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Net Neutrality Never Really Existed?
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Apr 13, 2007 09:15 AM
from the cry-me-no-tiers dept.
from the cry-me-no-tiers dept.
dido writes "In his most recent column, Robert X. Cringely observes that network neutrality may have never really existed at all. It appears that some, perhaps all, of the major broadband ISPs have been implementing tiered service levels for a long time. From the article: 'What turns out to be the case is that some ISPs have all along given priorities to different packet types. What AT&T, Comcast and the others were trying to do was to find a way to be paid for priority access — priority access that had long existed but hadn't yet been converted into a revenue stream.'" Cringely comes to this conclusion after being unable to get a fax line working. His assumption that the (Vonage) line's failure to support faxing is due to Comcast packet prioritizing is not really supported or proved. But his main point about the longstanding existence of service tiering will come as no surprise to this community.
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Fax compression incompatible with VOIP compression (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fax compression incompatible with VOIP compress (Score:5, Informative)
VOIP uses lossy compression that is heavily tuned for voice. Of course it is going to be lousy for lossless data transmission. If you wound the baudrate down low enough (say 2400baud), you might have some success, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
Parent
That's generally correct... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who works on this for a living, I can tell you that most VoIP vocoders are not compatible with most high speed voice band modems and Faxes.
Most vocoders, such as GSM AMR NB, G.729 AB, G.723.1, are ACELP based (Algebraic Code Excited Linear Prediction) which basically parameterizes speech at the encoder and resysnthesises it at the decoder. These are specifically made for speech processing (and don't usually do well with music) and provide great compression with good quality (depending on the b
it's the codecs (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, faxing over VoIP has always seemed a bit backwards to me anyway.
Re:Fax compression incompatible with VOIP compress (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Works for me - fax ncompatible with VOIP compre (Score:2)
Perhaps the fax issue is more technical (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps the fax issue is more technical (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Perhaps, though he quote a reader who had worked for Road Runner and claimed that their internal operating procedure was to prioritize packets based on content. So his conclusion may well stand even if the personal anecdote that inspired it is faulty.
Also, another poster here claims to have gotten faxes to work with Vonage, which suggests that it is at least possible. Given that Vonage's goal is a re
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What exactly is neutral in net neutralit. (Score:5, Insightful)
P.S. Fax is obsolete. Scan and email.
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Tell that to my credit union or any of my insurers. Even though I have a scanner and can send them encrypted PDFs, they insist that I fax them various bits of information for "security purposes." This isn't much of a problem since my computer has a built-in fax modem, but why they don't accept encrypted PDFs is beyond me. It's just as secure as a fax.
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It's not about security of the data being sent, it's about their own legal security.
A fax gives them a better paper trail -- it is theoretically harder to spoof, since it has the outbound and inbound telephone numbers logged on the receiver's end.
Also, banks and insurance companies are slow to accept alternate means of communication -- it increases risk of fraud.
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Its not as secure, in at least one potentially important sense, as a fax if the printers on which they can print the encrypted PDF are shared and not in a location that is locked 24/7 with limited access, but th
Re:What exactly is neutral in net neutralit. (Score:4, Insightful)
It be like paying for phone service and getting only good connections to people who paid that also paid that specific phone company off.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While I generally agree that the former is acceptable, I think the VoIP providers would have a legitimate gripe if a big telecom company slowed VoIP packets to a crawl in order to protect their competing telecommunication services.
Sure fax is obsolete, if you get paid hourly (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's why this is a dumb idea (Score:4, Informative)
Most transport streams that deliver audio use UDP - it doesn't matter if you lose a few packets here and there because the human hear hears a reasonably good approximation of the original sound. There's no point trying to redeliver packets that get lost, because they will be late anyway by the time you get them there. This scheme will just plain not work with digital data, fax or whatever, if you're losing bits of it here and there. I suppose you could re-implement a reliable TCP-like protocol on top of the unreliable transport stream, but it would be so much easier to take a scan or a photo and email it.
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Fax over VoIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Cringely is a very valuable indicator (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't read his column. I only know it from Slashdot, which tends to post only his most outlandish stuff, usually about Apple. In fact in this case I really do agree with him; nobody ever guaranteed you "net neutrality" in the first place. And I am extremely doubtful that any law Congress passes on the subject would do more harm than good, even if they meant well by it.
Nonetheless, I saw an opportunity for a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this mean I KNEW it will rain? No. Does it mean that I PREDICTED it will rain? Again, no. Maybe it just means that it rains 75% of the time in Seattle. To KNOW it will rain tomorrow or even to predict it, I have to have a basis for my prediction. Sheer odds, such as it raining 7
Meh... this is FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this guy actually have any technical smarts at all? Does he not realize that in order to do business, there's a certain level of "oversubscription" that is inevitable? ISP's have limits... they can only afford so much backbone to the Internet. This means that in order to prevent multiple broadband users from taking down the entire ISP, they HAVE to QoS the traffic in order that grandma with her PC can get on and send emails to little Johnny in California while torrents flood the network.
Net Neutrality isn't really about prioritization... it's about money. ISPs QoS the traffic, they just don't (yet) charge for certain tiers. I hope they don't... it would be the death of the Internet as we know it... and probably the birth of another more neutral network.
And for reference, I've worked for several ISPs in my career... and the company I work for today is also an ISP... so yes, I can speak somewhat intelligently on this
T.38 for fax over VoIP (Score:5, Interesting)
I use a Linksys SPA-2102 VoIP ATA with Gafachi as my service provider, both of which support T.38. I can report that I haven't had a single problem sending or receiving a fax.
QoS has has been here for a while (Score:2, Interesting)
My ISP, Shaw Cable, offers users the ability to pay $10 per month to give their third party VoIP services a higher priority on the network by bumping their SIP protocol to a different QoS. While this works,
Probably Jitter issues (Score:4, Informative)
Second, IIRC, the initial part of a fax call does some measurement and negotiation -- this is where the two endpoints determine how fast they'll communicate, exactly which protocol they'll use, what capabilities each other have and (most importantly here) test their connection, including round-trip time. But, this negotiation assumes a circuit-switched network, not a packet-switched network.
One of the core things about IP is that the round-trip time can change. Normally, each side would put in a buffer to balance it out, but if the delay changes, the buffer may need to be increased. For people, that's not a big deal -- add an additional 10ms delay midway though a call, and we don't even notice. But, that increase will kill a fax machine.
Think about what you're doing with fax: you are scanning an image, converting into data, then encoding that data as analog, which then gets re-encoded as data for transmission over IP. On the other end, just the reverse happens. Why not skip the extra steps by getting a scanner and emailing it? Or, subscribe to efax, which does it for you.
But, since a lot of people still have fax machines, a better technological solution might be to have your gateway decode the fax signal to get to the underlying image data, and then just transmit THAT to the other end. This is approximately what the T.37 fax standard does (again, IIRC). Unfortunately, it's not particularly well supported anywhere yet.
Yes and No (Score:4, Insightful)
When Clinton commercialized it, at ISPs were created, the CLECs still did not mess with packets other than that ALL Internet packets had the lowest of low packets on the ATM.
By 2000, qwest (old uswest) had packet shaping but I understood that it was only being used it to make sure that their employee packets got through.
2 years ago, Now, I have heard from a friend of mine that is there and they do shape based on other criteria, including who the packet goes to. In particular, qwest had a battle with cogent and SLOWED down the dns to them until they agreed to pay them more connect money. Basically, it has been turned into a weapon of sorts to have the big clecs control the small upstarts. Obviously, it will by used against end customes as well.
Truth is... (Score:2)
Real time open network QoS monitoring (Score:5, Interesting)
At any rate after this outage, I notice that my Google search requrests seem to be taking significantly longer than they used to. Hmmmm.... Now Verizon is in the process of implementing FIOS in many surrounding communities so my suspicions are (a) priority routing may be going to the FIOS customers or (b) requests to google are being down prioritized (in the hopes of being able to extort $$$ for priority routing). I also notice that for several months digital channels on my Comcast Cable TV service it seems to be taking much longer for the TV signal to start after changing channels than it once did.
So my impression is that the local ISPs (Verizon & Comcast) are most likely moving in the direction of prioritization of routing so as to maximize revenue. (In contrast to models like TV where costs are advertiser supported or monopoly telephone companies where a minimal level of service was required.)
I think the only solution to this will be to revisit these issues at the political level (Congress) and/or develop public solutions that eliminate the monopolies. If people are familiar with high speed internet service in countries like Germany, Japan, Korea, etc. it appears that the U.S. is getting a lot less and paying a lot more due to the duopoly positions of companies like Verizon & Comcast.
Towards "taking back the internet", I would argue that we need 2 things.
First, an open source project to use P2P routing statistics to provide an online *free* analysis of where network congestion (or more importantly specific provider) problems may be occurring. I would love to have been able to say to the Verizon support tech, "Well I just used 10 minutes of my "free" AOL service to confirm using www.opennetstats.org that Verizon DSL services in the following communities north of Boston are all down! If the "public" at large can diagnose your network problems then why can't your own support staff do so [1]? I, and I suspect many Linux users, would be happy to run a server which contributed "peer" statistics to a cloud. This could also be used to determine whether services are being degraded to specific providers. If I consistently get high speed access to Stanford's FTP servers but low speed access to Google's servers (Boston to the Bay area) then something is going to be very suspicious in terms of the QoS the middle-cos are providing [2].
Second, communities need to seriously looking at WiMax based public "town" networks based on cheap Linux routers (the poles may belong to the companies but the airwaves belong to *us*). For people who aren't interested in TV on demand (e.g. people whose internet use is still largely base on *reading* and *writing*) there should be a standard high level quality of service which is dictated by the upstream provider (e.g. how many server farms Google wants to build) and not the money sucking, promise you the world and deliver nearly zippo at a decent cost, telcos and cablecos.
So why can't we at
Perhaps people familiar with small community open WiMax type projects can post URLs for those as well.
1. The primary problem here appears to be that the data side of the telephone companies rarely if
Anecdotal Evidence, but they missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I want my $200 billion dollars back (Score:3, Interesting)
But look at who we're talking about. We're talking about ILECs and Cable companies. To some small extent we're talking about mom and pop ISPs, but they'll follow the big leaders (or die).
The ILECs were asked about fiber to the home. They said "give us 200 billion dollars, and we'll take care of it." The US government gave them $200,000,000,000 in various forms. (Look at all those zeros.) And what did they deliver? Squat. What do they say they delivered? DSL! That's basically fiber! Did they deliver it everywhere? No. But they delivered it to everyone rich, so that basically everyone!
I feel like Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride:
Inigo Montoya: Offer me everything I ask for.
Count [ILEC]: Anything you want.
Inigo Montoya: I want my [$200,000,000,000] back you son of a bitch.
Net neutrality (Score:3, Insightful)
All that (and the legal shield it provides) goes away if the isp *does* look at what the packets are and asserts control over them.
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Maybe it was really UFOs from area 51 that were causing his fax not to work?
Carriers have always prioritized packets on their backbones. but not Internet packets. those are all best effort.
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:5, Interesting)
They would always be telling me about problems, finding people who are using way too much bandwidth, significantly more than usual, and how they'd institute an upper cap on those people to make sure they wern't running their own ISP off of the line that they were provided (back in the day people used to buy T1 lines, and turn their homes into little dial-up ISP services).
So theres always been prioritizing of traffic, even if it wasn't always an automatic process. But, I would like to point out, that this guy sounds more like the crazy dishevled homeless guy on the corner "OMGZORZ, MY FAX NO WORK! CONSPIRACY AND RANTYNESS" than really newsworthy
Parent
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, what you are pointing out is the basic flaw with the whole 'net neutrality' argument. It's not a public network, per se. It's owned and opperated by someone. They have the right and privledge to impose what ever restrictions they want on people.
When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their service
1) Dont do anything illegal. We will rat you out.
2) If you want to run an ISP, thats fine, we have special rates for heavy users
3) If your usage for your web host exceedes a reasonable percentage of our available bandwidth, we reserve the right to raise your rate.
No one seemed to have any issues with these simple rules.
Cringly is even getting bitchslaped for being an ignorant dumbass over this on his own website. Serves him right.
Parent
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:4, Informative)
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1. All backbone providers must allow other providers to connect to them on a naked pipe.
2. All providers must use standard protocols*.
3. Providers may only throttle data/bandwidth based on protocol, not orgin/destination.
*I'd leave defining "standard" up to ICAAN, with these additional rules:
1. The protocol must be open - anyone can see how it works
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a non sequitur. Just because it is an owned network does not mean they have the right to restrict people however they want. I may own a private road, but that does not automatically grant me the right to deny passage to the people that own the mineral rights to that same land. I may own a flower shop, but that does not grant me the right to deny service to blacks, without repercussions.
These privately owned networks were funded largely with our tax dollars, hundreds of billions of them the government provided in subsidies. Many of these privately owned networks run on public right of ways to which the government has granted them an exclusive monopoly. Further, those same private businesses are being granted exemption from obeying the law, namely copyright laws, libel laws, pornography laws, free trade laws, conspiracy laws, etc. Those exemptions from obeying the law are granted under "common carrier" statutes that say impartial carriers goods and information are not held liable for what they carry provided they impartially carry everything. I say it is just fine for these private businesses to decide not to be impartial and to slow down or block traffic from some people to gain a competitive advantage. What I object to is them doing that, and being exempted from punishment for the laws. Common carriers are a public service and that is the only reason they are protected. If you're not serving the common good and are just making money for yourself without benefiting society, why should you be given special privileges?
So here's the problem... the rules you list have nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality is simply about treating some traffic differently than others not based upon the type, nor the traffic levels, but based upon the person or location from which the traffic is being generated. You can block all users that send more than a gig a day. What you can't do is block just the black users that send more than a gig a day, or just the republican users that use more than a gig a day, or even the users that do business with your competitor and use more than a gig a day... if you still want to be given all the special privileges that are given to common carriers.
Parent
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm confused. Could you rephrase in the form of a car analogy?
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Not quite. (Score:5, Insightful)
The cost of being a common carrier is having no content-based selection in what you carry. You must be completely neutral and select customers based upon what they are willing to pay not what they want to send. Once you hook things to what they want to send (i.e. content) then you are no longer a common carrier and you are responsible for knowing what is being sent at all times and answering for it if it isn't.
The issue here is twofold. Firstly the status Cringley is looking at might be more aligned to paying extra so the package moves faster type service which doesn't (necessarily) violate common carrier status. However , the argument that many ISP's are making is that they should be able to have their cake and eat it too that is, filter based upon content in order to make more money and stifle competitors while at the same time not being responsible for the legality of any content sent (i.e. child porn). Such a position is basically a whiny monopolists cant that I have no time for.
And yes it is true that the lines are private, in large part, but the service itself is still an infrastructural service and one that, like phone lines, has costs too significant to allow for basic competition. Not anyone can setup their own phonelines. As such that is the legal hook for government regulation and guaranteed fairness. Without it the dominant position of extant carriers (who built their power under the open competition regime but now want to shut the door on other competitors) would become so dominant as to be a monopoly and kill any hope for an open internet market.
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Re:Nice Logic... (Score:4, Informative)
For non-network important 'stuff', it's all pretty much best effort.
Things that are important to the day to day opperation of the network (route updates, SNMP/Managment traffic) have to have priority over 'customer' traffic. But so what. That is such a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the multi-meg service people get...
A real question for vonage : Why dont you have a bandwidth tester on your network that your customers can hit? Better yet, something that produces latency and jitter stats?
That would settle this whole argument once and for all. the closest I could find on their site was this:
http://www.vonage.com/help.php?article=497&catego
which is weak. It shows my 10M ethernet internet access with a D/L speed of 2.74M and and upload speed of 4.76 Mbs...
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That said I have seen wierd things with vonage over verizn dsl such as my routes all goi
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Digital is great for many things. It increases bandwidth significantly, but it will always be limited compared to the potential of analog (specifically irrational numbers). Digital has a limited precision compared to the infinite precision of analog.