Bye-bye Net neutrality.

[Origisaurus]

Court: FCC has no power to regulate Net neutrality

It seems to me that the reasoning is unassailable - there is no law for FCC to enforce, therefore the regulation is illegal.  I think the Supremes will uphold, 7-2.

[Richardk]

I think it's more of an idea at this point, so like you said what could they enforce if there's no law.

This is both good and bad. Good because maybe this will push the discussion to the forefront but bad because I think neutrality is a good thing.

I understand Comcast's point. What do you do about bandwidth hogs? On the other hand everything is getting pushed to the web and we're getting / are dependent on it. Who's to say that my content is less important than yours?

[The Original Henry]

The ISPs have nobody but themselves to blame  They are out selling 10Mbit or 20Mbit residential connections knowing full well that they can't possibly support those connections if someone were to actually use them for all they're worth. It's a marketing game for them - we have faster connections so sign up with us. They're overselling their network capacities way beyond what normal fluctuations would allow and blaming the "heavy users" for their network problems while they rake in all the monthly fees. I've seen broadband networks so oversold that individual subscriber throughputs were no better than dial-up, but the ISPs were still allowed to sell and bill the connections as 3Mbit or 5Mbit broadband. That's unacceptable.

Bandwidth should work like water rights in the west. By signing up for a 10Mbit connection I am establishing a right that I may exercise at any time by placing a "call" on it. If I'm not using it then it is free to be re-purposed by the ISP however they like, but by law (hint hint, legislators) they would be required to provide full throughput when a "call" is made for it. If they can't support all of the simultaneous "calls" being made by their subscriber base then they would have to offer their services in smaller chunks until they can. Then if they want to add more subscribers or increase their offerings to current subscribers they would have to build out their networks to actually support them first.

I think if that were to actually happen you would start to see the true nature of the ISPs oversell-and-shift-the-blame game.

[The Gorn]

... I've seen broadband networks so oversold that individual subscriber throughputs were no better than dial-up, but the ISPs were still allowed to sell and bill the connections as 3Mbit or 5Mbit broadband. That's unacceptable.

Bandwidth should work like water rights in the west. ...  If they can't support all of the simultaneous "calls" being made by their subscriber base then they would have to offer their services in smaller chunks until they can.

WOW! Thanks for the analysis. That makes absolutely perfect sense as to what's going on.

[Origisaurus]

Talk about WOW!

I may be wrong, but the real issue, terminology (lipstick on the pig) aside, is that the FCC reg sought to force ISPs to sell to other ISPs at unprofitable rates.  The word for this is "socialism".  The only precedent for this is in the minds of those who can't read the Constitution and/or think it is a great impediment to "progress"

As for selling beyond capacity, I just got in my daily newspaper the weekly flyers from the two remaining supermarkets in the area.   Every household in the area gets these flyers.  But if we all went to the store advertising ground beef at $2/lb, they couldn't meet the demand.   What they do when an advertised special is out of stock is give anyone who complains a rain check.  No one is demanding that their legislature outlaw this common, reasonable business practice.

This is slightly different from the ISP case.  ISPs are more like the electric company - they build capacity for projected demand, and every so often demand exceeds capacity and outages result.  "Net neutrality" would not have prevented this type of event.

[Richardk]

The overselling is nothing new but often overlooked. I remember when DSL was first available in the area and its max speed seemed slow but it was explained that "what you buy is what you get". That line going back to the phone company is "yours". I don't think that's quite true but the speed seems consistent.

On the other hand, cable was explained to me as a "party line". It's fast now but as more people get online and more bandwidth gets used, it's still a single cable with a fixed capacity. Now I don't know how it's wired but that makes sense to me.

I wonder which one is right (or both or neither?) but with on-demand movies, people downloading more everyday, web use, etc at some point they will hit the wires maximum capacity without the bandwidth hogs and then what?

I think Henry has it right that they want to line their pockets as much as possible while blaming heavy users for problems. The longer they can keep this up, the more they collect. At some point, they'll have a "Y2K" moment (max out the system) and then everyone will have to "pitch in".

It's like a cell phone company. You have $X to spend. You can invest it in upgrading your system (a true expense) or you can pay it out as sales perks for new accounts, which on their own add almost no load to your system but generate recurring monthly revenue.

You know they are going to feed the goose instead of upgrading the housing.

[The Original Henry]

ISPs are more like the electric company - they build capacity for projected demand, and every so often demand exceeds capacity and outages result.  "Net neutrality" would not have prevented this type of event.

That's right, but from the wrong angle. The ISPs are using this situation that they created as an excuse to argue against net neutrality because traffic shaping is their only way to control the "bandwidth hogs". If the ISPs wouldn't oversell capacity by such a huge amount then people who actually use their connections don't create problems. If there are no problems there's no need to complain about how net neutrality is killing their ability to stay in business. Once the ISPs leverage this into permission to shape traffic then you start getting into content favoritism and all of the other ugliness that goes with it. The big problem we have today is our elected officials are too clueless about all this technology stuff to even understand what's going on. To them it's just a "series of tubes" being clogged up by all these selfish bandwidth hogs. And it must be true because that's what the big-money ISPs are telling them.

The comparison to electricity is an apt one, except how many electric companies would drop a new 200 amp service to your house if they can't even come close to keeping up with current demand? They would either have to forgo adding new drops or they would have to upgrade their service capacity to meet reasonable peak demand before adding more users. The difference, of course, is that electricity is regulated by the public service commission, while the internet providers are allowed to operate like cattle thieves in the old west. And once they've stolen your cattle you get the blame because you were using too many cattle in the first place.

[The Gorn]

ISP customer from heaven: Grandma who uses email and Facebook (very occasionally) to check up on her grandbabies.

ISP customer from hell: college student with mad Bittorrent skillz

[The Original Henry]

On the other hand, cable was explained to me as a "party line". It's fast now but as more people get online and more bandwidth gets used, it's still a single cable with a fixed capacity. Now I don't know how it's wired but that makes sense to me.

I can help.

The difference has to do with the topology of the infrastructure. With phone service, there is one set of wires that go from the central office to each location. If a central office serves 1000 locations, there are 1000 sets of wires that converge at the central office. (It's a little more complex than that, but the complexities are out of scope.) It's basically a hub-and-spoke topology.

Cable is mostly a daisy-chain topology, where your cable comes from the next closest termination point and branches off to the next point after that, like branches on a tree.

With the daisy-chain topology there is no choice but to make the entire segment a single network because there is no physical separation in the wires. That means the capacity of the infrastructure is divided among the number of nodes in the segment. If cable can support 20Mbit throughput and there are 20 people on the segment, each node will only be able to utilize 1Mbit of simultaneous throughput. If they sold you a 20Mbit connection they have oversold their service by a factor of 20. There is a hard trade-off between number of nodes and available throughput at each node. The only way to increase it is to run more wire to create more segments that have fewer nodes each.

With the hub-and-spoke topology you have a dedicated connection to the central office. A 3Mbit DSL connection means you have the full 3Mbit throughput to the central office, no matter what the other 1000 nodes might be using at any given time.

The big problem with the overselling plagues the hub-and-spoke topology just as much, though. Once all 1000 of those 3Mbit DSL connections reach the central office, they have to be multiplexed and routed up to the carrier networks. The multiplexing equipment in each central office has a limited amount of combined throughput, so if they are multiplexing 3,000Mbit worth of DSL connections but their equipment can only do 100Mbit of combined throughput, they are oversold by a factor of 30. So while a DSL modem can send and receive data at a full 3Mbit to the central office, you hit a bottleneck with too many individual lines trying to merge through equipment that can't handle it all.

The problem is the ISPs are not overselling by reasonable factors like 2, 4 , or 6 times capacity. They are overselling their capacity by factors of 100 or more and then blaming the users for the problem.

[The Original Henry]

ISP customer from heaven: Grandma who uses email and Facebook (very  occasionally) to check up on her grandbabies.

ISP customer from hell: college student with mad Bittorrent skillz

Haha...nice one. Allow me to make one minor change for you:

ISP customer from heaven: Grandma who uses email and Facebook (very  occasionally) to check up on her grandbabies.

ISP customer from hell: everyone else

Sorry...I'm rambling too much on this thread. This just happens to be one of my biggest hot-button topics. I've been at war with my own ISP for years over this so I'm quite familiar with the internals of this whole situation. And I'm not even a heavy user...just average business stuff that happens mostly during the day.

[Richardk]

So the "story line" that I heard was basically right but not the whole story.

The big problem with the overselling plagues the hub-and-spoke topology just as much, though.

You're quite right and that jarred my memory. I totally forgot that a few years ago I could tell on my DSL service when "the kids" got out of school and I'm not talking my kids but everyone at school. There was a noticeable slow down in traffic shortly after the high schools got out, that lasted into the evening. 

Since then I've upgraded our service and my work has changed, so I don't notice that now and maybe the phone company upgraded its end as well. In the end there is only so much bandwidth that is available.

[benali72]

A couple comments in this thread stated that the ISP's have a point in being against NN because this is the only way to control bandwidth hogs.  Not so.  NN means price discrimination by content.  This could be used to control bandwidth hogs by charging more for activities we know will consistently require more bandwidth, such as movie downloads.  It could also be used for other purposes (discriminating against sites holding certain political or social views, deep packet inspection to spy on users' data transfers, etc.).

There are other techniques besides NN for controlling bandwidth hogs.  One is metered pricing.  This would be simliar to traditional landline phone service pricing.  As you use above a certain number of "units", you break into a new price tier.  So those who use more, pay more. 

The big advantage to metered pricing is that no "deep packet inspection" (DPI) is necessary.  So the ISPs do not have to look at your data to see how much you should be charged.  They don't look at content, they look only at usage. 

[The Original Henry]

Metered pricing will never work for internet. When you send a request for the content of a website you have no way to know - or control - how much data will come back to you as a result of that request. You may just want to read the latest news from your favorite news site, but your request for that page could come back with tons of ads, video content, pictures, or even intentionally padded junk just to run up your meter when all you really wanted was some text that could have been highly compressed.

Then there's the issue of background services doing phone-home stuff, software updates or activations that happen without the user knowing, etc. And what of the people with legitimate needs for large transfers? What about remote workers who need video conferencing to do their job, or the database guys that have to move gigabytes of data from server to server in the middle of the night. Should they be penalized just because they move more data than the arbitrary limits set by their ISP? You might say they should buy the business service, but when everybody starts buying the business service to avoid the meter we're going to be right back where we started, only with higher monthly premiums. What then?

This is a hole that the ISPs have dug for themselves by over-advertising and over-selling their ability to provide service for over a decade now. The government has given them nearly blanket immunity while they strong-arm and sue legitimate competitors out of business. Local governments and community organizations all across the country have tried launching community fiber projects to do what the ISPs refuse to do, only to have the ISPs lobby (read: bribe) state governments to make it illegal for anyone - including local governments - to do that. If I hadn't seen it for myself I would have never believed the level of corruption and mafia-like behavior that the ISPs are engaged in behind the scenes, all while receiving legislated immunity from our state and federal governments.

It's time to declare internet service a public utility and put all ISPs under the regulation of the public service commission, to be held to the same standards of service as other utilities like telephones and electricity.

[benali72]

>>>>>> It's time to declare internet service a public utility and put all ISPs under the regulation of the public service commission, to be held to the same standards of service as other utilities like telephones and electricity.

I agree with you 100%, Original Henry.  To me the internet is like the US postal service or electric utilities -- it is required national infrastructure that should be run for the benefit of the country as a whole (rather than strictly for the businesses engaged in it).   To me it is sad and rather incredible that NN is even a live issue in the US.  Seems like business lobbies can drive any public policy issue these days. 

[Richardk]

Like its been said "Follow the money".

Who "owns" the Internet?

Who pays for it?

Most importantly, who profits from it?

At a local level, our city has dark fiber all over town. One ISP told me that their biggest "unknown" is will the city someday compete against them by providing low-cost or free Internet access. Now just scale that up.

They make it sound like a 'cost center' but I suspect it's really profit driven, thus the over-selling.