So people see their Netflix or their Vonage suddenly sputter and the first explanation that comes into their heads is 'my ISP is trying to kill them to sell me their stuff instead'. RS> Of course didn’t you get the memo? ISP's are evil. Even more evil than the evil airlines. :-) We have the potential here for a really bitter dispute. Instead of picking up the phone to complain to their ISP, people have been picking up the phone to complain to their Senator or the guy in the White House. RS> Potential! Potential dispute! We’re already there. The missiles are in the air.! They call it Obamanet around this town. The cynics are already calling it the Federal Internet Commission and or the Bureau of Transit and Peering. It just leaked that the proposed FCC Open Internet order that will drop Feb 26 is over 332 pages long. ( That is not the record BTW) There's “light touch” regulation for you. And it is going to be really difficult to explain to a lot of people who have taken up arms on either side of this dispute that this might be the cause of the slowdowns. One side is going to accuse us of being shills for the corporate interests. And on the other side there are a lot of lobbyists licking their chops at the thought of fat billable hours for as long as they can make the fight worse. RS> Welcome to Washington DC, Ottawa, Brussels depending. So how do we de-escalate the situation? One part is that we need more than a technical fix for this problem. We need to be able to tell Joe or Jane Consumer how often these slowdowns occur and what the cause is. The problem being that the cause of the problem might be on the broadband provider side or the home user side of the network. So maybe have the residential gateway collect some data and expose it to the consumer in some fashion. This could also help debug other connection issues. I was having unexplained network slowdowns for a month that were eventually found to have been caused by a falling tree snapping the fiber but not the sheath round it. So the result was a flaky connection that had the peculiar property of working for some frequencies but not others. Another is to point out that just as the fact that you can't print from your computer is because you have the wrong printer port assignment rather than a virus does not mean viruses do not exist, the fact that buffer bloat explains some network slowdowns does not mean it explains every slowdown. Nor does it mean that malice is never a cause. RS> Speaking from personal experience the easiest way to put some internet policy wonk to sleep is say the word bufferbloat. I've tried. A lot of people have been proposing this idea of more consumer control of packet labeling at the edge or more consumer information. I’m deeply skeptical of any of these ideas. Life is simply too complicated as it is. 99.8% of consumers just want their cat videos or House of Cards and they want them now. Having some White Paper on the causes of network congestion for consumers, legislators, regulators etc is a fine idea and could be useful. That is something IMHO ISOC could and should commission. Actually MIT SAIL and CAIDA have filed a number of papers with the USG on this. However the counter argument I often point out are smart meters in the power industry. Sure they gather lots of interesting data but the evidence is consumers never use it. Historically we went through this congestion issue in the late 1990’s with dial up 9600/56k modems etc. Eventually we all worked through it though there was a lot of pain network engineers had to endure. |