Net Neutrality Never Really Existed?

dido writes "In his most recent column, Robert X. Cringely observes that network neutrality may have never really existed at all. It appears that some, perhaps all, of the major broadband ISPs have been implementing tiered service levels for a long time. From the article: 'What turns out to be the case is that some ISPs have all along given priorities to different packet types. What AT&T, Comcast and the others were trying to do was to find a way to be paid for priority access — priority access that had long existed but hadn't yet been converted into a revenue stream.'" Cringely comes to this conclusion after being unable to get a fax line working. His assumption that the (Vonage) line's failure to support faxing is due to Comcast packet prioritizing is not really supported or proved. But his main point about the longstanding existence of service tiering will come as no surprise to this community.

Nice Logic...

I didn't RTFA, but the mans comes to the conclusion that the big companies are out to get him on the basis that his fax won't work? Astounding logic! We should have been able to figure this out by assuming the companies are trying to increase profits.

Re:Nice Logic...

Back about 10 years ago when I was a kid hanging out at my dad's office after school or on weekends(usually playing Doom1, the only good computers were at his office and he worked insane hours), he was across the hall from his ISP, and they were a friendly lot so we'd stop over and say hi and go to lunch together and stuff like that.

They would always be telling me about problems, finding people who are using way too much bandwidth, significantly more than usual, and how they'd institute an upper cap on those people to make sure they wern't running their own ISP off of the line that they were provided (back in the day people used to buy T1 lines, and turn their homes into little dial-up ISP services).

So theres always been prioritizing of traffic, even if it wasn't always an automatic process. But, I would like to point out, that this guy sounds more like the crazy dishevled homeless guy on the corner "OMGZORZ, MY FAX NO WORK! CONSPIRACY AND RANTYNESS" than really newsworthy

Re:Nice Logic...

Man, that takes me back.

Of course, what you are pointing out is the basic flaw with the whole 'net neutrality' argument. It's not a public network, per se. It's owned and opperated by someone. They have the right and privledge to impose what ever restrictions they want on people.

When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their service

1) Dont do anything illegal. We will rat you out.
2) If you want to run an ISP, thats fine, we have special rates for heavy users
3) If your usage for your web host exceedes a reasonable percentage of our available bandwidth, we reserve the right to raise your rate.

No one seemed to have any issues with these simple rules.

Cringly is even getting bitchslaped for being an ignorant dumbass over this on his own website. Serves him right.

Re:Nice Logic...

That's still a neutral network though as all the data packets have equal chance of reaching their destination. It would only be a problem if you were prioritizing your own VoIP service and/or penalizing data packets for Google Talk/Gizmo/Vonage voice data packets. Or in some other way prioritizing data packets from the Internet that effects all of your customers (not just those abusing your ToS).

Re:Nice Logic...

Of course, what you are pointing out is the basic flaw with the whole 'net neutrality' argument. It's not a public network, per se. It's owned and opperated by someone. They have the right and privledge to impose what ever restrictions they want on people.

This is a non sequitur. Just because it is an owned network does not mean they have the right to restrict people however they want. I may own a private road, but that does not automatically grant me the right to deny passage to the people that own the mineral rights to that same land. I may own a flower shop, but that does not grant me the right to deny service to blacks, without repercussions.

These privately owned networks were funded largely with our tax dollars, hundreds of billions of them the government provided in subsidies. Many of these privately owned networks run on public right of ways to which the government has granted them an exclusive monopoly. Further, those same private businesses are being granted exemption from obeying the law, namely copyright laws, libel laws, pornography laws, free trade laws, conspiracy laws, etc. Those exemptions from obeying the law are granted under "common carrier" statutes that say impartial carriers goods and information are not held liable for what they carry provided they impartially carry everything. I say it is just fine for these private businesses to decide not to be impartial and to slow down or block traffic from some people to gain a competitive advantage. What I object to is them doing that, and being exempted from punishment for the laws. Common carriers are a public service and that is the only reason they are protected. If you're not serving the common good and are just making money for yourself without benefiting society, why should you be given special privileges?

When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their service

So here's the problem... the rules you list have nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality is simply about treating some traffic differently than others not based upon the type, nor the traffic levels, but based upon the person or location from which the traffic is being generated. You can block all users that send more than a gig a day. What you can't do is block just the black users that send more than a gig a day, or just the republican users that use more than a gig a day, or even the users that do business with your competitor and use more than a gig a day... if you still want to be given all the special privileges that are given to common carriers.

Re:Nice Logic...

I may own a flower shop, but that does not grant me the right to deny service to blacks

I'm confused. Could you rephrase in the form of a car analogy?

Not quite.

You, and the other posters seem to have missed the one essential hook for net neutrality, indeed the only one that counts; Common Carrier Status. In order for you, and the phone company, and UPS to not be charged with a crime when someone does something illegal via your service you have to be a Common Carrier. Lacking that status you would be charged as an accessory to the crime even if you ratted them out first.

The cost of being a common carrier is having no content-based selection in what you carry. You must be completely neutral and select customers based upon what they are willing to pay not what they want to send. Once you hook things to what they want to send (i.e. content) then you are no longer a common carrier and you are responsible for knowing what is being sent at all times and answering for it if it isn't.

The issue here is twofold. Firstly the status Cringley is looking at might be more aligned to paying extra so the package moves faster type service which doesn't (necessarily) violate common carrier status. However , the argument that many ISP's are making is that they should be able to have their cake and eat it too that is, filter based upon content in order to make more money and stifle competitors while at the same time not being responsible for the legality of any content sent (i.e. child porn). Such a position is basically a whiny monopolists cant that I have no time for.

And yes it is true that the lines are private, in large part, but the service itself is still an infrastructural service and one that, like phone lines, has costs too significant to allow for basic competition. Not anyone can setup their own phonelines. As such that is the legal hook for government regulation and guaranteed fairness. Without it the dominant position of extant carriers (who built their power under the open competition regime but now want to shut the door on other competitors) would become so dominant as to be a monopoly and kill any hope for an open internet market.

Re:Nice Logic...

let me restate.

For non-network important 'stuff', it's all pretty much best effort.

Things that are important to the day to day opperation of the network (route updates, SNMP/Managment traffic) have to have priority over 'customer' traffic. But so what. That is such a tiny amount of bandwidth compared to the multi-meg service people get...

A real question for vonage : Why dont you have a bandwidth tester on your network that your customers can hit? Better yet, something that produces latency and jitter stats?

That would settle this whole argument once and for all. the closest I could find on their site was this:

http://www.vonage.com/help.php?article=497&categor y=46&nav=102 [vonage.com]

which is weak. It shows my 10M ethernet internet access with a D/L speed of 2.74M and and upload speed of 4.76 Mbs...

Fax compression incompatible with VOIP compression

The last time I tried to setup something similar, I came to a dead end, find several sources via Google that indicated that the compression used by fax machines was incompatible with the compression used by VOIP. Has the stat of the improved, or is Bob on a goose chase here?

Re:Fax compression incompatible with VOIP compress

VOIP uses lossy compression that is heavily tuned for voice. Of course it is going to be lousy for lossless data transmission. If you wound the baudrate down low enough (say 2400baud), you might have some success, but I wouldn't guarantee it.

That's generally correct...

other than G.711 (uncompressed PCM), voice codecs will not handle fax or modem calls. The standard method of handling fax calls over IP is T.38 [wikipedia.org].

Perhaps the fax issue is more technical

I don't know anything about Vonage , but if its like other VOIP systems it'll used lossy compression. Which is death for most kinds of digital to analogue systems running over a phone like using systems such as QAM or PSK since important information will be stripped out. This is why you can't use dial up modems over most (all?) VOIP services (why you'd want to anyway is another matter).

Re:Perhaps the fax issue is more technical

Indeed, he seems to set up a huge conspiracy theory for what could be a faulty digital to analog conversion. I'm sure that there is at least some wrongful packet prioritization, but I doubt you would ever see the effect to the extent that a fax wouldn't work.

What exactly is neutral in net neutralit.

There's a difference between giving priority to different kinds of packets (QoS), and giving priority to packets from different sources, which is what Net Neutrality is all about. QoS is ok, it's encouraged so long as every packet of the same type gets treated the same way. The problem comes when your VoIP packet gets preferential treatment over my VoIP packet.

P.S. Fax is obsolete. Scan and email.

Re:What exactly is neutral in net neutralit.

Net neutrality is also about giving the customer what they paid for. The customer paid for the internet, not for a subset comcastnet, verizonnet, or any other connection. They didn't pay for the company to double dip on both sides.

It be like paying for phone service and getting only good connections to people who paid that also paid that specific phone company off.

Here's why this is a dumb idea

Most transport streams that deliver audio use UDP - it doesn't matter if you lose a few packets here and there because the human hear hears a reasonably good approximation of the original sound. There's no point trying to redeliver packets that get lost, because they will be late anyway by the time you get them there. This scheme will just plain not work with digital data, fax or whatever, if you're losing bits of it here and there. I suppose you could re-implement a reliable TCP-like protocol on top of the unreliable transport stream, but it would be so much easier to take a scan or a photo and email it.

Fax over VoIP

I use Bellsouth (now ATT). I had some serious issues sending faxes as well. One of the key ways to resolving this problem was to set the error correction levels on my Fax to the highest and to set the fax machine rate to the slowest possible speed. Doing this I was able to send and receive faxes with no trouble. The same worked for Comcast as well. This was also with Vonage. I used it with Comcast and VoIP some time ago, though. Perhaps things have changed in the last year or so.

VOIP has it's limits

Since VOIP uses data compression I suspect that it is lossy. Voice can have lossy compression and still sound good to the ear. Even music can work. Since FAX is data that is embedded in higher audio frequency, I would expect it to not work becuase of lossy compression. POTS is analog all the way and has very little loss (except for analog filtering).

Anyone else know about this?

Cringely is a very valuable indicator

I don't really know anything about the subject, but it's Cringely, so I'm going to assume that the opposite of whatever he said was true.

Meh... this is FUD

Prioritization and QoS is good... and expected. It doesn't mean that net neutrality doesn't exist.

Does this guy actually have any technical smarts at all? Does he not realize that in order to do business, there's a certain level of "oversubscription" that is inevitable? ISP's have limits... they can only afford so much backbone to the Internet. This means that in order to prevent multiple broadband users from taking down the entire ISP, they HAVE to QoS the traffic in order that grandma with her PC can get on and send emails to little Johnny in California while torrents flood the network.

Net Neutrality isn't really about prioritization... it's about money. ISPs QoS the traffic, they just don't (yet) charge for certain tiers. I hope they don't... it would be the death of the Internet as we know it... and probably the birth of another more neutral network.

And for reference, I've worked for several ISPs in my career... and the company I work for today is also an ISP... so yes, I can speak somewhat intelligently on this ;)

T.38 for fax over VoIP

If you get a VoIP adapter and provider that support T.38, you'll have much better luck with faxing over VoIP. As I understand it, T.38 allows your VoIP adapter to emulate G3 fax audio signals of the remote fax machine, and conversely, your service provider emulates your fax machine at the interface with the PSTN.

I use a Linksys SPA-2102 VoIP ATA with Gafachi as my service provider, both of which support T.38. I can report that I haven't had a single problem sending or receiving a fax.

Level 3 marks Class of Service

I know for a fact Broadwing now Level 3 Communications does service tagging. Our corporation bought a DS3 and were only to get single session rates of like 300K. We could fill up the entire 45Mb but it took a ridiculous number of sessions to do so. After much troubleshooting with them we found out our traffic was getting tagged as Bronze. They removed the tags and now we're smooth sailing with rates up to 1Mb per session. Still not the best but it is better. So just goes to show yes they are already tagging traffic.

QoS has has been here for a while

QoS(Quality of Service) has been around for a while. Cable Broadband companies, like Comcast give packet priority to their own products, such as Comcast Digital Voice or network access to their own sites. But they previously let competitor products like Vonage suffer by giving it a lower package priority.

My ISP, Shaw Cable, offers users the ability to pay $10 per month to give their third party VoIP services a higher priority on the network by bumping their SIP protocol to a different QoS. While this works, Vonage @ $19.99 + Shaw's QoS @ $10.00 is already more expensive then Shaw's base Digital Phone service.

Probably Jitter issues

First of all, everybody should recognize that most Fax-over-IP use a different codec (typical T.38, if I recall) for encoding the fax signal. If you just plug your fax machine into a plain-old VoIP port, there's a good chance that your gateway will do some lossy audio compression that isn't noticable for speech, but destroys a fax signal. That's one of the reasons that Vonage sells fax as a separate type of line.

Second, IIRC, the initial part of a fax call does some measurement and negotiation -- this is where the two endpoints determine how fast they'll communicate, exactly which protocol they'll use, what capabilities each other have and (most importantly here) test their connection, including round-trip time. But, this negotiation assumes a circuit-switched network, not a packet-switched network.

One of the core things about IP is that the round-trip time can change. Normally, each side would put in a buffer to balance it out, but if the delay changes, the buffer may need to be increased. For people, that's not a big deal -- add an additional 10ms delay midway though a call, and we don't even notice. But, that increase will kill a fax machine.

Think about what you're doing with fax: you are scanning an image, converting into data, then encoding that data as analog, which then gets re-encoded as data for transmission over IP. On the other end, just the reverse happens. Why not skip the extra steps by getting a scanner and emailing it? Or, subscribe to efax, which does it for you.

But, since a lot of people still have fax machines, a better technological solution might be to have your gateway decode the fax signal to get to the underlying image data, and then just transmit THAT to the other end. This is approximately what the T.37 fax standard does (again, IIRC). Unfortunately, it's not particularly well supported anywhere yet.

Yes and No

Back in the 80's, the net was carried by the CLECs. They did not give a hoot. Heck, we had not real security. I was able to connect to the modem at the univeristy with NO password and later my work modem pool at US West had just simple shared password. After all, it was local and long distance that carried the money.

When Clinton commercialized it, at ISPs were created, the CLECs still did not mess with packets other than that ALL Internet packets had the lowest of low packets on the ATM.

By 2000, qwest (old uswest) had packet shaping but I understood that it was only being used it to make sure that their employee packets got through.

2 years ago, Now, I have heard from a friend of mine that is there and they do shape based on other criteria, including who the packet goes to. In particular, qwest had a battle with cogent and SLOWED down the dns to them until they agreed to pay them more connect money. Basically, it has been turned into a weapon of sorts to have the big clecs control the small upstarts. Obviously, it will by used against end customes as well.

Unofficial favoritism

Regardless of technical favoritism I think a lot of people here have probably worked at an ISP or other business where the change requesting and troubleshooting needs of larger customers was routinely given higher priority than the needs of smaller customers, regardless of the fact that the "priority levels" of both issues being the same...

What do I know?

All this stuff about compression and packet prioritixation is nice, but the fact is I've had Vonage for about 3 years now, along with Comcast -- and I've never had a problem sending or receiving dozens of faxes.

Truth is...

Truth is, nobody knows much about most things, until you try to demand money for it. Then the shazbot hits the air circulator.

404 can we get a real link

please.... All I get is a 404 error. It has either been yanked due to /. effect or someone screwed the pooch on the link.

TIA

Real time open network QoS monitoring

Last weekend Verizon took my Boston suburb DSL line out of service several times (Friday night through Sunday). Its too much of coincidence that it started around 11:30 PM Friday night, came back early Saturday morning, then a similar situation Saturday night. Verizon support claimed cluelessness as to the cause (their support technicians admitted to running Windows XP and being able to ping a Verizon router a couple of hops upstream from my local town office -- though they didn't know how to run a TRACERT to the IP address that the Verizon DNS allocators handed out each time I rebooted the in-home Linksys & DSL modem). [I had to check and TRACERT is a standard XP command, presumably they don't educate support technicians how to do anything more than PING.]

At any rate after this outage, I notice that my Google search requrests seem to be taking significantly longer than they used to. Hmmmm.... Now Verizon is in the process of implementing FIOS in many surrounding communities so my suspicions are (a) priority routing may be going to the FIOS customers or (b) requests to google are being down prioritized (in the hopes of being able to extort $$$ for priority routing). I also notice that for several months digital channels on my Comcast Cable TV service it seems to be taking much longer for the TV signal to start after changing channels than it once did.

So my impression is that the local ISPs (Verizon & Comcast) are most likely moving in the direction of prioritization of routing so as to maximize revenue. (In contrast to models like TV where costs are advertiser supported or monopoly telephone companies where a minimal level of service was required.)

I think the only solution to this will be to revisit these issues at the political level (Congress) and/or develop public solutions that eliminate the monopolies. If people are familiar with high speed internet service in countries like Germany, Japan, Korea, etc. it appears that the U.S. is getting a lot less and paying a lot more due to the duopoly positions of companies like Verizon & Comcast.

Towards "taking back the internet", I would argue that we need 2 things.

First, an open source project to use P2P routing statistics to provide an online *free* analysis of where network congestion (or more importantly specific provider) problems may be occurring. I would love to have been able to say to the Verizon support tech, "Well I just used 10 minutes of my "free" AOL service to confirm using www.opennetstats.org that Verizon DSL services in the following communities north of Boston are all down! If the "public" at large can diagnose your network problems then why can't your own support staff do so [1]? I, and I suspect many Linux users, would be happy to run a server which contributed "peer" statistics to a cloud. This could also be used to determine whether services are being degraded to specific providers. If I consistently get high speed access to Stanford's FTP servers but low speed access to Google's servers (Boston to the Bay area) then something is going to be very suspicious in terms of the QoS the middle-cos are providing [2].

Second, communities need to seriously looking at WiMax based public "town" networks based on cheap Linux routers (the poles may belong to the companies but the airwaves belong to *us*). For people who aren't interested in TV on demand (e.g. people whose internet use is still largely base on *reading* and *writing*) there should be a standard high level quality of service which is dictated by the upstream provider (e.g. how many server farms Google wants to build) and not the money sucking, promise you the world and deliver nearly zippo at a decent cost, telcos and cablecos.

So why can't we at /. start at least the opennetstats.org part of this?
Perhaps people familiar with small community open WiMax type projects can post URLs for those as well.

1. The primary problem here appears to be that the data side of the telephone companies rarely if

Anecdotal Evidence, but they missed the point

ISPs *have* been prioritizing traffic [wikipedia.org] for years -- usually based on packet content-type. I helped install a "packet shaper" when I worked at a mom-and-pop dialup shop in the early 2000s. The thing is, TFA missed a key point about Net Neutrality: proponents aren't fighting QoS type prioritization, they're fighting prioritization based on origin and destination. QoS services organize packets based on their content type -- if you wanted to cut down on illegal downloading but still provide a decent web experience, you would throttle down P2P type packets, but let http packets through. What big ISPs are trying to do is go to major websites and say "hey, we'll give you priority for $x/month. Oh, your competitors? We'll just throttle their bandwidth to nothing. But if they pay the big bucks and you don't, you're screwed." What TFA is complaining about (ignoring the VoIP/Fax compression issue already pointed out) is old-skool QoS, something we've had for years. Net Neutrality is about unfairly shutting out the competition.

VoIPoVoIP...

Why would you think that fax over voice over IP would even work? I mean, yeah it might be convenient, so give it a shot, but I cannot fathom the thought process that would lead to the expectation that it would work.

I suppose next someone will be complaining that, after hooking a modem up to their vonage phone, they can't get skype to work.

Vonage & Comcast never worked for me

But I don't think it was a nefarious plot; I just thought the bandwidth from my house back to Comcast was so slow that it didn't support VOIP very well. When I switched to FIOS it worked very well, except when I'm downloading a lot of stuff and the bandwidth gets saturated very quickly.

Comcast may be a lot of things, but I don't think they're smoothly run enough to support a conspiracy like this. And even if you accept Comcast is lowering the priority of Vonage packets, Vonage should disguise their packets better so it's harder for Comcast to spot the app running.

Net transparency, not net neutrality

As long as we've had broadband ISPs we've had net non-neutrality, called "tiers of service". Cringely already knows this, since he pays for commercial grade service. You pay more money, you get (at least in theory) a better grade of service.

What we don't know is exactly *how* the ISPs implement it. Bandwidth speeds alone don't tell the story, since they're theoretical in any case.

For any given grade of service, the ISPs should disclose any and all filtering, prioritization, "shaping" etc -- any treatment of packets that is different from the norm. If your ISP gives priority to its VoIP service, commercial customers, etc, that needs to be disclosed. Any filters intended to slow down P2P or Vonage, that should be disclosed. If they give preferential treatment traffic originating from certain sites for a fee or for any reason (Yahoo gets better access than Google because Yahoo pays), that absolutely should be disclosed.

Somewhere on their websites, referenced from their terms of service and available to the public, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner et al need to fully disclose all their shaping. This should be achievable with much less regulatory effort than trying to define "net neutrality" which never really existed. Then consumers could make informed choices between providers.

And then Cringely can stop whining about his fax :-)

Traffic shaping stuff

I'm the former NOC Director for a national ISP (who quit after saving enough money to get out of that environment). Anyway, we used several utilities (Arbor, homegrown, etc.) to see what kind of traffic was on the backbone. It is relatively simple to set what % of what type of traffic you want to filter. We were using nearly 100% Junipers for peering and that was a good choke point. Actually, we engineering guys wanted to filter things (like p2p) long before the marketing folks bought into it.

I want my $200 billion dollars back

Cringley's getting screwed, as are we all. The technical aspects of how we're getting screwed are important and we need transparency in our ISPs to help resolve that. Then we could go to an ISP that shapes in the way we want.

But look at who we're talking about. We're talking about ILECs and Cable companies. To some small extent we're talking about mom and pop ISPs, but they'll follow the big leaders (or die).

The ILECs were asked about fiber to the home. They said "give us 200 billion dollars, and we'll take care of it." The US government gave them $200,000,000,000 in various forms. (Look at all those zeros.) And what did they deliver? Squat. What do they say they delivered? DSL! That's basically fiber! Did they deliver it everywhere? No. But they delivered it to everyone rich, so that basically everyone!

I feel like Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride:

Inigo Montoya: Offer me everything I ask for.
Count [ILEC]: Anything you want.
Inigo Montoya: I want my [$200,000,000,000] back you son of a bitch.

Net neutrality

well, one obvious advantage to maintaining at least the illusion of net neutrality is "common carrier status" - this is what stops an isp being sued when its naughty customers use p2p to share the latest britney spears hit.

All that (and the legal shield it provides) goes away if the isp *does* look at what the packets are and asserts control over them.

No, it never existed

...although this isn't why.

This is something that I think got missed in a lot of the hullabaloo about net neutrality: people weren't translating from Corporate Executive Speak to Engineer Speak. Instead of thinking about "tiers of service," think about "packet priority" -- giving some packets on the network higher priority and reliability than others. What does this sound like? That's right. We're talking about packet shaping, and the ability to do it has been out there for a long time.

And arguably, some packets on the same network could use higher priority and reliability than others. IP was never designed with the notion that consistent timing (not to mention packet ordering) was important, but as we increasingly start shoving real time data -- voice, streaming audio and video -- down the Great Tubes of the Internet, suddenly that timing does become important. And it makes sense to give those packets higher priority. Remember, lower priority doesn't mean the packets aren't delivered; it means they may be delivered with higher latency, but under all but the crappiest circumstances we're talking about extra milliseconds.

Whether or not it's fair to charge for making packets higher priority is another issue, and certainly worth debating. But this is not quite as nefarious as it's sometimes painted to be. (And remember, you're probably already using a tiered internet service based on how much you pay!)

It's not about Net Neutrality

I read Cram's column with quite a bit of amusement. What's interesting is I ran across exactly the same deal but over a different medium: telephone service over cable. A cable equipment company called me in when their customers reported they were unable to send faxes over the telephony-over-cable product. When I visted the test lab of this company (named withheld to protect the guilty) they demonstrated the failure. Interestingly, the faxing worked when they first started up the testbed, and then it got steadily worse. In order to measure the quality of the channel, I built a POTS tester that would measure line performance over a long timebase -- 24 hours, in fact. (To do a longer test, I would have needed more disk space.)

When I analyzed the data, I found that the cable system had a bad case of vibrato, which translated in modems terms to phase jitter. The oscillators the cable vendor used in it circuits weren't up to the task. In some cases, the 1-Khz phase jitter exceeded 360 degrees. No modem using phase modulation can stand that. Period.

Do the VoIP terminals, not to mention the implementations using PCs, have better oscillators? Can they do a better job of maintaining time coherence? That's even before you look at the effects of routing and propagation over the Internet.

Bob, I think you are asking too much of Vonage.

And reading way too much into what you are seeing. It isn't just the network. It's the end terminals, too. The oscillators in the cable system were supposed to be good to 20 parts per million. The cheap crystals used in the VoIP terminals and in PCs are more than an order of magnitude worse in stability. Did I mention that the cable-system oscillators used phase-locked loop technology to maintain even better accuracy with each other?

Oops.

apples and oranges

What he's talking about is QoS and ToS handling, and is not what is RELLY being discussed in the net neutrality debates at all.

Using QoS is not in itself a bad thing. It can actually improve most user's network performance a good bit. In the case of prioritizing routing tables (BGP) over other traffic, it's the only sensible thing to do. After all, if the BGP traffic doesn't get through, the route goes down.

The difference is a simple matter of who pays for what. When QoS is being used to optimize the customer's service all is well. When it is instead tuned based on who (besides the customer) paid them an extra fee (bribe), the customer suffers. Essentially, the ISP is/would be getting paid to degrade their customer's service to everyone else. Way too many networks already double dip, tuning QoS based on the destination paying extra is triple dipping. Talk about greedy.

Good summary

It's seldom a good summary is posted on Slashdot. Typically the poster provides some nonsense or poses some arbitrary unrelated question at the same time. I hope more posters take after kdawson in actually reading the article, digesting its contents and add some value to the slashdot readers by exposing the gist of the article.

We've got too much crap-publishing going on and anything and anyone who helps reducing the need for readers to weed through crap is a good thing.

Re:What a waste

(list of cringely stuff)
What a waste of a real estate on the Slashdot front page.

You had to read the article to find out that Cringely opinion-trolls? He even admitted it in public once. Lemme tell you about a guy named Dvorak...