafts on how to make it work for real-time web traffic. We'll get there.
"Yet more people prefer to complain than switch providers. Some 89 per cent of Americans have a choice between at least two broadband companies - so why not switch? Why not throw a switching party for everyone on your street? Start acting like customers - it's the only thing that scares the hell out of an ISP."
I do have a choice.
Choice A - Comcast
--$50/mo 20Mbps service
--No contract - "Cancel anytime!"
Choice B - Local Telco
--$30/mo phone line + $35/mo (Introductory pricing!) DSL @ 6Mbps
--1-year contract required (termination fee {$~$190} applies upon service cancellation within term.
--Buy/lease our DSL modem at a discount!
--Data caps; if you go over the cap, it's an additional fee in a tiered system.
Hurray for CHOICES!
There is NO Competition in Upstate NY for Broadband Internet.
Comcast (was Time Warner) is the only broadband company truly serving our area. There is NO FTTH in Niagara County.
Do you hear me Google? Please come and bring FTTH to our area.
Screw Verizon with their lousy DSL, Time Warner/Comcast with their Cable monopoly and the stupid inactive NY State government that has been bought out by those same corporations.
Back in 2010/2011, Verizon was building out its FiOS network in suburban Boston. Comcast, who has a stranglehold of cable TV/Internet service in Massachusetts, didn't like that one bit. (Competition? Not on MY watch!) A deal was then hammered out between Comcast, Verizon (and other cable providers in MA) to halt the rollout of FiOS. Voila! No more competition, and the consumers get the short end of the stick again. Those handful of communities in the Boston suburbs are the ONLY people in MA that has FiOS.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2013/05/28/boston-fiber-optic-internet-network/2/
The first paragraph on that page says it all.
That being said, I have a (Sophie's) choice of Internet service. I could either have Satan's... err, I mean, Comcast's overpriced 30Mbps internet service (that goes up in price every year), or I can have what I currently have, DSL from Verizon (they claim I'm getting "up to 3Mbps," but with a top download speed of 580kbps, I doubt I'm getting anywhere near that... being only 1.5 miles from the DSL signal's origin).
Even my fast lane is a back road.
that is typical of this industry, I live in Washington D.C. and my half of the city has been promised FIOS for about 15 years, now ATT says they will not be bringing fios to my side of washington d.c.
so i have no choice comcat or nothing ( no satellite antennas on apartment buildings)
Adam Smith in his "Wealth of Nations" showed that a monopoly offers a price thaqt is most dear. This is true for any product/service that is monetized, such as video on demand. The real concern is not a battle between "fast" and "slow" lanes but the increased latency from a provider that think it cheaper to delay spending money than on improving it's network.
There are some strange points in this article.
It states that Netflix drops Cogent and peers with Comcast directly because of congestion. Presumably Netflix still delivers traffic to ISPs other than Comcast so they are infact paying twice.
Are Netflix now paying less for their Cogent bill as well as having to pay Comcast?
Why are netflix raising their costs to cover the new peering arrangements?
The reasoning that performance was poor because of congestion seems extremely odd seeing as soon as the Netflix cheque cleared the congestion magically disappeared! Either Comcast have a magical way of adding capacity to their networks or there is something fishy going on there.
I have heard that Cogent tend to skimp on their peering infrastructure and I would much rather some action to get that fixed rather than the slippery slope we are heading down.
If a ISP can feel free to ignore is public backbone commitments in exchange for juicy dedicated peering contracts where do you think we will be in 10-15 years.
Also calling this article as non-idealogical with all the references to 'well-funded net neutrality' and beardies etc while ignoring associated campaigning by big ISPs is frankly disingenuous at best
"It states that Netflix drops Cogent and peers with Comcast directly because of congestion. Presumably Netflix still delivers traffic to ISPs other than Comcast so they are infact paying twice."
Not unless their routing is very broken. Remember the Internet is a collection of private networks. Previously Netflix paid Cogent for transit. Cogent then attempts to deliver Netflix traffic to it's peers and transit customers. Cogent's transit customers (small/regional broadband networks) pay Cogent. So with the transit ISPs, there is an element of double-dipping. Netflix pays for transit, destination ISP pays for transit. So take the transit ISP's special pleading with a large pinch of salt.
Now Netflix peers with Comcast, the costs and quality between those two networks are under those two parties control. Netflix shouldn't be paying twice for traffic to Comcast's customers but they'll still need routes to non-Comcast networks.
"Are Netflix now paying less for their Cogent bill as well as having to pay Comcast?"
Transit deals are often volume based with a price per Mbps. Trafic between Netflix and Comcast will no longer be going via Cogent, so Cogent won't be billing for it, so Netflix will be paying Cogent less. Hence the special pleading from the transit ISPs. What they're paying for their peering is one of the few real regulatory concerns, ie ensuring peering charges are Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND). So if I set up a Netflix competitor, I should be able to pay the same rate per Mbps for an equivalent volume as Netflix.
"Why are netflix raising their costs to cover the new peering arrangements?"
Are they? Maybe their content costs have increased. It costs money to buy in or make those programs. Maybe they're just doing a bit of profiteering and using this as an excuse to increase profits. Netflix is adding £1/$1 a month to it's charges, transit costs <20c/Mbps.
"The reasoning that performance was poor because of congestion seems extremely odd seeing as soon as the Netflix cheque cleared the congestion magically disappeared! Either Comcast have a magical way of adding capacity to their networks or there is something fishy going on there."
No magic required, just basic network operations. Connect 10/100Gbps ports between Comcast and Cogent, change a couple of lines of config and traffic is off the congested port and onto the new peering link. Some reports have said Netflix is paying for 'priority' access now. Can any Comcast users with Wireshark look at the TOS bits and see if this is happening?
"If a ISP can feel free to ignore is public backbone commitments in exchange for juicy dedicated peering contracts where do you think we will be in 10-15 years."
With a better user experience. Currently their are no 'public backbone committments' except in lobbyists minds.
They aren't peering with comast, they bought transit from them... so, in addition to going straight to a HUGE percentage of endusers, they also get to leverage comcasts peering and transit connections. In other words, they realized they made a mistake on their infrastructure, and they fixed it. There is no point putting a 20k square foot warehouse store in a town with only 1500 people. You have to put that sucker in the middle of a major metropolitan area for it to 'work'.
Comcast's network capacity has never been the issue. the issue has always been 'how does comcast justify upgrading a peering connection with a carrier that is already hugely lopsided because of one of it's customers'
pull that one customer off that line and put them somewhere else, and the problem is now fixed. What do you know! maybe those guys who RUN THE NETWORK actually know something about... mmmm, RUNNING THE NETWORK? <insert BOFH moment>
there is no such thing as a 'public backbone commitment'. In fact, there is no such thing as a 'public backbone', nor has their been in the US. The only portions of network that could be considered owned by the public would be the private networks maintained by government and Internet2 which is pretty much all university and research facility stuff.
Internet peering is an amazingly pure form of commerce. It doesn't matter how big a footprint you have, it doesn't matter how many customers you have. The only thing that matters is if you have something a peer wants/needs to make THEIR network better, or the color of your money.
injecting all these conspiracy theories about 'the man keeping us DOWN' simply illustrates someone recognizing their business plan didn't take into account the realities of their transport costs. I mean, damn... Looking at the Net Neutrality: what you need to know page is a laundry list of things to be afraid of. THEY EVEN THROW DOWN THE RACE CARD! cause you know, ISPs have so much spare time laying around, they can take the time to censor your website if you are promoting some kind of minority rights campaign...
big carriers pinching off competitors packets? why would they do that? where is the MONEY in that? because you seem to forget the other side of the coin. once one carrier decides to get cute that way, nothing protects them from an all out war with every other carrier.
It's happened in the past. anyone remember AGIS? (who's moldy remains are now owned by COGENT) AGIS thought nothing of hosting spam generating customers, which were ACTIVELY blocked by most major carriers at the time. If you had net neutrality, wouldn't everyone be forced to allow such things? They ended up out of business for pushing unwanted data on the rest of us. This is a great example of the good people who actually run the internet, acting independently to maintain the integrity of the system. In virtually every case where someone demands a law be made to help police what goes on online, it's based on a broken assumption.
COGENT based outages used to be a regular thing on the network, as they would string along their peering partners, blatantly abusing their peering agreements, until they had their plug pulled. I think the last MAJOR pain they caused was when sprint de-peered them in 2008?
Oddly enough, COGENTS failure to maintain their agreements is also a reason for demanding 'real net neutrality', since their failure results in disruption of the network, other carriers should be FORCED to deal with them. What?
Which brings us to the sticking point: How does NETFLIX making a poor choice in transit carrier for their needs translate into a need for net neutrality? Are we really going to start picking winners and losers online? or are we going to force everyone to fund everything, regardless of how inefficient, broken, or otherwise faulty it is, in the name of 'fair'.
Fair is an artificial construct designed to promote competition and innovation. it's not supposed to be a bludgeon to force everyone else into going along with someone's screw ups.
Andrew, I see you are back to your ideological industry oriented self. You start by claiming this will be a a "strictly non-ideological" guide then immediately start distorting the picture. For example, you start out with several paragraphs about RFC 791. Classical misdirection. Net-neutrality is not about traffic management by QOS. Net-neutrality is about traffic management by monopoly fiat. Few people would argue about latency sensitive packets getting priority, as long as all latency sensitive packets are treated the same. If video is latency sensitive, and I want to watch Happy Go Lucky Videos latest offering, I don't want to suffer delays while my mate in the other room has no problems watching Monopoly ISP Latest Vids. All because my ISP is a monopoly and has the power to dictate what will and won't work good at my end point. I want an ISP that only has the movement of network traffic as their priority. They shouldn't have any vested interest in whose packets move the best. Type of packet, fine. But not originator of the packet.
It is also telling that you used the TOS as a counter example when that wouldn't work in the current situation. Setting a bit in the packet header is the sender's choice to describe the packet to the router. If Comcast was only going to shape traffic according to needs, as specified in the packet header, they wouldn't know or care who the packet came from. The fact that they are specifically looking for Netflix IP addresses and blocking/slowing themm is just what the Comcast customers are complaining about.
The stat you quote about 89 percent of Americans having a choice between two broadband companies is highly misleading. Even in many metropolitan areas, the choice is between the incumbant telco, who can claim they provide broadband for the surveys, and a cable TV company. The telco will many times not be able to provide more than dial up because most of their customers are more than a mile from the central office (yes, some DSL products now work further than that, but most US telcos don't use modern equipment.) The cable TV company will string a bit of coax to your neighborhood and connect twenty or thirty or more households to one segment. Only at very limited times will the throughput approach broadband. Limited oligopoly instead of monopoly, but the same result. I and many other Americans can't just move on. We effectively have no choice.
That's a 3 page troll right?
Hypothetically I have a choice of ~15 ISPs. However, most are resellers, only 2 own hardware. So I have limited competition on price, caps and customer service, I don't have competition on the service itself.
It's either cable so over-subscribed dial up is faster between noon and 2 AM or 4Mb/s DSL that dies whenever it rains or the temperature is between -3 and -4 C (in Canada) Both last mile providers have 5 year upgrade plans, my neighbourhood is on neither list.
Do I live in a remote low density area where they don't have the client base to justify the expense? You tell me:
2 blocks away is the main CO for a city of over 100k in a county over 500k.
2 blocks further 2 universities, 1 is top 10 for business programs, the other is #1 in the country for engineering and computer science. Lots of apartments, townhouses and most of the detached homes are rooming houses filled, not just with students.
Also between my house and the tech university is the cities technology/R&D business park. Between that business park and the aforementioned CO? Raytheon, and most of the 20+ buildings in the city occupied by Blackberry.
The are businesses and schools can and have paid to put their own fiber lines in, but with such a high density of residential demand, if the market was how Orlowski thinks it is, why is neither company even thinking about upgrades?
Internet service IS a utility, and it's high time it was treated as such.
Also, having spent a couple decades on the hardware and network side of the wireless telecom industry, including cell and satellite, believe me, no wireless tech will ever be able to provide comparable viable economic broadband service in rural areas. Other than on the immediate periphery of an urban area, have you even looked at the rain fade characteristics of Ka-band (to say nothing of response times)?
Good post SoaG. In my case I'm definitely rural. Twelve miles from telco central, so no DSL. Satellite is not suitable for regular use either - as the provider will tell you. The only choice is good old wireless. So, no competition here either.
The good news is that my wireless is from a local mom and pop operation and their installation has gotten quite solid. I am able to use it for reliable quality VoIP which rivals the quality on the land line here. I basically have no complaints about my ISP.
The problems that I encounter are further afield. When some sites are slow to respond, I often do a traceroute. What I've found is that the bottlenecks are in the upstream provider. I have no input there, and they have no intentions of upgrading their network any time soon. They're just going to keep upping the price every year without putting any of those profits into their infrastructure. I can't see any way out of this dilemma we have here in NA.
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