Net Neutrality Never Really Existed? 157
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.
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.
Re:What exactly is neutral in net neutralit. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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...
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.
That's generally correct... (Score:5, Informative)
Level 3 marks Class of Service (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:4, Informative)
What do I know? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What exactly is neutral in net neutralit. (Score:2, Informative)
Tiered services are a part of many industries, including Customer Service, Shipping, Transportation (first class anyone?), and many others.
Forcing businesses into government-mandated business models is wrong. It only stifles the creation of new business and innovation, while increasing the control of politicians over citizens lives.
Re:Here's why this is a dumb idea (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nice Logic... (Score:3, Informative)
That said I have seen wierd things with vonage over verizn dsl such as my routes all going through dozens of hops for a route with high latency while vonage phone adapter was up and running and then nearly instantly getting low hop numbers and low latency when the vonage phone adapter got disconnected. It could have been coincidence but it was pretty reproducable over a period of a week which is why I didn't end up getting vonage.