Net Neutrality Never Really Existed?

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.

Works for me - fax ncompatible with VOIP compress

[Anonymous Coward]

I have only VOIP at home through my cable provider, and I use a normal, stand-alone fax machine all the time to send faxes.

Re:Nice Logic...

[CogDissident]

Back about 10 years ago when I was a kid hanging out at my dad's office after school or on weekends(usually playing Doom1, the only good computers were at his office and he worked insane hours), he was across the hall from his ISP, and they were a friendly lot so we'd stop over and say hi and go to lunch together and stuff like that.

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

Meh... this is FUD

[Thumper_SVX]

Prioritization and QoS is good... and expected. It doesn't mean that net neutrality doesn't exist.

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

[JimDog]

If you get a VoIP adapter and provider that support T.38, you'll have much better luck with faxing over VoIP. As I understand it, T.38 allows your VoIP adapter to emulate G3 fax audio signals of the remote fax machine, and conversely, your service provider emulates your fax machine at the interface with the PSTN.

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

[ironicsky]

QoS(Quality of Service) has been around for a while. Cable Broadband companies, like Comcast give packet priority to their own products, such as Comcast Digital Voice or network access to their own sites. But they previously let competitor products like Vonage suffer by giving it a lower package priority.

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, Vonage @ $19.99 + Shaw's QoS @ $10.00 is already more expensive then Shaw's base Digital Phone service.

it's the codecs

[mungtor]

The basic problem with Fax over VoIP is that it's _V_oIP. Not FoIP. The codecs that are generally in use have been optimized for use in the frequency ranges of the human voice, not the ranges used by fax machines.

Of course, faxing over VoIP has always seemed a bit backwards to me anyway.

Re:Fax compression incompatible with VOIP compress

[MightyYar]

I don't fax frequently, and when I do it is just through my iBook's modem. However, I have never had a problem faxing through my Vonage line. I have no idea what speed I'm getting... it just works :)

Sure fax is obsolete, if you get paid hourly

[kiddailey]

Obsolete? It may be, but it's sure *hell* more efficient than scanning and email more often than not in my experience!

1. Turn on the scanner
   
2. Wait for it to warm up
   
3. Wait for preview scan
   
4. Wait for scan
   
5. Realize you forgot to sign and date the document
   
6. Re-preview scan, rescan document
   
7. Save image to disk
   
8. Resample image in image editor so it's small enough to email
   
9. Receive reply from recipient who says their SMTP server filters out attachments
   
10. Scream in frustration after realizing how much time you wasted
    
11. Decide to use "obsolete" faxing instead
    ...
    
12. Put original paper on fax machine
    
13. Dial recipient's fax number
    
14. Hit send

Real time open network QoS monitoring

[bradbury]

Last weekend Verizon took my Boston suburb DSL line out of service several times (Friday night through Sunday). Its too much of coincidence that it started around 11:30 PM Friday night, came back early Saturday morning, then a similar situation Saturday night. Verizon support claimed cluelessness as to the cause (their support technicians admitted to running Windows XP and being able to ping a Verizon router a couple of hops upstream from my local town office -- though they didn't know how to run a TRACERT to the IP address that the Verizon DNS allocators handed out each time I rebooted the in-home Linksys & DSL modem). [I had to check and TRACERT is a standard XP command, presumably they don't educate support technicians how to do anything more than PING.]

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 /. start at least the opennetstats.org part of this?
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

I want my $200 billion dollars back

[wonkavader]

Cringley's getting screwed, as are we all. The technical aspects of how we're getting screwed are important and we need transparency in our ISPs to help resolve that. Then we could go to an ISP that shapes in the way we want.

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.