FCC Commissioner: "Engineers solve engineering problems"

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Tony Lauck [tlauck () madriver com]
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 11:08 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] FCC Commissioner: "Engineers solve engineering problems"

When two customers are clashing over scarce bandwidth it does not matter
what their intent is.  What matters is that the limited resources are
shared fairly between them. This can be done by an ISP without
inspecting anything other than source and destination addresses, i.e. it
does not require any deep packet inspection. This can not be done by
users for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the
concept of "fairness" can not be separated from individual customer
service contracts.

Allocating based on "single application instance" would still fail to
solve the fairness problem.  Users could simply run multiple application
instances to gain a larger share of performance.

In summary, network operators can and should manage their network to
ensure fairness between customers competing for limited network
resources. Once they have done this, their customers will have little
problem figuring out how to prioritize their own traffic, for example by
controlling their own active applications programs.

Tony Lauck
https://www.aglauck.com



David Farber wrote:
> ________________________________________
> From: Mike O'Dell [mo () ccr org]
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 6:46 PM
> To: David Farber
> Subject: Re: [IP] FCC Commissioner: "Engineers solve engineering problems"
>
> it's interesting that the Commissioner's op-ed piece proceeds from
> apocrypha exhibiting a fundamental factual error:
>
> Jacobson's Congestion Avoidance Algorithm does *not* "prioritize
> applications and content needing 'real time' delivery over those
> that would not suffer from delay."
>
> that would have been "IntServe" - the failed Integrated Services model
> promulgated in the IETF half a decade later which was never viable
> at the scale of the Global "Big-I" Internet.
>
> No, Jacobson's algorithm made all TCP streams on the same path tend to
> share more or less equitably when viewed over a relatively long
> interval.
>
> as has been reported before ad nauseum, the behavior being complained
> about these days is an application simply using multiple TCP streams,
> each one of which gets treated independently.
>
> as is often the case, the network behavior which some claim to desire,
> treating all streams from a "single application instance" as an
> aggregate managed in toto, requires the real-time imputation of intent
> which is generally only available in retrospect.
>
> if one possessed an algorithm which could read minds and tell the future
> to the degree required by that, one could find better uses for it
> than simply managing TCP flows. (grin)
>
>      -mo
>
>
>
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