Google and Friends Release Net Neutrality Measuring Tools 126
angry tapir writes "Google and a group of partners have released a set of tools designed to help broadband customers and researchers measure performance of Internet connections. The set of tools, at MeasurementLab.net, includes a network diagnostic tool, a network path diagnostic tool and a tool to measure whether the user's broadband provider is slowing BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P-to-P) traffic. Coming soon to the M-Lab applications is a tool to determine whether a broadband provider is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic, and a tool to determine whether a provider is degrading certain users or applications. 'Transparency is our goal,' said Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google and a co-developer of TCP/IP. 'Our intent is to make more [information] visible for all who are interested in the way the network is functioning at all layers.'"
God bless em (Score:5, Interesting)
This is great, I'm sending this link around to friends and family on different networks now.
Not because I want to know, but because I want them to read it, see their problems in b&w, and be aware of what their ISP's are doing... without me preaching to the deaf.
Define slowing (Score:5, Interesting)
What do they mean by slowing? You can "slow" Bittorrent by shaping or by giving it less priority? Again, is this being confused on purpose? To what end? From my post on the Cox story:
One issue is over subscription. Unless a company is large enough to have lots and lots of peer connections, your ISP is probably over subscribes their upstream connections. This is fine, because on average traffic goes in bursts. The problem is that everything starts to break down once you have a small pool of people running P2P 24/7. These people are just as greedy as the ISP's they complain about. They want a huge "dedicated" pipe, but have others subsidize it. I have no issue with someone like Cox de-prioritizing their traffic so that the people that just want their Vonage to work don't get squashed out. This is a temporary solution because the ISP will eventually have to up their pipe speed.
The other issue is granting certain companies privileges on a network and penalizing other companies they don't like (e.g. penalize Vonage and prioritize a VoIP partner). This should be illegal. This is a clear case of violation of neutrality. At the same time, the company should be able to directly peer with a company (say a VoIP provider) without violating the law. This may seem unfair, but peering has been a perfectly valid way of reducing traffic on a transit connection.
The last issue is traffic caps. I don't think there should be a law against it as long as the company is upfront about it. Putting caps on traffic allows ISP's to maximize their over subscription and cater to people that want low cost Internet service. We *want* people to afford Internet services. The market chooses. If you are a big user of P2P, then you will have to go with another ISP that does not have caps. You may have to pay more for this privilege... sorry, but that is how things go. The market must have a way to manage scarcity of resources. If you want more of a resource, you will have to pay for it even it if looks the same (e.g. 5mbit from Cox versus 5mbit from FiOS).
Don't confuse QoS with net neutrality. As long as the QoS is applied equally, then it should be perfectly fine.
Useful to both p2p users and network admins. (Score:4, Interesting)
These tools are no doubt going to be very useful to everyone that uses p2p software for _any_ purpose.
The flipside is that as an administrator of a workplace network i can also use these tools to ascertain whether or not the traffic managment and qos i've put in place on the corporate network is working.
It doesn't really matter so much on this particular network as p2p protocols are blocked (infact every outgoing port is blocked from the internal lan, some https sites are whitelisted, and all non-ssl web access is proxied.
But it will allow me to ensure the qos for our voip trunks is effective.
Metered Service (Score:3, Interesting)
> The last issue is traffic caps. I don't think there should be a law against it as long
> as the company is upfront about it. Putting caps on traffic allows ISP's to maximize
> their over subscription and cater to people that want low cost Internet service.
I don't think that caps should be illegal either but metered service would be much better.
Re:This Glastnost thing ain't gonna work (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah I just tried the Bittorrent test and got a message indicating the service was busy.
I wonder if the worst offending ISPs would consider blocking these site's IP addresses. I can imagine their response now "Oh we're not 'traffic shaping' or blocking those sites... we're just 'data molding' or 'idea shaping'."
Re:God bless em (Score:4, Interesting)
those tools seem pretty useful, but i don't know how user-friendly some of them are. personally, i'm looking for a tool to see if our ISP (at the office) is hijacking our DNS errors, or all of our computers are just infected with malware.
also, is anyone else seeing a bunch of "" characters on the Network Diagnostic Tester [internet2.edu] homepage? is my browser/system screwed up, or are there a bunch of a little boxes with "FF FD" in them scattered all over the page?
Re:Define slowing (Score:5, Interesting)
Not likely (Score:2, Interesting)
Way to preach to the choir, google.
Re:God bless em (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, exactly. So the next step is for the users to start making their traffic look like these tools. The final solution for the user is for the test tool to be as much like file transfer tools that the ISP can't tell the difference, so must either play fair or be detected.