[AusNOG] News: Telstra to clamp down on peer-to-peer

[Kris Price]

On 2/7/2013 9:31 AM, Mark Smith wrote:
[snippy]
> I think "violating network neutrality" to prioritise latency sensitive traffic over bulk throughput traffic can be a reasonable thing to do if necessary, and this is what Telstra seem to be announcing they're going to be doing. The only other alternative is to buy enough bandwidth until the congestion disappears, or rather, is shifted to where it only impacts the person who is causing the congestion (i.e. putting the problem where it is caused) (I'm ignoring the options of making those customers go away, or not soliciting them in the first place). In a residential broadband network, that means buying so much bandwidth in the core of your network that the traffic bottle neck link is always the individual customers' access circuits.  Customers are probably not paying enough to be able to do that, and if they expect it, that's like saying that all our roads should be congestion free, and the only congestion that should ever occur is on our single driveway
>   when we have two cars - ideal, but impractical. I think it is an unrealistic expectation, and if people think they access circuit speed is a guarantee of their Internet service speed they don't understand how the Internet works and haven't read their T&Cs.
[snip]

If your voice traffic is prioritised over my traffic, I qualify this is 
not neutral. It shouldn't be for the NBN Co (or whoever) to decide that 
one customer's traffic matters more than another customers because it's 
of a certain type.

Granted Voice is a bad example here since it's so small that 
prioritizing it isn't a big deal, but if this gets into things like 
video, you're now prioritizing some video services over others, then 
it's a real problem. When I buy a 100 Mbps service, I expect that I get 
to 100 Mbps. If the network upstream is congested, then I expect to get 
(my__paid_for_bw)/(num_cust*avg__paid_for_bw) share of that. I don't 
want to see that I'm paying for it, but another customer is getting more 
share because they use a type of protocol, or service that is favoured 
by the network.