Category: Networks

Communications Daily did a good write-up of the ITIF’s Network Management Forum yesterday, where Brett Glass and I held forth with our views and recommendations about the Internet’s traffic glut. CD is a subscription-only publication, so I can’t link to the article, but here’s a little snippet where I pitched tiered service and Weighted Fair Queuing:

ISPs might reduce worries about competition and free speech raised by neutrality regulation supporters by putting management in consumers’ hands, Bennett said. A common argument for neutrality regulation says network management lets ISPs favor their services over competitors’. Bennett proposed letting consumers designate the services they want given the most bandwidth. Consumers would use their home gateway to assign VoIP, Bit-Torrent and other services to tiered subscription “buckets,” he said. Each bucket would offer an amount of time for each level of bandwidth, he said. A consumer wanting fast BitTorrent service could put it in the high-priority bucket and demote Web browser service to a low-priority bucket. If the bucket used up its high-priority minutes, the BitTorrent service would be “demoted” to a lower tier bucket, he said…

Adding bandwidth on networks won’t fix congestion woes, Bennett and Glass said, citing Japan. At 100 Mbps, Japan has some of the world’s largest pipes, but still faces significant congestion due to P2P networks, they said.

This is an example of solving a problem through technology rather than by regulation and law, and that’s what we do in networking.

Here’s the slides I showed at the ITIF in Washington, DC today.

The talk was well-received, if I do say so, especially the concept of ISPs selling buckets of packets at high and medium priority while allowing unlimited scavenger class for peer-to-peer.

Multichannel News has reported that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin made an exceptionally clueless remark about Comcast today:

Martin added that “two of the more troubling aspects” of the Comcast matter was that in his view Comcast at first denied the allegations, though he didn’t specify the nature of the allegations or the denials.

He said he was also troubled by allegations that Comcast altered certain user information in packets to effect a delay in peer-to-peer transmissions.

The first remark is spot-on, as Comcast clearly hurt itself by denying it was shaping traffic, but the second remark is clueless. Martin confuses the RST bit in the TCP header with “user information” when in fact it’s nothing of the kind. As RFC 3168 says, it’s a control bit:

There exist some middleboxes (firewalls, load balancers, or intrusion detection systems) in the Internet that either drop a TCP SYN packet configured to negotiate ECN, or respond with a RST. This document specifies procedures that TCP implementations may use to provide robust connectivity even in the presence of such equipment. – p. 4

I understand that Martin is a political creature and not an engineer, but is it too much to ask the head of the FCC to understand the difference between “user information” and network control?

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this guy needs to get over his blind hatred of cable companies. I don’t care if the cable guy ran over his dog, he needs to bring a little balance to his job.

Next Wednesday, March 12, Brett Glass and I will be speaking on network management at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation‘s office in Washington, DC.

For me, this will be an opportunity to develop some of the points I raised but didn’t have time to flesh out at the FCC hearing at Harvard, such as per-user fairness, Quality of Service tagging, and the role of back-pressure in the IETF model of congestion management. Most of the heavy lifting on traffic management is done inside ISP broadband networks today, and the Internet protocols have some unfortunate side effects when layered on top of them.

I’ll also explain the consequences of applying Free Press’ “Deadwood System” to modern broadband networks and contrast it with a practical alternative.

Next on the speaking agenda is an appearance at Supernova 2008, one of the premier events at the intersection of networking and public policy. I’d like to speak at Dave Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect, but he’s not real thrilled about the idea. Isenberg trashed me in absentia during a talk Tom Evslin made at the Berkman Center a while back, and I’d like equal time to respond.

UPDATE: Mr. Isenberg has offered me free registration to F2C. That’s not as good as a place at the table, but it’s a start. I should point out that his conference is highly-regarded by people who agree with his “stupid network” formulation as well as by those who don’t. We all want our networking experience to be as free from barriers as possible, we just disagree on which barriers are most significant. In Isenberg’s world, the carriers are the problem because they want to squeeze every last penny out of their customers; in mine, the biggest barrier is the unbridled appetite for network bandwidth of about 1% of the people who share wires with me. His concern is theoretical, while mine is real.

Check The Register for my write-up of the FCC hearing.

Testifying as an expert witness on bandwidth management at the FCC’s field hearing in snowy Cambridge this Monday was a heady experience. The hearing took place in a cramped corner of the Harvard Law School, a building that was already decorated with pickets, banners, and reporters when I arrived. Gingerly stepping through the snow in my California sailing shoes enabled me to avoid the protesters and find my way into the hallowed Ames courtroom. The room itself was full of buzz, and packed with a heavily Comcast-friendly crowd thanks to the cable giant’s exploitation of the first-come, first-seated rule. Comcast had gamed the hearing’s seating rules, hiring place-holders.

The composition of the crowd wasn’t apparent until Comcast VP David Cohen got an overly enthusiastic round of applause at the end of his prepared remarks, but pretty much only then. They didn’t hiss and boo – unlike the free-speech-loving neutralitarians who replaced them. I was invited to present an afternoon session.

It gets better, as I propose a decision-making framework.

Here’s your announcement on the FCC hearing in Boston this Monday.

11:00 a.m. Welcome/Opening Remarks

11:45 a.m. Technology Demonstration – Gilles BianRosa, Chief Executive Officer, Vuze, Inc.

12:00 p.m. Panel Discussion 1: Policy Perspectives

* Marvin Ammori, General Counsel, Free Press

* Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

* The Honorable Daniel E. Bosley, State Representative, Massachusetts

* David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation

* The Honorable Tom Tauke, Executive Vice President – Public Affairs, Policy and Communications, Verizon Communications

* Timothy Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

* Christopher S. Yoo, Professor of Law and Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, University of Pennsylvania Law School

1:30 Lunch break

2:15 Panel Discussion 2: Technological Perspectives

* Daniel Weitzner, Director, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group

* Richard Bennett, Network Architect

* David Clark, Senior Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

* Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer, BitTorrent

* David P. Reed, Adjunct Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab

* Scott Smyers, Senior Vice President, Network & Systems Architecture Division, Sony Electronics Inc.

3:45 p.m. Closing Remarks

4:00 p.m. Adjournment

The infamous “Ernesto” announces new countermeasures to grab even more of Comcast’s residential network:

BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, ISPs have been doing it for years. When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clients introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This was the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers, which is about to enter new level.

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

As much fun as this sort of thing is, it’s not really going to work. Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent explains why:

…when it comes to dealing with ISPs, obfuscation is some combination of hostile, unprofessional, and harmful. Software projects which value quality over featuritis generally steer clear of such things, especially when their potential effectiveness level is the equivalent of spitting in one’s face than actual utility.

Oh, and by the way, the amount of CPU necessary to do a diffie-hellman key exchange is enough to be annoying, and if you’re making a connection via a trusted intermediary, like, say, a tracker, or already have a reasonably secret piece of shared information like, say, an infohash, there’s no need to use a diffie-hellman key exchange to establish a shared secret. Imagining that crypto will stop being done by dilettantes is clearly a pipe dream though.

This won’t stop the pirates, of course, but it should cause them to think about what they’re doing. Not that it will.

Note: A reader points out that Cohen’s remarks referred to a previous obfuscation scheme that clearly didn’t work, and suggests the current one will work for some magic reason. I doubt it, because all that Comcast has to do is look for a large number of inbound connections when none are going out. No form of obfuscation will hide that scenario because the traffic stats alone are enough to expose it. I never cease to be amazed by how naive these pirates can be.

Here are some of the jewels among the comments submitted to the FCC on Save the Internet’s hilariously silly petition opposing sensible network management practices.

Brett Glass, the operator of a wireless ISP in Wyoming, points out that Saving the Internet would put him out of business and his customers off the net.

Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation explains a bit about networking in general and DOCSIS in particular.

Comcast slams its clueless critics in a forceful and detailed response.

Competitive Enterprise Institute advocates market solutions.

Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center reminds the Commission of the framework around new rules.

AT&T comments in support of rationality:

Some net neutrality proponents urge the Commission to preserve what they view as “the fundamental idea on the Internet since its inception . . . that every Web site, every feature, and every service should be treated exactly the same.” But this “dumb pipes” vision of the Internet is irresponsible nonsense. Some real-time Internet applications—such as video, voice, and telemedicine—have a much greater need for high service quality than other applications, such as ordinary e-mail. The Internet’s constituent networks can satisfy consumer needs only by treating such applications differently.

Verizon lays out the dollars and options:

Investing nearly $23 billion, Verizon has led the charge in fiber deployment and now makes its fiber-to-the-premises network (FiOS) available to 6.8 million homes and businesses, with plans to pass 18 million homes and businesses with FiOS by the end of 2010. Verizon’s investments are prompting competitors – such as the cable companies and other broadband providers – to respond, which has benefited consumers with lower prices and increased speed and quality. Competitive alternatives include 3G mobile wireless, fixed wireless/WiMAX, WiFi, broadband over powerline, and satellite. Verizon Wireless’s 3G technology, for example, now reaches 242 major United States cities with a total population of more than 200 million people.

George Ou gets down with the technical issues, and illustrates the key point.

Hands off the Internet joins the fray.

Progress and Freedom manages the demand glut.

Save the Internet isn’t wearing any clothes.