Record and Reverie

The term Net Neutrality covers a lot of hotly debated topics but at its core is whether ISPs should be allowed to treat some traffic differently. In the midst of the discussion, one minor fact seems to have been lost: Not all packets are truly equal.

Around 10 years ago, I had DSL with 768kbps down and 128kbps up. I quickly learned that if I did any upload at all, the download speeds suffered greatly. Upon investigation, I discovered that the outgoing control packets, such as ACK packets, were being stuffed in the same queue as outgoing data packets. One of the solutions was to employ egress traffic shaping. This was simply prioritizing control packets such as ACK, SYN, and RST, followed by small packets all ahead of the large data packets. The result: uploading data no longer slowed downloads. Today, with much higher speeds, this shaping has less benefit, but it is not gone.

If shaping were available on download links, what effect would it have? The control packets are less frequent on downstream links but they are still present. On the other hand there is an advantage to shaping between large data packets. Assume a household has a 15Mbps downstream connection and is watching a movie off Netflix in Super-HD (up to 7Mbps). The teenager in the household starts a torrent that is properly throttling its upload speed as to not saturate the connection. The resulting 20+ connections in the torrent will overwhelm the single connection the Netflix client is using and its quality will drop. If downstream shaping where employed which prioritized Netflix over other connections, the torrent will consume all the remaining bandwidth, but not encroach on the bandwidth used by Netflix. Applying this kind of shaping immediately before the last mile would achieve most of the desired effect since this is where the queues build up awaiting available bandwidth.

In the above, I’ve essentially made an argument for Quality of Service (QoS). This is not new though it is barely used. The question is who marks the priorities on the packets? To affect downstream content, the ISP must mark packets following a set of rules but the best solution is for the consumer to determine the rules. Imagine if an ISP allowed the consumer to prioritize their downstream bandwidth among a few common options. Then the solution to scenario above would be plausible.

Now for the legal aspect. I would argue that ISPs should be allowed to prioritize traffic at the consumer’s behest on an individual basis. Among the available prioritization options, no prioritization must be an allowed option. This yields the best consumer protection whilst allowing for future innovation. It’d be a shame if laws and/or regulations the were intended to protect consumers resulted in a loss of advancements being made available to them.