Category: Net Neutrality

Here are my opening remarks from Media Access Project’s Innovation ’08 in Santa Clara this morning. A DVD will be available shortly. This was a lively discussion, with Google and Vuze on the case.

The remarks are cross-posted to CircleID and were Slash-dotted. One Slashdot reader said: Thank you, I finally read a post from someone who gets it. I didn’t think that would ever happen. That’s not a bad response.

Good morning and welcome. My name is Richard Bennett and I’m a network engineer. I’ve built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed’s on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing.

I’m opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we’re going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain.
Continue reading “Introductory Remarks, Innovation ’08”

Why Tiered Broadband is a Wonderful Thing and ASIVS – Blog Maverick

There is a new and exciting development. Its called an Application Specific Integrated Video Service (ASIVS) . What is an ASIVS ? Its a computer dedicated specifically to downloading and playing both standard definition and high definition video. You connect it to a network that is dedicated to delivering GIGABITS PER SECOND of high quality video with ZERO buffering. Its amazing, it always works and connects right to your standard def or High Definition TV, easily. Most of the systems I have seen have a pretty good programming guide and scheduling system and they will let you download AS MUCH VIDEO AS YOU WANT, limited only by the size of its hard drive!!

If you haven’t heard of the ASIVS, its because most people call it a DVR.

If downloading TV shows is so important to you, add a DVR to your cable or satellite service for 5 bucks a month and download all you want. If you want to watch those shows on your laptop, connect the composite video out in your DVR to the composite in on your laptop. Same with movies.

Read the whole thing, it’s a classic.

Technorati Tags: net+neutrality

Here’s an update on the MAP/AT&T tech policy event next week:

Where: de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University
500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053

When: Thursday, June 12

10:15 AM Panel 1: What Does Net Neutrality Mean Now?
Comcast’s interruption of P2P transmissions has generated debate about the need and wisdom of deploying advanced net management technologies. Can and will the private sector address this problem without government mandates? Historically, the debate about Net Neutrality has focused on who can access information distribution channels, and under what circumstances. Comcast’s recent interruption brings up new questions, explored here by some of the leading experts in the field.

Panelists:
George Ou, Technology for Mortals
Richard Bennett, Network Architect, Broadband Politics
Ronald B. Yokubaitis, Chairman and CEO, Data Foundry
Richard Whitt, Senior Policy Counsel, Google
Jay Monahan, General Counsel, Vuze, Inc.
Parul Desai (Moderator)

They had me down as “Musician” which is pretty funny for anyone who ever heard me sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

Another panel will discuss the 700 MHz auction after lunch:

12:30 PM Panel 2: Spectrum Policy After the 700 MHz Auction
The FCC’s recently concluded 700 MHz auction has been praised, criticized, and puzzled over. Auction veterans will discuss what happened, why it happened, and what will happen next.

Panelists:
Coleman Bazelon, Principal, The Brattle Group
Gregory Rose, Economist, Gregory Rose & Associates
Carolyn Brandon, CTIA
Marc Berejka, Senior Director of Public Policy, Microsoft Corporation
Joanne Hovis, President, Columbia Telecommunications Corp.
Harold Feld (Moderator)

UPDATE: the Times BITS Blog has totally re-written its story, removing most of the incendiary language, so this post is now officially academic. A similar piece in The Register has also been re-written. It would be a lot easier for everyone if our blogger/journalists would get things right the first time, but better late than not even.

Comcast’s “protocol agnostic” network management system has been generally praised by all parties in the network neutrality debate as a sane and sensible approach to congestion management. As the system enters trials today in two locations, the praise has been tempered by some irrational criticism. Saul Hansell, a New York Times blogger, sees the new system as something quite nefarious, a “blacklist:”

It will test new devices that will keep track of Comcast users and assemble a blacklist of heavy users. Those on the blacklist will find that all of their online activities may slow down at peak times: from downloading movies to checking e-mail.

This account is extremely bizarre, but not unprecedented. Saul Hansell, meet your progenitor.

Come on down to Innovation ’08 at eBay’s place in San Jose for this outstanding panel on June 12th:

What Does Net Neutrality Mean Now?

Comcast’s interruption of P2P transmissions has generated debate about the need and wisdom of deploying advanced net management technologies. Can and will the private sector address this problem without government mandates? Historically, the debate about Net Neutrality has focused on who can access information distribution channels, and under what circumstances. Comcast’s recent interruption brings up new questions, explored here by some of the leading experts in the field.

Also on my panel are George Ou and Ronald B. Yokubaitis, CEO of Data Foundry. The ever-shifting sands of public policy will be prominently on display.

I finally got a result from the Glasnost server after several unsuccessful attempts, but it’s unfortunately not correct:

Is BitTorrent traffic on a well-known BitTorrent port (6881) throttled?

2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were
interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets.
It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.

The BitTorrent download worked.
Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads.
In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 2079 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved
maximal 2147 Kbps. You can find details here.

Is BitTorrent traffic on a non-standard BitTorrent port (4711) throttled?

2 out of 2 BitTorrent transfers were
interrupted while uploading (seeding) using forged TCP RST packets.
It seems like your ISP hinders you from uploading BitTorrent traffic to our test server.

The BitTorrent download worked.
Our tool was successful in downloading data using the BitTorrent protocol.

There’s no indication that your ISP rate limits your BitTorrent downloads.
In our tests a TCP download achieved minimal 2135 Kbps while a BitTorrent download achieved
maximal 2126 Kbps. You can find details here.

Immediately before and after this test I seeded a Torrent successfully, at a rate in the range of 30-40 K Bytes/sec. So I know seeding is possible on my connection, but Glasnost claims it isn’t. This is not a cool tool.

Still no answers to my questions, despite a promise to have some by Friday.

Here’s an example of the kind of blatant falsehoods that Free Press and their ilk have been circulating about Internet regulation, from the Future of Music Coalition Blog:

Recently, Comcast blocked access to the legal, licensed audiovisual delivery service called Vuze — which competes with the company’s own AV offerings — simply because Vuze utilizes peer-to-peer technology to distribute its licensed content.

Excuse me, but no such thing happened. Vuze works fine on the Comcast network and always has. Vuze petitioned the FCC for a rule that would define network management in some specific terms, and did not themselves allege any blocking.

Continue reading “Future of Music Coalition Strays into Fantasyland”

Free Press’ network neutrality campaign reached new heights of hysteria last week with the release of a wild press release on the Glasnost study. Their press release abounded with errors, which Register editor Andrew Orlowski endeavored to correct. Here’s his analysis:

With its campaign to “Save The Internet”, Free Press may achieve two goals that I fear are the opposite of what its biggest backer, George Soros, intended when he financed the outfit.

One is that it makes the job of genuine free speech activists – who work to promote cases of real repression – much harder.

The other is that it mandates a broken network as the default technical standard for citizens.

…So in banging the drum for the virtual campaign, Free Press makes the big guys even stronger. That’s an odd result for an outfit that says its goal is “to promote diverse and independent media ownership”.

The “broken network” is the part that I’ve written about, but the free speech issue is much larger.

If you have any doubt about the extent of Free Press’ misinformation campaign, here’s a quote from Free Press employee Tim Karr on the Save the Internet blog (which Free Press controls:)

…Comcast secretly put in place a system that makes it virtually impossible for most of its users to use BitTorrent and other file-sharing applications…

This is not, of course, the experience of Comcast customers.

I’ve sent a list of questions to the Glasnost people myself, and have received only partial answers, so more on that later. The short version is that they’ve collected some interesting data and failed to interpret them correctly. We know that cable ISPs use RST packets to reduce the number of outbound connections used by P2P. The interesting questions relate to the impact these packets have on applications generally and P2P in particular.

The neutralists are touting a study by a German research center alleging Comcast blocking of BitTorrent at all hours of the day:

The Max Planck Institute has released a new survey of worldwide BitTorrent traffic finding that Comcast and Cox are the chief offenders for throttling traffic, and that they block at all hours of the day and night.

The study is here.

The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge: “…These results lead us to three conclusions. First, the largest cable companies were doing more blocking than they have admitted to Congress or to the FCC. Second, other cable companies, and all telephone companies, can manage their networks without the need for blocking the traffic of customers. Finally, the fact that the blocking goes on all the time should tell the Commission that it needs to act soon to prevent the practice.”

Like a good engineer, I tried to measure my Comcast link using the German tool, and got this (click on the image to enlarge:)

This tells me that the test system has some problems, as the server has been busy for several hours. Feel free to try it yourself.

I know my BitTorrent isn’t blocked on my Comcast connection because I tested it in real-world conditions: yesterday, I successfully downloaded Fedora Linux version 9, over Comcast using BitTorrent, at full speed and with no interruptions. I then seeded it for several hours before shutting down Azureus (the Linux client for Vuze’s implementation of BitTorrent) and just restarted it an hour ago. So I’m now seeding without incident (click to enlarge:)

Pardon me if I’m skeptical of Ms. Sohn’s charges. It may be that the Germans have found something, but I can’t confirm it; perhaps we need a better instrument.

The Germans are apparently measuring TCP-level behavior, the thing that CMU professor Jon Peha and the infamous David Reed have measured and commented upon. The problem with this analysis is that Vuze’s BitTorrent uses 50 TCP streams by default, continually testing them for the 4 best and making these 4 active at any given time for any given piece of content. So while some of the 50 are torn down by Sandvine management systems, they’re quickly replaced and you retain 4 active upstream TCP connections most of the time.

The test that should be done would simply record the seeding rate of popular BitTorrent sessions like mine. When you do that – test the overall contribution to the swarm, not the 50 TCP connections individually – you find that BitTorrent works quite well on cable networks, contrary to the claims that the neutrality regulation advocates are making.

The German tool simply doesn’t produce meaningful data, and the advocacy groups touting it (Free Press is another) it are deliberately misleading the public.

UPDATE: Peter Svensson, Free Press’ personal reporter, has written the predictable story about the evils of the BitTorrent blocking uncovered by the alleged research organization in Germany. It’s predictable because Svensson ran the gamut of interviews with ISP critics, but didn’t talk to anyone who might shed light on the study. In fact, reducing the number of active TCP connections from a given BitTorrent user often increases his throughput, just like metering lights on freeway on-ramps increase freeway traffic speeds. This is only one of the critical points that these amateur network engineers don’t get.

There’s an interesting article on the Chronicle of Higher Education about the RIAA’s automated pirate catching program. It works just as I said it did at the USF Toll Roads Symposium, which is to say it doesn’t involve Deep Packet Inspection or a private police state, as Professor Tim Wu alleged.