Cisco Opposes Net Neutrality 337
angry tapir writes: All bits running over the Internet are not equal and should not be treated that way by broadband providers, despite net neutrality advocates' calls for traffic neutral regulations, Cisco Systems has said. Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network, while others, like most Web browsing and email, may live with slight delays, said Jeff Campbell, Cisco's vice president for government and community relations. "Different bits do matter differently. We need to ensure that we have a system that allows this to occur."
Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Funny)
Oral-co + Cicko = Oralsicko.
Anyway, Jeff Campbell is a fucking idiot. Who the fuck is he to say that someone's stupid YouTube video experience is more important than someone else's business email? He's astroturfing because his company sells networking equipment that handles filtering which is only needed in a world without net neutrality.
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because several-second delays in video packets will make it unwatchable (or require a lot of buffering) and a drop of a significant percentage of a phone call's UDP will make it unusable, but the effects of neither of those will be noticed by the recipient of that business email.
To me there's a significant difference between "Net Neutrality" and QOS.
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the difference, in two sentences:
QoS is about prioritizing and filtering traffic based on type .
Net Neutrality is about prioritizing and filtering traffic based on source .
You could possibly say that QoS is layer 4-7 (port, application, transport) while Net Neutrality is layer 3 (address).
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Wrong.
QoS isnt about bandwidth, its about queues and latency.
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be blunt, you dont know what you are talking about.
Video traffic isnt generally like voice, and doesnt need to be prioritized. It is NOT latency sensitive; it can be buffered. It would be classified as "bulk", unless it were part of a teleconference (in which case it would share several of the below characteristics, like being UDP).
Voice traffic can come from any number of sources; whether it is Skype, or GoToMeeting, or WebEx, or a privately run Jabber server, it will share a number of characteristics:
* The traffic needs to arrive quickly, and reliably, or not at all. If a voice packet takes longer than ~100ms to arrive, it might as well be dropped and just cause a slight blip.
* It will almost always be UDP, because TCP is only useful for re-transmits; a missing packet in a webpage means the page doesnt render, whereas a missing packet in voice just causes a minor blip.
* Latency will kill a connection. 500ms of additional latency means each side will perceive a 1 second delay in responses. That is completely unworkable, and means that theres a pretty hard cap on the amount of latency that is allowable. Bulk traffic does not have this problem; a 0.5 second delay just means a 0.5 second delay.
QoS is about types of traffic that cannot fulfill their function if they are not reliably delivered; it is generally used for protocols that require fast response times. It also generally will have no perceivable impact on "everyone else".
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The points of congestion are typically the hardest to QoS. Once you start getting into the 400gb+ link speeds, you can't do real time QoS anymore. Enabling QoS slows y
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:4, Funny)
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Such a dumb setup.
Not as dumb as paying more per gigabyte of RAM on your Cisco server for the privilege of paying more per gigabyte of RAM and Gigabit of network bandwidth on your Oracle software so you can pay extra for the ports on your Cisco network switch. With mandatory support contracts all 'round.
Oh God (Score:2)
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Informative)
The crux of net neutrality is bits from different providers being given the same priority. Nobody is arguing that we can afford to drop some Bittorrent packets in exchange for VOIP / video streaming. What the cable companies want to do, however, is prioritise their video streaming, for example, over someone elses. That is the net neutrality issue.
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cisco also knows where their income comes from.
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Once again. It's all fine so long as everyone's packets of a particular type are all treated the same.
Prioritizing VOIP over my Netflix packets is not and has never been the issue.
Cable companies are masquerading as ISPs. They want to sabotage the competition in ways we would not tolerate if they were a phone company.
Re:Somewhere in my mind... (Score:5, Informative)
Shoddy journalism to blame for this, I'm afraid.
Conspiracy-theory rubbish ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you lose yourself in flights of fancy, consider this. Cisco sells network gear, i.e. the stuff you need to implement multiple tiers of traffic. Only the more advanced, expensive, and high-margin gear will do that of course. Think: deep-packet inspection.
And you were actually wondering why Cisco is in favour of an Internet that needs advanced kit and against an Internet that doesn't need special gear to implement multiple tiers?
A bit slow at arithmetic, are you?.
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Its not surprising Cisco says things like these, but, then again, it wouldnt surprise me to find Cisco eats babies and tortures puppies.
I prefer (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I prefer (Score:5, Insightful)
I would rather prefer to open the market to anyone who wants to provide the service without unnecessary restrictions as government concessions. Failing that I can be satisfied with legislation that forces the providers to offer a service of reasonable quality to the user as a condition to their concessions.
Density Myth. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Other things small countries can do that may be more difficult for the U.S. to do:
1 - Have a true national plan for rolling out internet, rather than Country, State, County, Municipality, Neighborhood, and Individual plans. (Individuals in this case being people who object, maybe with some merit, to unsightly telco boxes on or near their property and do something about it, messing up the plan, either requiring the telco box to be moved or for them to go through city planners and/or court to get permission to place the box on the person's property.)
2 - Dictate how the internet is going to be rolled out. Similar to 1, but not quite the same. Possibly have "country wide" municipal broadband, with individual providers riding off of state owned infrastructure.
3 - Not deal with U.S. Corporate lobbyists. It seems we have world class corporate lobbying. Our lobbyists are so strong that they can convince us the price we're paying for Internet, Health Care, Cell Service, pick your overpriced product is as good or better than the rest of the world, that the reduced service we often receive along with the high prices is really better than the rest of the world, and that all the multiple ways we pay our ISPs to improve their infrastructure, through taxes, directly through our internet bills, through "back door deals" like Netflix paying both their ISP and the end user's ISP to deliver content will actually improve much of anything. (The latter seems to have, but only because that one entertainment provider has paid to improve that one service on that one monolithic ISP.)
4 - Laying down new infrastructure rather than dealing with a hodgepodge of existing infrastructure. This one is actually pretty important. Especially since some of that old infrastructure - land lines - are something ISPs/telcos are still federally mandated to maintain. . . unless this has recently changed. Also, they may have more uniform wiring, and access to that wiring, in their larger buildings.
Re:Density Myth. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
It is possible because your density story is a lie. It is made up. There is no truth to it. If Ephrata, and even smaller towns in that county, can have gigabit at a reasonable price 14 years ago then we all can now. The tech is 100x cheaper now. There is no excuse for not fibering up the whole country.
Re:Density Myth. . . (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also add my example. I live in a decent sized city. We're no New York City, by far, but we're not suburbs either. When Verizon was laying their FIOS cables, they went to the suburbs and bypassed the city. The population density of the city was higher, but they avoided us entirely. Of course, the reason wasn't population density, but income. Suburbs are more likely to have middle class/high middle class/affluent individuals who can pay Verizon more money. Cities might have poorer individuals and they might not be able to afford FIOS. So they made a business decision and avoided the poorer locations.
The problem with this is that, in the 21st century, knowledge of how to use the Internet is crucial to many jobs. Use of the Internet can help lift a person up from poverty. Sticking the poor regions with slower speeds is exasperating the income separation.
Of course, Verizon is free to build where they like and avoid poorer areas. It's not like they took billions of taxpayer money to wire states, reneged on their promises, and kept the money, right? (Oh, wait. They did.)
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Back when the common-carrier thing applied to DSL, I had my DSL line through the phone company, but my account was through an ISP. The DSLAM pointed me to that ISP in the CO, instead of to the phone company's network. That arrangement suited me just fine, as I h
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All your bits are belong to Comcast.
I prefer (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I prefer (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure that I like having my web pages load slowly so that somebody else can watch Keeping Up With The Kardashians jitter-free.
And without net neutrality, those web pages will load even slower unless they are coming from somebody who has given your ISP extortion money (in addition to the money you're already giving them each month) to not slow them down.
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inter-subscriber priority (Score:3)
Why should your videoconferencing packets get priority over my netflix stream?
If we've both paid for equivalent plans, then we should have equal use of the network.
The only truly fair option is for ISPs to weight traffic between subscribers based on their plans, without looking at traffic type. Then within the traffic belonging to a single subscriber they could (if approved by the subscriber) do QoS based on traffic type.
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There would be no appreciable difference in render time of your website should QoS be implemented correctly; We're talking about introducing milliseconds of delay while a few HTTP packets are dropped in favour of RTP, because RTP is latency-sensitive and HTTP isn't. Your page will still get to you, you will not miss out on anything, your experience will not suffer.
Besides, this isn't about competing with web page rendering. This is about two streaming services competin
Re:I prefer (Score:5, Insightful)
I would take issue with, say, my ISP's VoIP application working fine while delays are introduced to Skype traffic. Prioritizing certain types of traffic make sense and can be provider-agnostic; prioritizing specific companies/sources, however, is chock-full of problems.
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Re: I prefer (Score:4, Informative)
This! Cisco doesn't actually oppose net neutrality, just the abolishment of QoS prioritization... but who the hell wanted to get rid of that anyway?
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Nobody, but the ISPs buy a lot of Cisco gear so Cisco wants to side with them. Plus, if the ISPs want to build a "Usain Bolt" lane and a "Usain Bolted To An Anchor" lane, they'll need some shiny, new networking gear to implement it. Cue Cisco's executives getting cartoon dollar signs in their eyes.
Re:I prefer (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a giant sticky mess. Many advocates for net neutrality have only a vague idea of how things work so their proposals are vague. Many with the experience to produce more detailed proposals have ulterior motives.
Anyway, if you assume honoring protocol priorities is OK, then you end up with abusive situations where an ISP that runs video protocol 1 can sink traffic from a competitor based on the fact that they use video protocol 2. Add to that that protocols can be patented, and you'd end up with an incentive to create and patent stupid protocols just to do exactly that.
Also there are services whose availability would benefit the customer/public/economy that involve prioritizing packets between privately administered device networks, and not by protocol, and defining the difference between those services and unfair competitive practices leads us down a road to byzantinism.
Really we need to get to a point where end-users can send ToS bits into the network and have them honored as long as they are below a fair usage level for ToS packets, and a certain percent of the network is kept free for best effort, allowing the consumer some level of live control. Before we even do that, though, we need to just move towards "ISPs and other providers must make X% of all built capacity available at a (possibly tariffed) basic rate for public best effort use" and apply that principle across all areas of bandwidth, pps processing power, and -- the toughest sell but very important -- CDN capacity. The cash flow through CDNs really needs to be further regulated to eliminate the perverse incentive of making money off congested pipes on the back end. The restriction on sales of prioritized services in the other 100-X% part of the pipe would provide appropriate incentive for expansion of the entire pipe, benefiting the basic rate users not just the premium arrangements. The X could be adjusted by policy changes until the sweet spot is found or as the ecosystem changes.
Now if the above was TLDR, a solid proposal would be 100x more complicated.
Re:I prefer (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, this argument feels like an end run to provide an argument for Quality of Service in an attempt to discredit net neutrality, when those are different things.
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This is exactly what I came here to say. Net neutrality doesn't mean giving every kind of packet equal priority but giving every source equal priority.
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I think you get it. its not about prioritizing one source over another or even one destination, but more about type of traffic and knowing how delay and jitter-sensitive it is. if you only have so much bandwidth (which is a reality everywhere), then you -have- to sort traffic by type and give prio to the sensitive ones and delay or drop (tcp or the app will do timeout/retries) the ones that won't fit.
cisco sells gear. they make and sell gear that does all kinds of filtering/prioritization and so on. why
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I was surprised to find in the configuration file of my Technicolour (Thomson) ADSL modem, a section already defining QoS, This isn't visible in the browser-accessible UI, but only when you "save" the configuration to a local hard drive, which option is also locked by Bigpong/Telstra unless you run a magic script. Anyway, it defines 6 queues for QoS, and it allocates VOIP traffic to the highest-priority queue, proceeding down the list until queue 5, which is the catch-all. There are various types mentioned,
Re:I prefer (Score:5, Insightful)
That, however, is a quality of service issue. I'm very happy for their to be QoS on my connection. However, I don't want your Verizon StreamTV or whatever service getting priority over my Netflix service. That is a net neutrality issue.
We should not dilute the issue by confusing the two, or even discussing the two together. They are not the same thing.
Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
This means Comcast & TWC will be purchasing more network equipment from Cisco. They won't upgrade infrastructure to deliver better service, but they'll happily buy equipment that prioritizes traffic (slows down traffic coming from non-paying sources) for the purpose of double dipping by charging both you and Netflix/Amazon/Google/etc.
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Don't be ridiculous. Every network hardware supplier has QoS for their customers. What Cisco describes here, makes sense: some protocols are more urgent than others.
What does not make sense is crap like Comcast is pulling: "Oh, these guys using HTTP didn't pay me more, but the other guys using HTTP did -- guess I'll have to employ some mafia tactics!"
Please don't mix these two cases up...
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The problem with this is what all the other providers will offer: your ISP, blog/web 2.0 host, video streaming, game drm platform will all offer to do the same for a few $ per month.
Every host, game site and portal will be on the slow as email default packet settings until you pay up per day, week, month, year...
How
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Re: Of course (Score:2)
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Its also, as a fairly experienced network engineer, very very very difficult, borderline impossible, to accomplish.
Is it really that difficult to slow down all traffic except traffic coming from a list of IP addresses that are paying you off? Comcast didn't seem to have a problem throttling Netflix for a few months until Netflix paid up. Also, if you wanted to target video streaming, wouldn't it be easy to specify after X bits or Y packets then slow it down? That would obviously cover more than just video, but would be most noticeable to most people with video. You can start there and get more intelligent, and as yo
its a shame... (Score:5, Insightful)
What About Electricity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some Web-based applications, including rapidly growing video services, home health monitoring and public safety apps, will demand priority access to the network,
Do health monitoring devices get priority access to electricity? Does the electric company get to decide which devices will be shut down first? Can they shut down your devices before they shut down your neighbor's, because you bought Sony instead of Samsung? Would it be good for the electric company to be allowed to negotiate priority access to electricity with the appliance manufacturers?
Net neutrality is about protecting the more important free market -- the free market in information -- by requiring the carriers to compete only on price and overall performance of their network.
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Does the electric company get to decide which devices will be shut down first?
When one of the nuclear reactors in Finland had to be powered down unexpectedly about a year ago the grid operators call the biggest electricity consumers and tell them that they have to power down some of their machinery ("You'll have to cut your consumption by 40 MW, right now") so that the rest of the country can keep functioning.
Re:What About Electricity? (Score:4, Informative)
Does the electric company get to decide which devices will be shut down first? Can they shut down your devices before they shut down your neighbor's, because ?
Actually yes. For industrial uses there are there are different categories of avaliability: high availability, standard and interruptible. An interruprible contract means that the electic company could disconnect the transformer serving your factory if the power demand is too high. Conversely high availability contracts will be disconnected last: normally they have also ne transformaer in stand by in the case the main one fails. By the way if yuo have a 100 kW contract you'll get more power than a 10 kW contract...
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Not at the moment, but it's being worked on, and it's called "Smart Grid".
The most important difference between Smart Grid and lack of net neutrality is that with Smart grid it's the customer who owns the appliance that gets paid (or refunded) if power isn't available for the appliance. The idea is that you'll be able to plug in your electric car in the evening, and the car will then negotiate for power, so that it is fully charged, at latest the next morning. It's a win for the costumer and the electricity
This is absolutely correct (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet had, since IPv4, provisions for exactly this, and whole careers have been built by this. It goes by different names, Type of Services, QoS, Traffic Engineering. IPv6 has also provisions for this, so did ATM in its time. MPLS has a HUUUUGE component of this...
Having said that:
Video on Demand traffic from, say comcast, should have the same priority as video on Demand traffic from youtube or netflix (or some future cash strapped start-up).
Videoconferencing traffic from skype should have the same priority as videoconferencing trafffic from google+ o Cisco (or some future cash strapped start-up).
Web traffic from yahoo should have the same (slighty lower) priority as the web traffic from "mom & pop web server".
You get the drift, not because some big company is willing to pay more, or the ISP wants to double dip you can play with the priorities.
And THAT is net neutrality for y'all!
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Mod parent up. (Score:2)
Exactly. We keep having debates framed by PR firms and their $$$ so we avoid the real issues and get stuck into weaker positions. Net Neutrality doesn't make phones(SIP) equal to crappy video streaming (http.) Actually we should be yelling at network admins fire walling everything outside port 80! netflix should be using rstp or something identifiable as video streaming- their abuse of http should be the reason their service has troubles not because comcast is into extortion.
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The internet had, since IPv4, provisions for
Only small 'i' internets.
exactly this, and whole careers have been built by this. It goes by different names, Type of Services, QoS, Traffic Engineering. IPv6 has also provisions for this, so did ATM in its time. MPLS has a HUUUUGE component of this...
By all means prioritize intra-domain traffic within an organization. This makes sense and is widely deployed as you point out.
None of this has ever worked inter-domain on a big "I" Internet of untrustworthy users with competing interests.
Any and all traffic markings will be instantly gamed RFC3514 style reducing to classification based entirely on ownership (shady deals between mega content and mega ISPs) rather than actual need/merit.
This is NOT a net neutrality issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Net neutrality is the idea that data from any provider (rich or poor, powerful company or a single guy, corrupt or honest) is treated the same way on the network.
Cisco's comment concerns the prioritization of data depending on its type. I see nothing wrong with that.
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Mod this parent up. This statement from CIsco has nothing to do with net neutrality.
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Cisco's comment concerns the prioritization of data depending on its type. I see nothing wrong with that.
Part of our basic jobs working with technology is to fundamentally understand and communicate what is and what is not possible.
When we mark your comment +5 insightful we fail at our jobs assuming Cisco lacks a traffic classification algorithm able to infer intent with superior intelligence to thinking human adversaries unwilling to wait for their slow lane bits to be transmitted over the wire.
We get a kick out of RFC3514 because it is funny. What makes Cisco's idea any less funny?
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Same as if the ISP were to setup email spam filtering or a school run provider that decided to block out site such as MAMBLA.
All of those actions would be illegal under the majority of Net Neutrality bills.
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However if you go read the bills that have been proposed for net neutrality you will see that ISP that did implement QoS would be breaking the law.
They've already been told that the net neutrality bills and fcc regulations dealing with the same were complete shit. They just wont listen, because apparently the two words, "net neutrality", when put together are so awesome as to completely overpower the actual wording of these laws and regulations.
Unfortunately, we have a problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
However, there's a serious complication that Cisco is either ignoring or doesn't have any reason to care about: the mechanisms for doling out 'priority access to the network' and 'slight delays' are more or less target agnostic. There is nothing magic about hypothetical VOIP-911, Granny Accelerometer, or whatnot that makes it easy to identify them as "justified" prioritization and leave everything else alone.
If you have the system set up to promote and demote traffic based on type, origin, destination, (or any similar set of parameters sufficient to plausibly identify 'important' traffic, rather than just basic TCP congestion behavior), you can promote and demote whatever you feel like writing rulesets for. Given that the last-mile is pretty much buttoned up by a cozy oligopoly of incumbent telco and cable outfits, does anybody seriously expect the shaping to stop at making sure those 'public safety apps' get the message out in time, rather than paying lip service to ensuring that 911 calls go through and then moving on to the actually profitable business of chopping the internet up and attempting to reach optimum price discrimination and suppress competition?
So, barring major changes in the competitive landscape, or some sort of regulation-indistinguishable-from-magic, agreeing with Cisco on architectural grounds;but still rejecting the idea on the balance, is a perfectly cogent position(you can argue that it isn't correct; but it's not contradictory): Yes, traffic prioritization will allow better performance of latency sensitive applications (if they are in fact prioritized) all else being equal. However, once you have the architecture in place for that, the economic incentives to go nuts with it are absurdly compelling. By comparison, 'just grow your way out of it' isn't architecturally elegant; but it provides a nice, aligned, incentive for ISPs to build out and people who want more performance to buy fatter pipes, rather than for ISPs to let the infrastructure rot and focus on squeezing every penny out of every user.
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Except with more lawyers, omnipresent surveillance, ubiquitous targeted advertising, and probably some sort of XML-based "Shakedown description language" for efficient automated squeezing of individuals and dependent companies by expert systems that continuously adjust the network's throttling behavior to maximize
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Maybe I'm not understanding something.... (Score:2)
How does net neturality impact QOS in IPv6?
I mean, if you aren't allowed to give some packets higher priority, then doesn't that make the whole point of getting a quality of service guarantee moot?
Well. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're doing anything as critical as home-based life support system monitoring and you're literally trusting your life to your ISP, then you're already well past the point of screwed.
Cisco and Self-interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, Cisco wants to support a new network paradigm that would result in a market for new hardware, worldwide? This is America where lobbying new product lines into existence, is routine.
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QOS != NetNutrality (Score:3)
Surprised (Score:3)
Who would have thought Cisco prefers the world attempt to deploy foolish and hopelessly complex inter-domain prioritization schemes requiring $$$$$$ Cisco solutions to implement?
TWC is already screwing customers using fast lanes (Score:4)
Abuse of the internet architecture (Score:4, Insightful)
This is abusing the internet architecture. The whole idea is that services don't rely on speed and delivery, but work with the network architecture to ensure that whatever service they provide is able te deal with delays. This means that if ISPs want happy customers and companies want their internet product to work properly, they have to ensure that there's enough room on the entire network to deliver those services adequately.
Now some company that sells equipment that can prioritize packets of certain services so network providers can get away with saturating the data links more starts flipping the principle of the internet around. Sorry, no, that's not the *internet* you are talking about Cisco. That's a private network in which some company gets to say what they think is important.
Every individual company owning a network will have different priorities. Try connecting thousands of private networks with different priorities and different technologies to achieve those and make that work. This is what Cisco is proposing we do to the internet and it will be a pain to try it and chances that it will ever work are close to zero. Part of why the internet works is because we have a global goal of just routing packets without prejudice. Don't mess with that, it will end in tears, unhappy customers and only a few rich C level executives at router producing companies.
Stuff and nonsense. (Score:3)
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Title is a bit sensationalist... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course a network vendor is going to point out that some packets needs preferential treatment over others. It's something they've worked to engineer into their product lines because their customers demand the capability to do so. For an ISP, 911 VoIP packets are a much higher priority than World of Warcraft packets.
Too many folks are caught up in the idea that prioritization is bad. There's a difference between between the philosophy of Network Neutrality and the operational reality of packet prioritization.
Saying Cisco opposes Net Neutrality just because they're pointing out some simple truths on how network operate today is like saying Glock supports terrorism just because they make guns.
Of course, if the title weren't sensational, no one would probably read it.
It saddens me that Slashdot seems to have decided that they need to resort to the same tactics as the National Enquirer
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Too many folks are caught up in the idea that prioritization is bad. There's a difference between between the philosophy of Network Neutrality and the operational reality of packet prioritization.
There is a difference between intra-domain and inter-domain prioritization and the operational futility of the latter.
It saddens me that Slashdot seems to have decided that they need to resort to the same tactics as the National Enquirer
In this case they are warranted. Cisco's statements cannot possibly be applied to the real world without picking winners and losers.
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There is a difference between intra-domain and inter-domain prioritization and the operational futility of the latter.
inter-domain prioritization is hardly futile. ISP's don't own the entire world, nor is the entire world directly connected to one network. Customers use applications that are time sensitive and not owned by the provider. Customers expect that, if they want to view a video, for example, that the video actually plays and isn't choppy, or doesn't stop to buffer every 5 seconds. This is a crapload more important than how fast your Google search results load.
In this case they are warranted. Cisco's statements cannot possibly be applied to the real world without picking winners and losers.
In what way? Cisco is not saying Comcast should priori
That's alright Cisco... (Score:2)
I oppose you and your products, I don't use them at home. And I use your competitors products when I do professional work.
please buy more equipment (Score:2)
Bad headline (Score:3)
Its all about sales (Score:3)
Cisco simply see a big profit to be made by selling new kit that is specially designed to be able to determine which traffic is from where and priorotize (a bit like QoS but for providers rather than traffic type).
They don't give a shit about the whole neutrality debate really... just more sales. Who cares who or what it harms? Sales comes first!
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While Cisco is primarily concerned with selling network gear, that doesn't make them wrong.
Believe it or not, every once in awhile, you can tell the truth and it will actually further your own agenda.
TFA is a lie (Score:2)
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I got here late, but TFA is a lie. Stating the obvious (voice and HTTP are not "equal" to the client nor provider), doesn't make an official Cisco stance against Net Neutrality. In fact, most Net Neutrality proposals (every one I've seen officially submitted in Congress), would have allowed for such action. No Net Neutrality has yet prevented reasonable traffic grooming. It's designed to prevent Comcast from running a VoIP service with premium QoS and deliberately lowering the QoS of all other competing services. To keep all competing services at the same level is "neutral".
Net Neutrality is not "traffic neutral" It's "provider neutral" at least so far in every bill I've read. And that's the best way. Why force every packet to be the same when we know they are inherently not?
I wish I could mod you up. You have a proper understanding of what net neutrality is about, rather than what it's been perverted into.
Well, then (Score:2)
Re:At my own peril (Score:4, Insightful)
Always read the fine print, in this case pay attention to way he says. Slight delay, now what does that really mean. Like email, is the slight delay a reference to postal services, or the electronic transfer of data, so milli seconds or minutes to complete.
I pay for bandwidth, I expect that bandwidth to be usable, what I do with that bandwidth as long as it is within the law is up to me not the providers choice. I do not accept the ISP monitoring, controlling and censoring my. I do not accept the ISP crippling my choices of content suppliers in preference for their own. I do not accept my ISP to purposefully crippling the services of companies who do not contract with them in preference for those that do.
It is obvious laws are required to protect the provision of services to ensure anti-competitive monopolistic tactics can not be used to artificially inflate profit margins.
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If your regional ISP does not have the right partners at a national level its game over for the users until extra cash flows.
Re:In that case (Score:5, Insightful)
Cisco is technically correct in that real-time or near-real-time services need higher priority than data transfers that don't need real-time synchronization or timing. If I'm watching a live TV program I need the network traffic carrying that program to get to me correctly, in real time, or watching the program live doesn't work. If I'm surfing the Internet to use web forums, mild reductions in performance won't really impact my experience. I do not have a problem with an ISP attempting to shape its traffic to give priority to content requiring real-time capability.
Opposing "Net Neutrality" seems to be opposite-ville to me. I see the goal of ending net neutrality being for ISPs to force payment from large real-time content providers in order to keep that content flowing with enough priority to make watching it practical. Even though the customer is already paying for enough bandwidth to receive everything if the ISP doesn't intentionally break it.
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Opposing "Net Neutrality" seems to be opposite-ville to me. I see the goal of ending net neutrality being for ISPs to force payment from large real-time content providers in order to keep that content flowing with enough priority to make watching it practical. Even though the customer is already paying for enough bandwidth to receive everything if the ISP doesn't intentionally break it.
Some customers are on the lowest tier while others pay more money for priority access. The big "net neutrality" lie is the omission of this basic fact while insisting that some entities should not be able to pay for priority access on the very networks that we ourselves pay extra to have priority access on.
Yeah, ISP's like comcast shouldn't be allowed to throttle their video service competition out of existence, but the solution isnt hypocritical feel-good bullshit that is completely blind to the consequ
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QoS is a standard and there seem to be some industry best practices to handle things like VoIP and video. Net Neutrality is not based on any standards and merely appears to be a legal way to extort money.
Re:In that case (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
QoS = Different types of application/service, with different latency/bandwidth/reliability requirements, being treated differently = Good.
Net Neutrality = Similar applications/services, with identical latency/bandwidth/reliability requirements, being treated equally = Good.
In my view, they're not mutually exclusive.
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If I'm watching a live TV program I need the network traffic carrying that program to get to me correctly, in real time, or watching the program live doesn't work.
Unless it's something you have a bet on, it doesn't matter if there is some latency, so long as you buffer in excess of the latency worth of data, so that it can hiccup all you want, and there will be a 1:1 match between the minutes of program sent, and the minutes required to play back. And even if you have a bet going, the window is pretty narrow, unless you are making bets in real time covering the next several seconds of action, where someone without the latency could leverage apriori knowledge of even
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