The Gaming Den

Oh, speaking of websites that make us cry, Conservatives have decided Net Neutrality is a conspiracy to erase them from the internet.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Oh, speaking of websites that make us cry, Conservatives have decided Net Neutrality is a conspiracy to erase them from the internet.

-Crissa

Net Neutrality is a dumb idea though - how can you do QoS?

Net Neutrality is about not limiting QoS or increasing costs based on the sites you are accessing. If the guy across the street really wants to shell out whatever absurd costs for a faster connection, that's perfectly fine.

zeruslord wrote:Net Neutrality is about not limiting QoS or increasing costs based on the sites you are accessing. If the guy across the street really wants to shell out whatever absurd costs for a faster connection, that's perfectly fine.

Yeah, but clearly not everyone is on the same page as that: Random net netural fruitloops go!

Net Neutrality means no discrimination. Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination.

Blocking makes sense, but really it would be nice if we can move VOIP ahead of other traffic, and move P2P to the bottom of the heap - i.e. QoS, which requires that some of my traffic is prioritised over some of your traffic.

cthulhu wrote:Blocking makes sense, but really it would be nice if we can move VOIP ahead of other traffic, and move P2P to the bottom of the heap - i.e. QoS, which requires that some of my traffic is prioritised over some of your traffic.

My view might be naive, but I'd rather have net neutrality along with an incentive to increase bandwidth and decrease latency (VoIP) than a low-latency 'premium access' account.

Meh, I don't care about your phonecalls. Bumping VOIP to the top just lets constant phone users crap on everyone else's internet.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

cthulhu wrote:Blocking makes sense, but really it would be nice if we can move VOIP ahead of other traffic, and move P2P to the bottom of the heap - i.e. QoS, which requires that some of my traffic is prioritised over some of your traffic.

My view might be naive, but I'd rather have net neutrality along with an incentive to increase bandwidth and decrease latency (VoIP) than a low-latency 'premium access' account.

Yeah, there is always going to be contention, the entire protocol stack is built around contention and then resolving it.

Draco_Argentum wrote:Meh, I don't care about your phonecalls. Bumping VOIP to the top just lets constant phone users crap on everyone else's internet.

Yeah, thats why it makes sense to have off peak traffic or whatever.

So instead of buying a '40 GB of traffic' plan, you buy an internet plan that looks like, (with arbitary numbers):

High Priority Traffic: 2 GB

Medium Proirority Traffic: 20 GB

Low Priority Traffic: 100 GB

Then you tell, say, Skype that it can send out high priority traffic, Firefox gets medium, and MS patching and bittorrent gets low priority.

I'd be totally pissed if I had an internet plan that involved monthly limits on my bandwidth. Maybe I'm spoiled because I know this is common in some places, but I'd never buy into that.

Yeah, in the US or UK you just have soft bandwidth limits which results in completely undesirable behaviour.

For example, in the UK everyone gets shaped during peak usage periods, and high users just get constantly shaped when there is any contention. Due to the trade practices legislation as it stands in the UK, you just get lumped with that. This of course violates net neutrality, but is required by contention on the ISP's network.

In the US the same thing happens a lot, Comcast is a noted offender.

Also, there is contention in every international pipe, but Australia gets this one particularly bad.

So the reality is you have bandwidth limits, the difference is how they are structured, and how they are enforced. Another possible way to implement what I am proposing is this:

High Priority Traffic: 2 GB

Medium Proirority Traffic: 20 GB

Low Priority Traffic: Unlimited.

cthulhu wrote:Another possible way to implement what I am proposing is this:

High Priority Traffic: 2 GB

Medium Proirority Traffic: 20 GB

Low Priority Traffic: Unlimited.

So how is the priority of your connections set?

Surgo wrote:I'd be totally pissed if I had an internet plan that involved monthly limits on my bandwidth. Maybe I'm spoiled because I know this is common in some places, but I'd never buy into that.

We don't get a choice here. Not that its a bad thing in principle. I can go out and get a 100GB plan for a decently affordable amount. I can't realistically use that much bandwidth in a month unless I just download stuff and never use it.

cthulhu wrote:
Blocking makes sense, but really it would be nice if we can move VOIP ahead of other traffic, and move P2P to the bottom of the heap - i.e. QoS, which requires that some of my traffic is prioritised over some of your traffic.

Fuck that. And fuck you.

I don't want intermediate routers to even know what my bits are, let alone what purpose I'm sending them for. P2P traffic is just bit transference. Any system that could even identify it as such is way too far into crazy town Big Brother territory.

Net Neutrality isn't some kind of crazy hippy thing that's coming, it's the way we do things. And it works. The suggestion on the table is to remove net neutrality so that the people who own intermediate routers (AT&T, Sysco, et al.) get to decide who speaks and who is silent on the net. Presumably because they will let you speak if you pay them money in addition to paying your proximal service provider.

It's a naked power grab, a flagrant and pointless act of censorship, and if you are onboard with that crazy train I hope you die in a fire. And I'm not even exaggerating. The attack on Net Neutrality is literally the largest attack on global free speech in this century.

-Username17

Pfft. It doesn't require that they know shit. You just buy priority, and then you can tell whatever applications you have what priority they get, then your ISP meters you on it. I just voip as an example, but if you really want Busty hookers 9 or whatever, you could make that higher priority. It doesn't matter, its just formalising what already happens (comcast shapping high volume yours).

It's just QoS levels 1-9.

The reality is you don't care what the latency is on some traffic, but you do on others, and enabling things to priortise that is hugely useful for everyone.

For example, with quality of service, I could play counterstrike AND download busty hookers 9 at the same time which I cannot do currently because no-one labels their packets.

Note: QoS bits are part of the header which contains other information like 'where does this want to go' and 'who sent it' - if you're not cool with that being read by routers.... well then

Seriously, I don't get what the difference is from mail. I want to send you a later. I can send it snail mail, I can send it airmail, or I can get it couriered. The last option costs more, all of them get their eventually.

I'm not even sure why that might be bad.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:

cthulhu wrote:Another possible way to implement what I am proposing is this:

High Priority Traffic: 2 GB

Medium Proirority Traffic: 20 GB

Low Priority Traffic: Unlimited.

So how is the priority of your connections set?

Oh sorry, I totally missed this. IPv6 (and IPv4) both provide for a quality of service 'bit' in the header, which can accpet values between 0 and 9 (I think, it might be 8? Who cares)

Also, just as a background QoS only materially efffects latency, and not throughpoint. So if you're an FPS gamer or streaming video you want really high QoS, if you're just shipping busty [EDITED] 9 to your mate so he can watch it in a week, if its laggy... no-one cares.

Applications can specify their priority when they assemble a packet - so you'd just have an option window where you could set the 'priority'

Then your ISP would use its existing billing infrastructure to monitor your quotas.

Altenatively, when you're hosting a server you could specify how much QoS you want on your packets, similarly to how you specify how much bandwidth, data, power, CPU time etc today.

So if you where hosting el cheapo file sharing, you'd pay a bit less and set all your bits to the lowest QoS level. If you were hosting.. I dunno, streaming video for paying customers, you'd select a higher one and pay a bit more.

cthulhu wrote:Pfft. It doesn't require that they know shit. You just buy priority...

That. Right there.

Die in a fire.

Intermediate routers have no business being allowed to hold up the entire fucking internet for extortion moneys. And we all know how well free speech has flourished in the medium of television under such a program. After all, anyone can buy message priority on FOX News, right?

Being against net neutrality is synonymous with wanting powerful corporate oligarchs to be allowed to decide who speaks and who is silent on the internet. It's like the Great Firewall of China, but for the whole planet, and owned by corporate overlords who aren't even theoretically beholden to anyone anywhere except their own increased power and wealth. So please, become an hero. Now.

-Username17

I seriously don't get how that is different from Fedex vs US postal service. If I want my book right now from Amazon, I pay more. If I want to wait a week, I pay less.

I'm not proposing a situation in which you could never get the book.

Edit: I think you think I am judging by the china comment. That is clearly unacceptable and should indeed be defended to the death. Once we accept that we are merely tweaking routing rules to ensure that people who care about the time delay between Party A sending and Party B receiving (which is honestly not many applications) get stuffed down the pipe first, I think much of this conflict is resolved.

The post office hasn't exactly caused the death of thousands, so I'm not sure what the issue is really.

Edit: Also, you currently pay those routers money now anyway, just its 10 dollars, not 9 dollars if selected QoS 0 or 11 dollars if you selected 9.

And seriously, even if it doubled the latency on QoS 0 traffic? Who gives a shit? That makes no difference at all - there is a 600ms delay before google loads instead of a 300ms. And thats not including the time it takes firefox to process google's code which is more than half of the total delay experinced by users.

cthulhu wrote:I seriously don't get how that is different from Fedex vs US postal service. If I want my book right now from Amazon, I pay more. If I want to wait a week, I pay less.

I'm not proposing a situation in which you could never get the book.

Because it's not the post office. It's News Corporation. Furthermore, email already goes there the fastest way it can. So in the ideal world, your suggestion would be that people would be charged additional money to get the service that they are currently receiving. With people who refuse to pay the new premium service charges getting shunted to slower transfers, if their packets go through at all.

But since delaying a packet actually does mean blocking it and then presumably letting it through again later, you would indeed be having the routers in between you and your target deciding when to allow and when to block your packets. If they decided to never allow your packets through, that would be well within their new capabilities.

If you want t download busty waitress hookers while playing counterstrike you can do that. You just restrict the amount of bandwidth your computer allocates to that download, leaving the rest for counterstrike. You send more CS packets and less boobies packets, and you're golden. Allowing downstream routers to make that decision for you is fucked up.

We already know what happens when big media sells space in public discourse. It's called television. First of all, they set the price to entry very high so only moneyed interests can afford to be part of that world. Secondly, the reserve and exercise their right to not sell space in the discussion to viewpoints they don't like. Net neutrality comes down and the VNN's material will no longer go through. But while that is a somewhat cheering thought, the fact is that a lot of other thought won't go through either.

we already have TV. There is absolutely no reason to make the internet into TV. If anything, we should be trying to turn TV into the internet.

-Username17

Nah, that doesn't work particularly well (limiting bandwidth), because the router just sends on the CS:S packets and the busty hookers patterns as it gets them. While the algothrim does throttle, its not great at that for a couple of reasons

A) CS:S and bittorrent use UDP not TCP/IP so the throttling algothrim isn't there because UDP is designed not to have it. So the server sending busty hookers barks it out and chokes up my link no matter what I do.

B) Any application running at the same time as any other - no matter how little bandwidth they use - will impact latency, because at some point the router (which has no idea) will be sending busty hookers while CS:S packets are cooling their heels, when I'd rather CS:S was cut through routed and Busty hookers sat in the queue.

C) The router upstream from me has no idea about packets coming back. Seriously, its just going to max out my link with Big Tits 9000 because it doesn't know shit about what I actually want. This is especially annoying if you share a connection with someone else, using a web browser causes mad lag spikes.. sometimes. Typically when they download a large picture.

Remember Bandwidth is not the same as latency. You can have a really high bandwidth sat comms link, but you still won't be able to play CS:S because the 600ms latency on packets will kill you.

QoS is just to reduce latency experienced by preferred applications - the actual implementation prioritises stuff that sits around in the queue the longer it waits so it eventually gets sent.

To make this real, let us consider an application (Team Fortress 2) which uses little bandwidth but is very latency sensitive.

Let us consider two countries (Australia and NZ), and one desire (play a match of TF2 on a NZ team's server).

However, there are multiple links to NZ. Some have very high latency (almost 200ms), some have very low - like 80ms.

Currently its just random luck based on your ISP where you get routed. Sometimes you get a great ping to the NZ server. Some get a completely unplayable ping. Sometimes the guy in the next town from you on the same ISP gets routed differently and gets a great ping.

Having a system so I can say "Okay, I want to go through pipe 1 rather than pipe 2 so I get a good ping with my TF2 traffic" would be great. Currently I cannot.

Ideally to me, we'd get a situation where I can make that decision, but we still preserve all other current mechanisms. I agree that if people can block traffic it all goes to hell. That cannot be allowed to happen.

People need to get their packets 'eventually' - and that eventually has to be computer time, rather than people time. So the extra delay we're talking about has to be like 300ms, not 3 seconds.

CS:S and bittorrent use UDP not TCP/IP so the throttling algothrim isn't there because UDP is designed not to have it. So the server sending busty hookers barks it out and chokes up my link no matter what I do.

This is straight false. You can change the amount of packets bittorrent sends and receives because I have done it.If your client doesn't do that for you, you need a new client. If someone told you that net neutrality is what is stopping you from figuring out where that setting was, someone lied to you.

Packets being sent along as fast as they are received is not the cause of any latency problems you may have. Indeed, putting an extra checkstep into th routers to have them decide how much latency to give you would itself increase latency.

-Username17

Routers internal logic can manage wire speeds either way - you can make content filters that can manage 100 Mbp/s if you want, routers are tough stuff. You can do QoS at wire speeds no problem, and its widely used in enterprise LANs so they can run VOIP over their existing switch gear.

Anyway, your confusing bandwidth and latency again. Latency (which is what we are interested in) is the time a packet takes to reach you from me. You can have a 30mbp/s satcomms link, but the latency will be high because the path is too long.

Some bittorrent applications let you control the bandwidth yes, but consider what happens when the upstream router from my recieves packets:

Because it is much faster than my connection, it has to use store and forward routing. I've limited Busty Hookers to 20kbp/s, and CS:S uses ~5kbp/s, below the maximum speed of my connection. now consider what happens when all 5 packets rock up

So it starts piling up packets at a 4:1 ratio and dispatching them as fast as it can - and then starts queuing them because the link speeds are different. Now, because there is no QoS it queses them

Hookers, Hookers, CS:S, Hookers, Hookers,

and sends them in that order - and all the 'buster hookers' packets add latency to the CS:S packets, despite the fact that 'busty hookers' is limited to a very low speed. This makes CS:S unplayable VERY quickly. You can easily test this yourself if you like, and its a pretty instructive lesson into the problem. (note, just running bittorent, I can support 200kbp/s download and 80 upload, so this isn't close to maxing the connection)

However, if it was smart and just reshuffled the queue to CS:S, hookers, hookers, hookers, hookers, life would be great!

The problem is worse if you consider upload, because the connection is slower - consider if I limited hookers to 5kbs/s (again, very slow), because my upstream connection is only 2mpb/s, despite the packets being queued

Hookers, CS:S, Hookers, CS:S,Hookers, CS:S,Hookers, CS:S,Hookers, CS:S, Hookers, CS:S,

It's still adding multiples of the the latency of the inbound bandwidth.

Now, ideally, what I'd like the router to do is say 'Ohh, he wants the CS:S packets first' and just push whatever hookers packets have accumulated out of the way and send the first CS:S packet in the queue.

Without QoS, there is no way to say "I'd prefer my counterstrike packets were sent to me rather than my bittorent torrent packs"

Now, if we consider the Aus to NZ situation - there is a choke point at the NZ-> AU link, but if I'm downloading hookers from some guy there, my packets are being queued, and because the link is contested, some will be dropped

But the packets it drops are random! And whereas busty hookers is not sensative to packet loss, I'll be warping all over the place in CS:S

Edit: TCP/IP senses packet loss occuring and throttles back the connection dynamically - UDP doesn't do this. All the bittorent clients let you do is set a 'cap' on transmission speeds. With dynamic throttle you can say 'oohh, CS:S packets are getting dropped, better slow down the rates until the problem goes away'

Also note: Despite my advocacy of QoS, if you said 'Okay, but we want a government regulated regime with price controls to enable QoS but keep the net otherwise neatural and prevent censorship' I'd be 'yes, thats a good idea'

Edit: Also, government investment in broadband infrastructure is a good idea.

cthulhu, your whole idea is unworkable. Not only would it lock all customers and companies into some bullshit pricing plan, but it doesn't even work because the internet is bigger than you and your ISP! Here are some problems:
* The first company that tries to pull shit like that is going to, if not go under, at least realize how horrible this is for themselves when all their customers start flooding its help desk lines because their high-priority traffic isn't actually going through at any speed because either:
-- Everyone is using high-priority traffic at that point. Congratulations, we've now run into the exact same problem that made the 3 TOS bits in IPv4 unused in the first place.
-- Elsewhere on the internet (somewhere your ISP doesn't control), there's a delay of some sort. Who knows what it is. Happens all the time anyway.
* Legacy applications can't actually specify that they want a specific 3 bits in their IP header set a specific way for specific priority. These legacy applications include things like Counterstrike and Firefox. That pretty much kills this straight up.
* What happens when the packets leave your ISP? Your agreement is between you and your ISP. Not between you and the rest of the fucking internet. Which can do whatever it wants with your packets. Which means the whole idea fails immediately.

As far as busty hookers and counterstrike packets getting sent in the wrong order, I'm pretty sure you can set QoS to something other than first-in, first-out on your end and have the counterstrike packets go out before your own hooker packets. Of course that doesn't really help stuff coming in but I feel the other problems with the idea kind of defeat using TOS to clear that up. However, you can certainly limit the bandwidth of your busty hookers download on your own end. Which should deal with the problem nicely.

Frank, you can set the proposed IPv4 bits to handle this, uh, 'proposal' and have your ISP routers or any other routers not know what's actually in the payload (you can even encrypt it if you want). But honestly it doesn't even matter because this whole idea is unworkable. Those 3 TOS bits went unused since IPv4 came out for good reason.

Koumei wrote:...why are you more interested in a shitty game like CS than in boobs?

Because they don't have boobs right now. So they play CS to kill time, before boobs shows up.

Also, they perhaps want specific boobs. Not just any internet available boobs.

I heard of a guy that has a TV in his computer room set to display porn. When he's in a load screen, he watches the porn. When the game is finished loading, he plays the game and ignores the porn. This was back in original EQ though, and load screens were everywhere. The porn may have also been of lower quality.

PS, Net Neutrality is not just about shaping packets, which is difficult as is... You'd need to buy high priority packets from every hop between you and the guy you were skyping. And Net Neutrality doesn't stop there from being Internet II or private links or whatnot.

What it stops is your ISP requiring your buddy's ISP to pay them for his packets to be your priority. Or TGDMB from having to pay each and every one of our ISPs for the packets to not be blocked. We already pay our ISPs. Net Neutrality is about stopping double-dipping.

-Crissa

PPS: There just isn't any way to have high/low packets in TCP, UDP, current network architecture, okay? So don't think there is. Routers don't really know what's in a packet - they just know if it's ordered, who it goes to, and where it's from. Unordered packets don't get kept if there's a jam (UDP) and ordered packets get resent (TCP).

Your ISP can tell that you're getting many packets, but nothing really else about those packets without stopping and interrogating each packet - which is an invasion of privacy.

PPPS: The priority bits pretty much played out like this: All spam was highest priority. Everything you actually wanted was lowest priority. Routers would get flooded with low priority stuff, which they'd begin dropping on the floor, delaying the high priority which would then be resent, adding to the load. You'd eventually get the high priority, but if two people were spraying low priority packets, just nothing would come through. And normal packets would just stagnate and you'd see them have to take weird routes around crowded points that were breaking down.

And so, nothing uses that, hence not being part of the current architecture... Besides, the point is that you'd need to pay each and every hop for your higher price.

Lastly, Net Neutrality doesn't stop you from buying a premium internet package which is an ISP with private links to different backbones.