UK's Two Biggest ISPs Rip Up Net Neutrality 225
Barence writes "The UK's two biggest ISPs have openly admitted they'd give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies paid them to do so. Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals. Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC's iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company's executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be 'perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them.' Meanwhile, BT's Simon Milner said: 'We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts,' although he added BT had never received such an approach."
What's with this app horsedookie? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
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Etymologically, yes...but it's used (or at least is supposed to be used) to describe small applications downloadable to phones. I noticed it really take hold with Apple's App Store, although its been around longer than that.
There's no written rule saying it can't be used to describe all software, but it pisses me off in the same way it pisses me off when someone says "put it on the floor" when they're standing in the middle of a forest, or call a truck a "car".
It's wrong. It's WROOOONGGGG. /Cartman
Re:What's with this app horsedookie? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no written rule saying it can't be used to describe all software, but it pisses me off in the same way it pisses me off when someone says "put it on the floor" when they're standing in the middle of a forest, or call a truck a "car"
You must be angry a significant portion of the time if trivial things like that set you off. You are using the English language, it's a very flexibile language that allows for a wide variety of 'errors' while still conveying the intended message.
Restated:
You must be fuming a bunch if you make mountains out of molehills. English puts up with a lot of meddling. It can be bungled up and still convey the same meaning.
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AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH
But seriously though, it's just a slow day at work :/
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AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH
But seriously though, it's just a slow day at work :/
To be fair, I thought the same thing, until I remembered when I was getting angry at everyone calling MP3 players iPods and regular web served audio recordings as Podcasts.
On a related note, ever notice how each company or organization will use a different term for a Powerpoint Presentation?
Slides
Charts
Foils
etc.
I've seen debates on THAT! One of those things you never notice until someone points it out to you. Then you can never unsee
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My problems are doubled - my player, though it does play mp3s, is primarilly used for playing vorbis, so calling it an mp3 player is, to me, almost as wrong as calling it an ipod. This technology business is complicated stuff...
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That's not the least of it! I have people every day call desktop PC towers "hard drives", web browsers "the internet", LCDs "flat screens", DVD discs "CDs", and disk space "memory."
Don't even get me "started" on how difficult it is to get people over the phone to click the "start" button in Vista and Windows 7, now that it doesn't say "Start."
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The problem is that half of your grievances are a result of you being a tech-hipster. LCD's *are* in fact flat screens. DVD's *are* Compact Discs, granted they are a specific type of disc, and Hard Disk space *is* memory, its not RAM, but it is memory.
look, i understand these are pet peeves because they dont conform to the vernacular you're used to, but being frustrated about the way people say things when they're technically accurate... well thats a sign of deeper issues.
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Bullshit. The term was in use before mobile phones even existed.
It annoys you when people use language wrongly, but insist they're correct?
Pot, let me introduce kettle...
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I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous.
Don't be such a whiner.
but it's used (or at least is supposed to be used) to describe small applications downloadable to phones
No, it isn't.
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Etymologically, yes...but it's used (or at least is supposed to be used) to describe small applications downloadable to phones.
Supposed by whom? I've been calling programs "Apps" since the mid-1970s, long before there were mobile phones that you could download software to. Just because you want to change the language doesn't mean anybody else has to follow.
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You know, not every bit of software is an app...
Isn't that why it said "and services"? Although...
Etymologically, yes...but it's used (or at least is supposed to be used) to describe small applications downloadable to phones. I noticed it really take hold with Apple's App Store, although its been around longer than that
That usage of the word apps especially "internet apps", web apps etc predates the mobile phone usage. Your reference is just the more recent trend even it if has been used for a while.
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Indeed. The phrase "killer app" was used before the notion of smartphones was a glimmer in anyone's eye. From where I'm standing, "app" is just an abbreviation of "application," and it need not even be a software program. Social networking is an "app," in terms of being an application of Web-based technologies to provide useful services, despite not being a program in any strict sense.
I really hate what Apple does to language sometimes.
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I agree "Killer App" existed before.
It wasn't used exactly the same way tho.
Most of the crowd around here would would say "I'm getting a new program, word processer, game, software", they didn't say "app" except as "killer app".
I never heard anyone on the amiga, the older apple II's, the ibm pc, AS/400, Vax say they were getting an "app" or "I have a cool new app!"
While "killer App" existed, it was used more by news organizations and visionary groups than by people. As in "What's the next 'Killer App' goin
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- Dan.
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We're far too busy for a word with so many letters these days.
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Yes, and it's been used as a short form of "application" for decades. The fact that Apple has made use of the term has gotten some people to use it conventionally to mean iPhone applications specifically, but I remember people using it to mean "application" long before (e.g. people talking about having a "killer app" [wikipedia.org]).
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Not every web site provides just content (Score:2)
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster.
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"I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster."
Or may """wish"""" to pay so that the data relating to their service doesn't have a sudden increase in ""accidental"" packet drops. Especially after their competitor was rumored to pay the network.
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VoIP isn't a guaranteed service, but QoS protocols should be respected where the bandwidth is available. If you want to be known as a 'quality' ISP, you deliver enough bandwidth to support a low data-rate protocol, like VoIP and other QoS delivery systems. Beyond that, an ISP is prioritizing for money-- and the theory of net neutrality is to give no priority for monetary privilege. You play into their hands thinking in any other direction. ISPs are ex-telcos and PTTs that haven't figured out the Internet ye
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That's the most important thing that was said on Slashdot this month. A lot of important points condensed to a couple of sentences.
Most internet users (and too many
App is short for application... (Score:3, Informative)
Defined as: (n) application, application program, applications programme (a program that gives a computer instructions that provide the user with tools to accomplish a task) "he has tried several different word processing applications" [princeton.edu]
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The other exec used the word "discriminate," which to me seems like the bigger word choice gaffe. Granted, he avoided saying things like raping free speech, fucking over the little guys who can't afford our extortion, whoring your ability to access content out to the biggest spender, or comparing his own company to nazis, but I'd argue he probably didn't want point out that they intent to "discriminate." Seems like a bad PR move.
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Credit where credit is due (Score:3, Insightful)
At least they're upfront and honest about this. No weasel words, no political doublespeak, just a flat out, "Yep, bigger payoffs, bigger pipes."
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That only makes it scarier though, they aren't being honest out of some sense of altruism. They are admitting it like they don't think there is anything remotely unethical or wrong about it.
They probably think it would be like a water company building bigger pipes for premium customers so that they can get more water (though you would have to increase the pressure for the whole system).
Rather it would be like redirecting pressure to another customer because they paid a premium, and anyone under that tier wo
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Re:Not exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)
What they're saying is that if Company A pays them, they'll make sure that Company B's users get less of the available bandwidth.
No, that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
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No, that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
'Not necessarily' is what we are worried about. How much 'priority' are they willing to sell?
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How much are you willing to pay them? There's your answer.
Re:Not exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
They are saying nothing of hurting those that don't pay.
It's simple network management. If you prioritize one source of packets and the network reaches a saturation point, the mere fact that you've prioritized one means you have to de-prioritize others. There's limited resources, if you always send Company A's packets before you send Company B's, then Company B will have degraded service.
Also, TFA said so:
... senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals.
Hmm, I wonder what 'expense of their rivals' means....
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I think it's all theoretical.
OFCOM said some time ago that ISPs are free to prioritise protocols and such, but if they go so far as giving one company priority over another, they'll step in. They can deprioritise BitTorrent for example, but if they deprioritised BitTorrent for World of Warcraft's updates in favour of some theoretical competitor then they'd fall foul of what OFCOM has declared legitimate for them to do.
I'm not sure the BT execs saying this really know what they're saying, because it puts the
So what, exactly, are they selling? (Score:3, Interesting)
So they sell "priority" to Company A ... but Company A's packets go through with the exact same speed as Company B's packets.
UNDER IDEAL CIRCUMSTANCES THAT IS.
The only way for an ISP to make a profit is to over-sell their bandwidth. If the ISP is profitable, their lines WILL be saturated.
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If they can degrade non "bribed" sites, they will. I doubt major ISPs are ever heavily saturated, to the point of which if they dont do QOS they would go offline. I have a hard time believing that most ISPs would be so badly managed. Most likely you are paying to have your competitors connection degraded. They might not word it in such a way, but if you read between the lines, that would be the most logical way to do it.
When was the last time your upstream provider ever got saturated? Your connection might,
Re:Not exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
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until you reach saturation and that effect starts, surely there's no value in being prioritised.
i.e. no-one is going to pay for this unless they get some result out (better performance than others), so by definition someone else will be getting poorer performance, else there won't be a service to sell.
latency....I pay and everyone who didn't loses (Score:3)
It's not "someone" getting poorer performance, it's everyone who didn't pay. The bottom of the slippery slope is that if you don't pay the extortion money, your packets don't get through at all.
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This would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
... which is most of the time. There are very few ISPs who do not have a significantly over-subscribed backbone at peak times (BT and TalkTalk both being quite bad at times according to people I know who have used them recently) and some are even over-subscribe at most times (all but the middle of the night).
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The customer pays for "internet". Not AOLnet, Ynet, or any other subset including the ISPs.
They are saying they would be willing to rip off the customer in order to double dip. Company A nor B has "bandwidth" once it reaches the ISP, it is the customers, to be used as they see fit. Not the ISP, who sold it to the customer already.
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That's how you make something's price go up. You make sure it remains scarce.
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or that speech where he said that he had no quarrel with Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, etc.
Also, Godwin!
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If you go back and read the text of his speeches, he wasn't being very subtle.
I haven't gotten around to reading Mein Kampf yet, but I've been told it's pretty obvious. I think the general excuse is that everyone thought it was just over-the-top hyperbole.
That's why all those people warning about freedom and vigilance just won't shut up. We have to remember, at all times, that it only takes 1 generation for an entire country to degenerate into psychotic madness.
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And? (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'm bloody outraged! (Score:2)
One of the purposes of the water/gas/internet providers is to, sure, earn a buck and get paid for their time. I get that. But another reason for their existence is to get me my effin water, gas, or internet. If they failed to do that or the quality was really piss poor, for whatever reason, there would be outrage. I And on a deeper, non-personal level, they are destroying the internet. I'm not one to really cozy up to tradition, and I'm aware that all is transient and change in ine
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As a business whose sole existence is to make money and pay their shareholders, is anyone surprised at this? Hell, does any reasonable person expect otherwise? It makes perfect business sense to prioritize websites that pay you. This is why people should not expect businesses to promote net neutrality.
Not really, no. As a customer of an ISP (i.e. an end user), I'm paying to have my packets transferred across their network. I'm not going to be happy to find that they're prioritizing the traffic of another
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You're missing that this gives them a chance to complete the MAFIAA chain. "Torrents? Who the hell legitimately needs a torrent? That will be $750/Gig, thank you. HTML can go at a Dollar-Per-Megabyte". When you ask to audit then they can wave their hands and call it proprietary.
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate this sort of argument. There are people who constantly use this excuse for every shitty thing that any company does, and it fails to take a few things into account.
First, it's not clear that a business's sole purpose is to make money for shareholders. Businesses and corporations are artifices that society has created for the purpose to increasing productivity and fairness and economic growth for the sake of benefiting society as a whole, i.e. "the common good". We have laws that limit an officer of the corporation from acting against the shareholder's interests, but those are largely in existence to prevent fraud. They are not there to prevent businesses from acting out of moral/ethical responsibility.
Second, your argument assumes (to some degree) that acting to please their customers and to cooperate with their partners and competitors would not be in the company's best interest. That's not a very clear issue. Certainly going against the best interests of your customers is dangerous over the long term, and the Internet is built in a way that assumes that many people are cooperating in good faith.
So no, I'm not surprised that someone might choose to do this, but that doesn't make it appropriate, ethical, or wise.
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As a business whose sole existence is to make money and pay their shareholders, is anyone surprised at this? Hell, does any reasonable person expect otherwise? It makes perfect business sense to prioritize websites that pay you. This is why people should not expect businesses to promote net neutrality.
And the precise reason it needs to be regulated.
My website has 9000 partners! (Score:3, Interesting)
If I want my service to be fast just about anywhere on the web, I guess I'll need to make this kind of deal with >9000 ISPs?
I guess I should do that as an individual as well, I'll pay so that all the traffic with my IP goes on the fast lane to the detriment of other customers in my area.
I can see the company's point. Why improve on the infrastructure of the network when you can get customers to pay an extra to get a better share of the limited connectivity?
Transparency and Competition (Score:2, Insightful)
hosted maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
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The point is it's not important who hosts the data. It's important who owns the subscribers.
"Owning" a large number of subscribers allows to manipulate what gets shown and how fast and therefore charge for it.
I'm sure it would be also possible to charge to "disappear" certain sites, indie media outlets etc. from the "internet" as seen by said subscribers.
Right now, AT&T can easily censor the internet for a huge number of iphones. Comcast, Verizon and Earthlink are not exactly beyond this either.
Guess wh
the last time this issue came up here (Score:5, Insightful)
somebody made the extremely astute comment that to do the kind of thing they are saying they want to do, the ISP would have to slow down everyone else. because there is simply no such thing as speeding up only one website selectively, there is only artificially slowing everyone down (except for those who pay up). this isn't capitalism, this is monopolistic blackmail
everything on a network as TCP/IP currently works is being delivered according to factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with financial input. yes, you can use financial input to build network infrastructure or build more servers, but on an existing pipe, to make financial input a factor, you would need to do artificial things that would add to overhead and cost. you would have to
1. proactively examine the headers,
2. pick out the headers from companies that are paying you,
3. proactively block all other headers
ironically, the effort involved to do this proactive promotion of certain headers is an additional cost on the speed of your network
so in other words, in a world where traffic priority is determined by who pays up, you are artificially hobbling the entire network for the sake of who gets priority in order to make the scheme work, and furthermore, the sheer effort of prioritizing headers hobbles your network even further
its silly
if i were a company and i wanted my traffic to get to internet consumers faster than my competitors, i wouldn't pay the isp to do that. i'd simply build more servers and place them at more nodes. much bigger bang for your buck, and you aren't buying into a bullshit system that creates an artificial rigged marketplace by ruining the elegance of how the internet works best
in the real world, all these ISPs are doing is giving their ISP competitors a selling point: "we're faster, because we don't interfere". the ISPs would have collude against the consumer and the content providers to impose an artificial tax on the internet, that would also slow it down
monopolistic and oligopolistic anti-capitalist schemes are alive and well. we learned nothing from the gilded age of victorian times. bust the assholes up and sue them into oblivion if any of them tries this crap
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There's no reason not to charge to allow someone to move to the front of the line.
Well, apart from destroying the concept of a transparent and reliable packet-switched network, that is.
and the next packet and the next packet (Score:2)
So if your priority clients gets to the front of the line for every packet on this over allocated network, then your unpaying sites are going to start timing out. They are defeated. And then the ISP is going to start lying. The ISP is going to claim that there must be something wrong with the "unpaying site" because otherwise they would have to admit that they shoved the money in their pockets instead of buying more bandwidth.
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Maybe, and maybe it will be traffic on netflix some other portal the competes with the ISP in some way or its business partners. The point is there will be a hidden and ever changing set of rules as to how reliable the network is.
If your car starts 3 out of 4 times, its not a car you want to ever use.
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Would it also be fine if someone paid to slow certain packets (and may be even drop certain packets)?
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Re:the last time this issue came up here (Score:4, Informative)
Dropping packets without thinking much is easy. You can limit the buffer and drop anything that won't fit, or do something like RED. You can do this without looking at the packet itself.
Dropping packets by customer requires examining the packet in detail, and deciding which priority it should have. This costs more effort, which means you need more CPU power to handle it.
The first company who pays will be happy, it will have noticeably better performance.
The second probably as well.
By the 200th or so, there will be so many "priority" customers that the situation will be effectively the same it was before, except they will be paying for that privilege of having any traffic delivered at all. If the link is so busy that priority traffic can take all of it, and it's indeed priority traffic, then everything else is going to get slowed down to a crawl if it gets delivered at all. And guess what, if you have a small website, or work at a small company, that's where your traffic will end up: at the very bottom of the pile.
Think they'll upgrade the pipe? But why would they? There must be congestion for a priority scheme to make sense.
The end state of this is considerably worse than what we have now, and in exchange for it we get no benefits. There is no reason for society to allow it.
at least you are consistent (Score:3, Insightful)
"There's no reason for society to allow you to bloviate on the Internet, either, yet we allow it. And I'm completely serious - what do we, the "Society Hive" you seem to value so highly, gain by allowing half the shit we do?"
it's called free will. yes, there is no money to be made off of it. this offends you, and a number of other people, who don't believe in capitalism. you believe in turning everything into a marketplace. for what purpose? for making cash. not because it is right, nor if it wrong, but jus
Re:the last time this issue came up here (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism tends to monopolistic blackmail, which is why intelligent advocates of economic systems organized for the common good as far back as Adam Smith have argued against allowing economic policy to disproportionately favor the interests of the capital-holding/mercantile class.
Oddly enough, the word "capitalism", originating in the 19th Century and popularized by Marxist writers using it as a label for the 19th Century system in advanced industrial countries that they advocated needed to be replaced is often used in a rather equivocal way to refer to that system, the economic system of modern advanced countries, and the economic systems advocated by classical economic theorists like Smith, as if those all were the same, or even similar, systems; however, its obvious to any sensible observer that those systems are completely different -- the 19th Century system to which the name "capitalism" was first attached was driven by policies of the precise types Smith warned against, and the modern economies sometimes labelled "capitalist" are, virtually without exception, systems which have thrived precisely because they adopted many of the proposals that 19th Century critics of capitalism demanded in the Communist Manifesto.
The "monopolistic and oligopolistc" schemes of Victorian times are the heart of the system the word "capitalism" was first widely used to describe, and they very much serve the interests of the capitalist class. They are not, in any reasonable sense, "anti-capitalist".
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Wrong in every way. Bandwidth is not infinite, when a pipe is running at capacity you need to decide which packets to keep and which to drop. It's called quality of service, and it's been around for a looooong time...
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Quality of Service means prioritizing protocols that require low latency over those who don't need it, like VoIP over FTP. Not about having VoIP packets from eg. Skype being always being preferred over other VoIP provider.
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Actually QoS is a broader topic than that and includes choosing which packets to drop based on criteria not limited to latency.
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You're wrong. Quality of service is about maintaining service quality for vulnerable or sensitive services, not discriminating against those who don't pay for "quality" and thus degrading service.
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Right because
There's no quality of service above best efforts.
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Yes there is. Best effort is quite a common term, and not just in networking. Best effort means a task will be done as time allows, with no target deadline. It is not a statement of high priority. Basically it means that if you have nothing else to do you will work on that task. Everything of higher priority comes before best effort.
We absolutely could see a situation when (Score:5, Funny)
What's that got to do with it? I could absolutely see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay Assassins to kill their competition. That shouldn't be legal either.
110% ?? (Score:2)
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You get "service above best efforts" by putting "best efforts" inside its own quotations.
"service above 'best efforts'"
There. Now it's obvious both terms are marketing speak and don't mean what they literally state.
Not as bad as in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
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Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
There are only about 15-20 ISPs who have unbundled services in the entire country, and none have every exchange covered. Even the most heavily unbundled exchange I could find (Battersea) only has equipment from 9 ISPs.
However, it's very common for one ISP to offer their services wholesale to another - so you're paying Company A for broadband, all your bills and technical support queries are directed through Company A, but your actual connection is going over equipment owned by Company B. Several ISPs off
Read between the lines, kids (Score:2)
If they're saying they are willing to do it, bet your bottom dollar they have already done it or are already doing it. And, if they're being public about it, then they want those with the big chequebooks to open their wallets.
Better Than Best (Score:2)
"We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts."
What's better than best? Or are they acknowledging that they don't really make a best-effort at present?
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Yes, I'm well aware of what the term means from a QoS standpoint, it only underscores my point. There is best effort, or there is deprioritized traffic. There is no "better than best".
this is why we need a law (Score:4, Informative)
This was so obvious, I'm sure even the famous british bookers didn't take any bets on it.
Of course a for-profit ISP will gladly take money to slow down the opposition (there's no such thing as speeding up "selected services" if you assume that they are currently delivering packets as quickly as they can). Who would not love a business model that consists of being the middle man in an exchange where you get money from both sides?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
As someone else pointed out last time we had the topic, "let the market sort it out" is (once again) not a valid solution. You can switch your ISP, but you can't choose what route your packets travel and you have no choice in the backbone providers it may travel through. So there simply is no way to vote with your dollars/euros.
We need a law. One that says in no uncertain terms that network neutrality is the law and if you violate it as an ISP you lose your license to operate. Any less and they will tell their lawyers to go find the loopholes.
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Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
Yet Traffic shaping [wikipedia.org] and QoS happens all the time in IP networks. For example, CloudGuard [cloudguard.com].
You can switch your ISP, but you can't choose what route your packets travel and you have no choice in the backbone providers it may travel through.
You could switch to an ISP that refuses to exchange traffic with "non-neutral" ISPs...
I'll worry about "network neutrality" when someone actu
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Two can play at that game (Score:3, Interesting)
"although he added BT had never received such an approach."
Maybe the few companies interested in doing so though they would be told to get lost and didn't want to risk having their name found out for making the request if they got nothing out of said request. I can't be the only one who sees this statement from the ISPs as an invitation for providers to start making offers for priority over their competitors.
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Wow - you're saying that being able to even be accessed is the same as being able to display your marketing material somewhere? And let's not kid ourselves - an incumbent with cash to burn will be able to relegate an upstart competitor to the equivalent of a geocities page if this becomes common practice.
As khasim already set, bandwidth in the current set up is largely a zero-sum game. There isn't much headroom into which ISPs can put priority traffic.
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In any case, these businesses get "one nudge ahead" just like those ISP customers that pay. Right?
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This is what Google does too. A business pays cash to get a chance at being displayed on Google's first page of search results. And nobody raises a finger...right?
I'm not paying Google to provide me with search results. They therefore have a right to do whatever the hell they want. I *am* paying my ISP, so they *will* carry my packets, with equal priority to their other customers' packets, or I *will* be terminating my contract and taking my money elsewhere. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels like t
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So because you are paying for something that means no-one else is allowed to pay more for better service? So FedEx should not be allowed to sell 'Custom Critical' services because it may interfere with your 'Ground' delivery? Airlines should not be allowed to sell first class seats because those seats take away from your standby-coach leg room?
The only thing you can reasonably expect is that you get the same priority as everyone else paying the same price. Saying a business should not treat customers di
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Exactly. Which is NOT what would happen in the scenario posed in TFA. If I want to watch iPlayer, and some other customer paying the same price wants to watch YouTube, then we should get the same service; my ISP should not deliberately downgrade my service just because the BBC hasn't bribed them not to.
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They're not talking about prioritizing by what costumers pay, they're talking about prioritizing by what service providers pay. Which means my neighbor who pays the same as me for his connection but happens to like Netflix, which pays the ISP for priority, will have a better service than me, because
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For a fixed speed/bandwidth to speed someone elses traffic up the only way to do it when you're at capacity is to slow something else down.
Don't believe anyone who says that they're speeding anything up
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most other ISP's are beholden to BT to a greater or lesser extent
AIUI, usually only for the so-called "last mile" (which, on BT's network, averages more like 2 miles), over which there should only be a single customer's traffic, so prioritization shouldn't be an issue at this level.