Wednesday article links: when net neutrality activists attack

My trip to Washington D.C. last week to meet with FCC officials on the issue of network management and peer-to-peer applications bandwidth usage didn't go unnoticed. Over at Broadband Reports, Karl and network specialist Robb Topolski are calling my characterization of P2P applications' effects on network congestion "epic distortions." Since I'm traveling today, I won't have the opportunity to post the response that this statement deserves, but you can check back here later this week for a full discussion about why cable operators' broadband services would grind into gridlock without responsible network management.

In the meantime, visit Karl's post at BBR. You can read my general thoughts about the benefits to broadband users of network management in my two part post entitled Confessions of a Network Manager. There's also a post at Ars Technica about my meetings at the FCC.

Don't Fear The Bandwidth Apocalypse, Cable industry lobbies the FCC with some epic distortions... [Broadband Reports]

Martin be damned, cable ISPs want network management freedom [Ars Technica]

On the behavior based advertising front, the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications Subcommittee will be taking up the issue in hearings on Thursday. According to Dow Jones, Chairman Ed Markey (D-MA) and ranking member Joe Barton (R-TX) are in agreement that Congress should require that behavior based advertising systems to allow customers to opt in to advertising.

Last week, this issue was the subject of a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee.

Tracking Of Users Across Web Sites Could Face Strict Rules [CNN.com]

And for those of you who are still waiting to pick up a new 3G Apple iPhone, here's a handy link to an article about Apple's "iPhone Availability Widget." Yes, you can check the inventory status of the new iPhone at your local Apple store from the web. Unfortunately for those of you in Louisville and Columbus, the iPhone Availability Widget currently says that the Apple stores in both cities are currently sold out of iPhones. Good luck as you pursue one of these hard to get devices.

iPhone 3G: Sold out in 21 states [Fortune]

Comments

[Vendeta]

Thanks for the link,Please join me today in wishing Donnia a Happy Birthday, Donnia was an artsit, She was my daughter, She died 11 years ago,and today is her birthday, Love from Christine in Italy xx HAPPY BIRTHDAY DONNIA

[Ejaz]

Hey grand, it's xiTom you probably know me by now, i've been tynirg for about 20 minutes to get onto the server and because im on a laptop i freeze alot and get logged out so when ever i get in finally, i get kicked back out and then can't get back in Just saying something needs to be done

[Andi]

thats quite hard seeing we don't know what area you mean, i just went with a local pivroder, gives 20Mb line with unlimited downloadVA:F [1.9.17_1161](from 0 votes)

[Noe]

We're glad you enjoyed the cilrate and hope you felt entertained enough to check back from time to time and see what's new on all our sites. We always welcome new visitors to our little cyberspace oasis and feel even better to welcome back our previous guests. Hopefully you will be able to relax and see what new entrees we are featuring. We try to provide new daily specials on all our sites every day.

[Robb Topolski]

sineswiper,

It's worse than that. Using Comcast as a judge, they seem to call people about using too much bandwidth at about 20% to 25% or higher.

And Comcast is comparatively generous compared to other ISPs who have named their caps.

They seem to be preparing to name caps. While that's more honest than enforcing unnamed ones, it would be better still to stop throttling the future.

I've been at 6 Mpbs for 3 years now. According to normal Internet growth statistics, network speeds double every two years. We're falling behind the rest of the world.

[sineswiper]

I think he said at one point that there aren't really any caps implemented. I've been called by them before about my usage, but I knew exactly what it was (my P2P), and I used my client settings to set some limits on my seeding. Problem solved.

Knowing that what I do might affect my neighbors, I don't want to be "that guy", the one in the 2% range, that is leeching all of the bandwidth. It's a shared service, and unless I want to pay $300-500/mo for a slow T1 line, it will continue to be shared.

[ARGO]

I would like to know...

Out of 100% 24/7 possible upload time what's the cut-off point here 50% or less?

[sineswiper]

Looking at the BBR article, he totally misses the point:

"Complete congestion is a technical fantasy which only exists in the minds of people who do not understand TCP congestion control and how Additive Increase/Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) works in TCP Congestion avoidance works, he says. "AIMD allows a linear growth of bandwidth utilization until loss occurs, at which time an exponential reduction takes place. This slow-start, fast-fallback ensures congestion cannot cause gridlock."

The fact that the TCP supports congestion avoidance has nothing to do with customers experiencing slow speeds, which is the heart of the matter. Really, TCP has nothing to do with it period. It's a DOCSIS issue.

According to DOCSIS standards, an upstream with a 1.6MHz channel width at QPSK has 2.56Mbps of total bandwidth. At 16QAM (the largest DOCSIS 1.0 supported upstream), it's 10.24Mbps.

What does that mean? Well, Insight sells a 10/1 and 20/1.5 package. Depending on how Insight is setting up their upstreams, there could be a few hundred modems on an upstream. So, at the 16QAM setting, it would take only 10 modems to saturate the bandwidth on the basic package, or 6-7 modems on the 20Mbps package. P2P apps generally just run in the background at max usage, so modems running on full throttle isn't an unreasonable idea.

Thus, the 10 customers that are using up the bandwidth don't make things fun for the rest of the 100-200 customers. Sure, the internet hasn't "stopped", but if you're not getting the speeds you paid for, I'm sure you'll be calling your cable company to complain. (Don't forget that TCP standard has ACK packets that are not getting there, so BOTH download/upload is affected.) Make it 20 or 30 customers, and then maybe your idea of the internet really has stopped.

This isn't just a cable problem, either. DSL sells unbalanced upload/download, too. (1.5M/256k and the like) They don't offer 1.5/1.5 for a reason: it's just not built that way. People download more than they upload, so the network and modulation standards are built that way. FIOS has similar bottlenecks. (You actually believe they allow you to pay for 2-20Mbps upload on the expectation that you will be using 100% of it all the time?)