Nokia boss smashes net neutrality activists Nokia's CEO has ridiculed the idea of a one-speed “neutral” internet, arguing that some IP packets are simply more important than others. Connected cars, for example, will need near-instant response times if they are to avoid accidents, said Rajeev Suri, speaking to media and analysts at the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. …
Surely the topic of net neutrality is whether service/content providers charge the consumer differing amounts of delivery of different types of content.
QoS mechanisms have been around for a long time, and I wasn't under the impression that they were being argued for/against in the net neutrality debate?
Nope, this is what happens when your definition of "neutrality" doesn't match up with the FCC's definition of neutrality.
FCC's Net Neutrality specifically BANS the use of packet prioritization on the public Internet - by packet protocol or content. The FCC gives lip service for VOIP and Heart Monitoring - but only when those services exist inside of a provider's network using separate, non-Internet channels.
that is not how it is being promoted nor how it is being implemented. Packet equality is the the rallying cry and this is what appears to be being done in the US by putting internet connections under the telephone connection regulations.
The fact that the rules are passed before anyone (technically literate) gets to see them is just the kind of clusterfuck in the making that governments are known for. I am thankful that I don't have a connection critical aspect to my work, because I can see this going rather badly as it develops.
"No, of course you weren't. Except that's effectively what Comcast and Verizon are charging Netflix for: QoS from Netflix to the Comcast servers."
They'll just achieve the same end with a private line between the Netflix servers and Comcast routers. Anything that gets outlawed on a public network will just move to a private one - nothing will change.
My understanding of the Netflix vs Comcast/AT&T/Verizon issues are that the links between Netflix and the ISP's are oversubscribed. I don't believe the NN legislation provides a way to address this other than Netflix and the ISP argue for a while and eventually agree costs to provide an upgrade and yes, ISP's do play silly buggers with upgrade pricing.
The fix is to allow more competition at the provider level, ideally by unbundling end-user services from the copper/fibre so that the businesses/homes get more choice. I'm not sure the NN legislation will provide this.
"The fix is to allow more competition at the provider level, ideally by unbundling end-user services from the copper/fibre so that the businesses/homes get more choice."
Which is what is happening in most countries except the USA, which has been steadily going the other way at state and regional levels, often specifically outlawing LLU and shutting down CLECs as a result.
"I'm not sure the NN legislation will provide this."
It won't and it can't.
The problem is that LLU is an intrastate issue and as such virtually impossible to regulate federally, whilst Internet trade is interstate and as such it's a lot easier to regulate.
USA state-level government is even dirtier and more corrupt than at federal level and it's often worse at lower levels. There's not a hell of a lot of difference between Lagos and what goes on in a lot of backwater USA states/towns (except Lagos is improving thanks to growing middle-class african anger about corruption, whilst Joe America is rolling over and taking it)
@W3dge yes and no.
VOIP, video streaming and other time critical services need prioritisation over non-time critical services, such as email, torrents, normal web pages etc.
The net neutrality should see to it that different services of the same type aren't bumped down the pecking order, because they aren't paying extra to promote their traffic. E.g a providers own VOIP service shouldn't get higher priority than other VOIP services, Skype, Facetime etc. The same for video streaming, Netflix shouldn't be throttled, when the providers own streaming service gets highest priority.
Suri cited healthcare as another field that needs critical real-time video performance – which requires low latency and low jitter – but multi-speed delivery is nevertheless verboten under some conceptions of “net neutrality”.
Surely then it's for the hospital to pay for a better connection? If I as a customer want to be able to download things quicker I pay more. Similarly if hospitals and others want a better QoS then they can equally pay for it.
What I have a problem is paying that extra amount - as I do already - and then being told that actually because the service provider on the other end hasn't given in to the financial blackmail my connection to them won't be able to function as well as it should.
Surely then it's for the hospital to pay for a better connection? If I as a customer want to be able to download things quicker I pay more. Similarly if hospitals and others want a better QoS then they can equally pay for it.
Under the new "Neutrality" rules, an ISP isn't allowed to sell a "better" connection. In order to be neutral all must be equal.
False.
An OC3 connection is MUCH better than a 30Mbit connection which is the BEST you would get in the US (except from Google).
You are confusing the CONNECTION with the packets carried by that connection. The PACKETS cannot be discriminated against. But that has nothing to do with the connection quality of service.
OC3 (155Mbps) is far from the best connection available in the US - we routinely get 1Gbps Internet links for new sites and have redundant 10Gbps into larger sites.
As far as I'm aware, telco's will provide pretty much anything I can support, it's just the price that leads us to get lesser connections.
You can vote me down all you want - but it isn't going to change the fact the FCC is making it illegal to have a committed information rate or quality of service on a broadband connection.
broadband providers may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind
In order words, you, the hospital, or anyone else CANNOT pay more for better service.
Once the full rules are published ways will be found around it, most likely though private circuits and splitting hairs over definitions, but blame the FCC, not me.
Technically they can and do sell 'better' connections. Your cable connection is a contended service, in practice you can usually hit the advertised speed but that level of speed is not dedicated to you. If everyone in your neighborhood were to try and max out their connections at once nobody would get their advertised top speed. ISPs also sell dedicated connections, leased lines is another term, where usually your full speed is guaranteed 24x7 and you usually hey money back if they fail their SLA. On top of this you usually get better support, so if there is congestion slowing down your traffic somewhere on the ISPs network they will restore the traffic and if it is external to their network they will try and send it via a different peering partner to avoid the congestion. A hospital shouldn't be running off a home cable modem, they will be paying more and getting more (and probably utilizing redundant connections with multiple ingress points).
"Surely then it's for the hospital to pay for a better connection?"
No, in the definition of net neutrality most activists are using, that would be illegal. They can pay for a faster access service, but if that connection hits the public Internet, the packets have to take their chances with the rest.
ISPs are free to oversell their connectivity.
What they're not free to do is throttle traffic to 3rd-party VOIP services whilst prioritising their own VOIP traffic, or pulling the same stunt with Netflix whilst prioritising Hulu.
The problem with telco/cableco as ISP is that they're acting as data carrier AND services retailer, which puts them in a unique position to be able to act anticompetitively (and they have been).
In a market with actual competition of supply customers would be free to go elsewhere but the actual broadband ISP choices across the vast majority of the USA are "Telco/Cableco" or nothing at all.
"What they're not free to do is throttle traffic to 3rd-party VOIP services whilst prioritising their own VOIP traffic, or pulling the same stunt with Netflix whilst prioritising Hulu."
Ahh see, this is still easy to do legally. I just sell hulu a private line from my network to their's, and let the main internet links being oversubscribed to the rest.
If my routers or systems do not support any QoS, you can add flags to your packets until the cows come home, they will get processed like the rest...
In any case, do you really want health data, real time video streams of remote controlled open heart surgery or car control going over the public internet, where any old Anon can play with it.
Mine's the one with the pwned iphone in the pocket that has suddenly started playing "Never going to give you up" ....
>the packets have to take their chances with the rest.
With the other video traffic, which gets high priority, yes. That's what a shared network is.
If you are doing important things like open heart surgery by robot with video, I think you can afford circuit switched links for video, with backup links. I hope you have backup doctors on-site too in case it all goes badly wrong.
Net neutrality can accommodate protocol priorities. The usual complaint here is your service provider playing monopoly and hijacking the same kind of packets that they want to sell you themselves. Packets of the same type aren't being treated equal. They are being discriminated against (or for) based on source. THAT is the problem.
If I am using an alternate VOIP provider, my ISP shouldn't be hijacking my packets.
Also, I would HOPE that a self driving car would NOT be dependent on the network. That just sounds like a recipe for disaster regardless of the net neutrality debate.
"Net neutrality can accommodate protocol priorities"
Not by most definitions of net neutrality in current use by net neutrality activists. All packets must travel at the same speed, they insist. (Eg, Franken etc).
This isn't actually how things work, and if it was strictly imposed the internet would be a smoking heap.
"Connected cars, for example, will need near-instant response times if they are to avoid accidents"
I know it was a throwaway comment but for the love of Bob who the hell thinks that using the internet is a good idea to help avoid accidents?!
"Sorry, your iCar was unable to connect to the internet because the server stopped responding"
Sadly the text to voice will only be able to read out the "Sorry" part before your brain is smeared over the bald patch of the OAP in front of you who has suddenly stopped in the outside lane of the M1 to adjust his snazzy seat covers.
I read it as they (cars) would need the internet to avoid accidents and reroute; like some satnavs. I too would be bloody worried if somehow a net connection was needed to avoid a crash!
Whatever you do, don't get on the same road as a driverless car designed by Nokia then. Here's the exact quote from the article:
"Driverless cars would require data to be served instantaneously,” [Rajeev Suri] said. “You cannot stop collisions from happening in the first place if the information that would prevent them is slowly making its way through the network. Near instantaneous connectivity is a must.”
Yeah, a lot of this is loaded. It sounds great on paper - ambulances should have priority over other users. Well fine, but how much bandwidth does an ambulance need? Are we currently seeing a failure of our ambulances due to too many people watching YouTube? If so, how specifically. If not, isn't this just rhetoric?
There is no reason that "connected cars" need share the same network as someone streaming from Netflix. Indeed there is an extremely good reasons that would be a bad idea even without net neutrality.
Indeed, net neutrality doesn't stop ISPs from selling different speed, different contention, different download limit services even from the same service. What it DOES prevent them doing is gimping Amazon's streaming service because Hulu paid them a bunch of money to favour theirs. Or similar scenarios.
Why should connected cars be discriminated against on the information highway? Building out your own network is far too expensive. That's why Netflix et al use the internet to deliver their content instead of building out a custom network to deliver the content. If cars can and ought to be discriminated against, there is no reason other types of traffic shouldn't be discriminated against. In particular traffic know to carry large amounts of illicit data, or types of traffic known to overwhelm other normal uses such as Netflix.
Full disclosure: I am a Netflix DVD & streaming subscriber.
"Why should connected cars be discriminated against on the information highway? "
They're not. It's a stupid analogy by some bigwig attempting to justify why net neutrality is somehow evil. They might as well have complained asking why factory safety systems have to contend with Netflix services. The answer of course is they don't and they never have. Safety critical stuff can run on a closed network or a network separate from other networks where its performance can be guaranteed. And if cars are ever automated then I assume that someone will buy out a chunk of radio spectrum or launch a bunch of satellites to ensure exactly that.
"Connected cars, for example, will need near-instant response times if they are to avoid accidents, said Rajeev Suri"
Seriously, this guy wants my car to rely on IP networking for safety critical functions? I rarely make personal statements on forums, but I'll make an exception here: He's a fucking idiot!
The thing is, I don't want my car (plane or hover-skateboard) to take safety critical decisions based on the availability, or not, of network services! By all means let it use them for non-safety-critical data, like route planning, but there's no way that my next 0 to 100 metres of travel should rely on the availability of GPS or network data! This is why the self-drive car is so complex, because it needs enough autonomy, at any given moment, to understand its immediate environment and make a safe decision.
Russia routinely swarms up to 32 war fighter planes in a WiFi type control group connected to RTOS controller eq... DARPA wants to swarm ALL the aircraft on any given plant... not necessairly Earth.
DARPA's autonomous auto contest of years back was a proposed marriage of Google's Street View sensors w/RTOS motion controllers on a single car. Eventually most entrants completed the test path to a finish line... DARPA described a "Smart Highway" as a Swarm Group of infinite size to accomodate ALL cars on a given road cross-section... by sharing sensor data in FFT form over the entire Swarm, extremely high resolution would be available to each auto to make motion control decisions... the data channel was to be duplex CDMA on unused UHF TV Channels.
IMHO= SciFi Nonsense ?? of course it is... however DARPA really needs to continue w/ this stuff as no auto maker could pull lthis off by itself... Please Note= the old USA NEXTEL Trucker Data Net did just about all of the DARPA Smart Highway Initiative minus the Swarm Technology and vehicle control... RS.
What net neutrality is. It does allow for the prioritisation of packets. What it doesn't allow is PAID prioritisation (and that includes prioritising companies in which the ISP has a financial interest above similar services). If VOIP packets get priority then ALL VOIP packets are treated equal, no matter where they came from.
If VOIP packets get priority then ALL VOIP packets are treated equal, no matter where they came from.
VOIP packets are not allowed to have a higher priority then web browsing or bittorrent. Remember, Comcast running web traffic at a higher priority than bittorrent is one of the cases that started all of this.
You're dead wrong there. If an ISP can provide a decent technical justification why, for example, Bit Torrent traffic is being slowed, and it is only being slowed enough to cut congestion, then there isn't a problem. Comcast's justification and amount of throttling didn't meet that standard. VOIP on the other hand is low bandwidth and predictable in its nature. You'd need a LOT of connections before VOIP flooded a network, and even POTS has connection limits.
I wish I was wrong - Per the FCC Announcement, "broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices"
To identify and degrade Bit Torrent traffic in order to cut congestion, while not degrading other traffic, will now be illegal on all "broadband" circuits. Also, keep in mind that they did NOT put an exception for "reasonable network management".
The FCC hasn't made a lot of definitive statements, but the above is quoted word for word off of their own announcement.
You are long on paranoia and short on facts. I googled your quote and a couple lines later it says:
"Reasonable Network Management: For the purposes of the rules, other than paid prioritization, an ISP may engage in reasonable network management. This recognizes the need of broadband providers to manage the technical and engineering aspects of their networks."
My reading of the notes DOES NOT suggest that the definition of NN makes QoS illegal.
Maybe you need to be a little more circumspect with your "the sky is falling" bullshit?
" If VOIP packets get priority then ALL VOIP packets are treated equal, no matter where they came from."
Even if the network is congested and one of the calls is an emergency call?
And wouldn't giving VOIP priority at all provide me with an incentive to game the system by marking my packets as being VOIP, regardless of the real content?
"What net neutrality is. It does allow for the prioritisation of packets."
Not by Sen. Al Franken's definition. Or <insert idiot here>. When one packet is being prioritised, that means another packet is going slower, which means "discrimination" is taking place, which is evil, which means we need new laws to stop it.
"If VOIP packets get priority then ALL VOIP packets are treated equal, no matter where they came from."
Yes, that's what some people want, and it's marginally less bonkers than Franken/Public Knowledge's interpretation - but it still puts consumer Skype packets the same speed as real-time applications - in the same slow lane.
If you give a monkey a loaded machine gun, the chances are it will eventually shoot you. That's where the "net neutrality" debate has reached. The activists are complaining the monkeys have really bad manners.
Even packet prioritisation might not help if the network is being flooded by a DDOS. If driverless cars need a connection that badly, why not use a dedicated wireless network or subdivision of what is already out there.
Of course a more accurate description of net neutrality fears might be if car from manufacture X gets priority over manufacture Y because they've bought up all the high speed access or have paid to downgrade others access.
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