Net Neutrality effect here?

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gehenna

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#1247933 27-Feb-2015 16:52

My definition of net neutrality more conceptual than mired in the technological detail that @sbiddle mentions.

To me it's whether or not we will allow residential ISP's to charge for tiered service levels when accessing a particular website or service. I say residential meaning traffic over a non-commercial/business grade connection, because you can already define service levels on those connections and that's just fine with me.

E.G. Can an ISP provide the option to pay more to access Facebook faster, and if you don't opt into the "Facebook Package" can they slow your access speeds in order to favour those who are paying for faster access. That kind of thing.

It's very murky though. I'd happily pay for faster access to certain services on my residential connection - give me a "Bittorrent/Usenet Package" or an "Xbox Live" package and I'll jump on it.

I just don't think net neutrality can work conceptually, let alone technically.

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#1247941 27-Feb-2015 17:11

testha:
NonprayingMantis:
the only bad bit about the comparison is that it is a lot easier for a single individual to use masses and masses of international banwidth than it is for an individual to clog up a 100 lane motorway on their own.

Nope, the amount of roads you can build in NZ is limited by the amount of physical land mass available. Opposite to internet traffic, where advances in technology (Moores Law) speed up the routers handling the traffic, ever increasing internet speeds.

Another problem with the motorway/Internet analogy is that a large part of the cost of building a motorway is compulsory acquisition of (very expensive) land to build it on.
The technology of motorway building is old, and only changes slowly.
With the Internet, construction costs are mostly the "building materials" / hardware, and IT technology is evolving rapidly to make it bigger, faster, and cheaper.

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Lias

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#1247942 27-Feb-2015 17:12

We could do with some more "Net Neutrality"ish things to be legislated here.

Force Vodafone to "unbundle" the HFC network, so we can chose any ISP on a cable connection.
Force certain large ISP's to peer at WIX.
Force companies like Vocus and SCC to provide bandwidth to anyone who wants it and at the same price for all.

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sbiddle

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#1247994 27-Feb-2015 18:35

Vodafone HFC network has 3rd parties on it and there have been a number of ISPs over the years who have offered services over it. The only one I'm aware of now who still does is Xtreme Networks.

pchs

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#1248047 27-Feb-2015 20:16

Lias: We could do with some more "Net Neutrality"ish things to be legislated here .

Force Vodafone to "unbundle" the HFC network, so we can chose any ISP on a cable connection.
They have had a wholesale product for some years, ISP's like Xtreme in Wellington sell it, and Snap (although Snap have only released it for Corporate/Enterprise customers)

Force certain large ISP's to peer at WIX.
All Large ISP's peer with each other or have a domestic product, compared to Australia and USA we have great peering. I think what you mean is for ISP's to have "free national peering" Although Telecom do have a local peering product.

Force companies like Vocus and SCC to provide bandwidth to anyone who wants it and at the same price for all.
SCCN and Vocus will sell to anyone who wants to buy it! they just sell in bulk because they are wholesalers who deal in large capacity purchases, and you need to have the infrastructure and engineers at you end to support this.

raytaylor

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#1248110 27-Feb-2015 21:54

gnfb: This Net neutrality thing will it happen here?
Article

We lost net neutrality before it was even an issue.
Back in the dialup days when you paid by the megabyte, and national data was free.

Then when the national data on broadband subscriptions started getting counted, things became more equal. Then internet reached a mass, and everyone was used to this being the norm, that unmetered sites like telstra clear unmetering TVNZ ondemand was seen as a "feature" and a win for consumers.

The USA would call it anti-competitive and a violation of net neutrality now.

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hamish225

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#1248636 28-Feb-2015 21:12

raytaylor:
gnfb: This Net neutrality thing will it happen here?
Article

We lost net neutrality before it was even an issue.
Back in the dialup days when you paid by the megabyte, and national data was free.

Then when the national data on broadband subscriptions started getting counted, things became more equal. Then internet reached a mass, and everyone was used to this being the norm, that unmetered sites like telstra clear unmetering TVNZ ondemand was seen as a "feature" and a win for consumers.

The USA would call it anti-competitive and a violation of net neutrality now.

i mentioned this on reddit one day and thats almost exactly what someone said back to me :P

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DarthKermit

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#1252352 6-Mar-2015 16:02

sbiddle: Vodafone HFC network has 3rd parties on it and there have been a number of ISPs over the years who have offered services over it. The only one I'm aware of now who still does is Xtreme Networks.

Why is that? Unfavourable commercial terms from Voda?

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noroad

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#1252394 6-Mar-2015 17:55

last time I used the "wholesale" HFC network for customers it was more expensive for the service to the wholesaler than they were selling it retail including internet! It has always been this way and TCL wholesale was never the slightest bit interested in changing this. At the same time as complaining about Telecom wholesale anti-competitive rates they were doing the same thing. I did once try and raise this with the commerce commission and they were not in the slightest bit interested in even looking into it. I assume this has not changed in the 5-6 years since and that is why you pretty much why you can only buy in house Vodafone internet on their HFC network. Why would an RSP ever use it when it costs more to wholesale the last mile than retail internet rates.

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#1275687 1-Apr-2015 20:28

testha:
sbiddle:
Treating each and every packet equally seems to be concept of "net neutrality" as many people know it, and can never happen. This is very different to the problem they're trying to solve of artificially restricting or shaping products or services for commercial reasons, which an entirely different argument.

Why not? All you need is bigger pipes and all packets can equally co-exist. The whole argument against net neutrality is about not having to invest in bigger infrastructure. Once you have a 100MB/s line packet prioritization it doesnt matter anymore. When a 2GB download only takes a few seconds, all other services wont be impacted much.

I already pay my ISP for access to the internet, I also pay my hoster for server traffic, why would I need to live with restrictions? Because my ISP claims to know what traffic is more important for me?

LOL

and more LOL...

If internet providers didn't use contention to effectively create a pool of shared bandwidth, then internet would probably cost $1000 a month. International links (and some other inter-networks) are not a free unlimited resource and have to be managed in a way that everyone gets an "experience" that FEELS fast.

If 100Mbps was enough then you wouldn't mind laggy VoIP and games every time the teenager in the next room did 2GB downloads. Some services are more sensitive to latency, while others are more sensitive to packet loss, and therefore NEED different priorities as they transit choke points in and between networks. Some businesses actually do need to set their own priorities and have full use of a given amount of bandwidth, and they pay for that privilege and for the guarantees of meeting the performance specs in their agreement.

You only pay for a best efforts service but the ISP has to implement QoS that makes it useable. They don't have to balance out the people sucking up the bandwidth, but they would lose all their other customers if they didn't.

Time to find a new industry!

raytaylor

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#1275884 2-Apr-2015 09:29

A 20 Mbit International Committed information rate costs $1200 a month from a local provider here in Napier.

If it costs around that much to deliver data to the 'napier area' then thats $60 / mbit
No home user wants to pay their $90 and get 1.3mbits

So three things exist to make that 20mbits go further and allow an ISP to spread that across multiple customers
1) Its shared. This means that multiple people can get the full 20mbits, but not necessarily at the same time. And when the pipe is full,
2) Traffic QoS priority so that voip and other sensitive applications do not suddenly drop out during a call etc.
3) Torrent Caching and CDN nodes - some content is redirected to local caches so that it costs less to deliver, and when certain content is being accessed by a user, it may not need to use any of the 20mbit pool. But running caching systems and CDN nodes still costs alot and to make them efficient you need thousands of users under them.

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SaltyNZ

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#1275949 2-Apr-2015 10:43

raytaylor: But running caching systems and CDN nodes still costs alot and to make them efficient you need thousands of users under them.

And they're likely to get more expensive, less effective, or both in the next few years. One negative side-effect of the push to encrypt everything on the wire thanks to the Five Eyes' insistence that they should be able to snarf up everything about everyone all the time, is that when the session is HTTPS, proxies and caches can't get in the middle and do their jobs (because 'not letting someone get in the middle' is basically the point of HTTPS).

However, because they are so useful, I expect someone will come up with some ideas around ways to have a secure side-conversation with a cache or proxy to make it work again. It will necessarily involve being able to trust a third party (the cache/proxy). I assume if you are paranoid enough about whatever you're doing that you can't trust them, then you probably need some other communications method, like hand delivery. After all, you have to trust the web server anyway.

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