Ironically, in the UK my cheap ISP, Plusnet used to do QOS for free.
The ASA (Advertising standards authority) decreed that ISPs that mark
traffic can't claim "totally unlimited" in ads - so they turned it off.
You can now pay more to opt into something similar.
It could be of course that there is more to it - eg. excuse to save on
kit for marking, or the ASA considered that internal "discrimination"
was going on - but IME over years with them I never saw evidence of that.
Anyway for a single line I think Plusnet and opt in/pay more would be
cheaper than AA (who IIRC, historically at least, don't classify/mark
but just do something simple like prio smaller packets - though I
haven't checked what they do now).
Dave Taht wrote:
I so wish that the network nuetrality debate included discussions such as these.
On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 5:53 PM, Jonathan Morton <[email protected]> wrote:
On 29 Mar, 2018, at 3:26 am, Dave Taht <[email protected]> wrote:
A finicky bit would be who to penalize when the underlying medium
(shared cable) is oversubscribed.
Two obvious reasonable solutions: share equally per subscriber, or share
proportionately to provisioned bandwidth per subscriber. Either should be
fairly straightforward to implement in an integrated qdisc, and either would
penalise the (instantaneously) heaviest users before affecting normal or light
users.
Equal sharing has the interesting side-effect that subscribers on lower tiers
don't notice backhaul congestion at all until higher tiers have been forced
down to their level. This potentially gives ISPs an incentive to avoid such
extreme congestion (by upgrading backhaul to match demand), since rational
customers won't pay for bandwidth they can't use. It also ensures that all
subscribers retain a reasonable, basic level of service during abnormal
congestion events.
Conversely, proportional sharing might give a perverse incentive, since paying
more gives a larger share of the pie, no matter how cramped it is. Artificial
scarcity could then be used to aid up-selling in an anti-consumer manner,
similar to what's been seen with Netflix. It would be naive to assume that
ISPs won't do this, given the opportunity, so it would be better to build only
the more consumer-friendly option into the software.
Theoretically, a middle ground could be to assign a sharing weight separately
from the provisioned bandwidth. This would permit, for example, subscribers
provisioned at 100:1 bandwidths to receive 4:1 service under congested
conditions. However, this would be under ISPs' control and fully documented,
and would therefore be a little too tempting to abuse.
- Jonathan Morton
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