Interesting -- comment from author -- F.C.C. to Look at Complaints Comcast Interferes With Net - New York Times

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Richard Bennett [richard () bennett com]
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 4:23 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:     F.C.C. to Look at Complaints Comcast Interferes With Net - New York Times

As the author of the article in question, I'll gladly defend it. The
fundamental point I was trying to make is simply that there's a huge
hole in the architecture of the IETF protocol suite with respect to
fairness. I'm a layer two protocol designer (Ethernet over UTP, WiFi 11n
MSDU aggregation, and UWB DRP are in my portfolio), and in the course of
my career have devoted an embarrassing amount of time to engineering
fairness in network access. Most the younger generation takes it as
given that if you understand TCP/IP you understand networking, but in
fact most of the progress in network architectures over the last 30
years has been at layers 1 and 2. And with the TCP-centric mindset, they
tend to believe that all problems of networking can be solved by the
application of the right RFCs. But in fact we all connect to our ISP
over a layer 2 network, and each of these has its own challenges and
problems.

The carriers are often criticized for not using packet drop to resolve
fairness problems, but that's not really the scope of packet drop, which
is actually a solution to Internet congestion, not to the lack of
fairness that may (or may not) be the underlying cause of the
congestion. We need a different solution to fairness at layer 3,
especially on layer 2 networks  like DOCSIS where packet drop closes the
door after the horse has run off.

The buffet analogy needs a little refinement. What the bandwidth hog
does is block the line to the all-you-can-eat buffet so that nobody else
can get any food. That's not a behavior that would be tolerated in a
restaurant, and it shouldn't be tolerated in a residential network.
Unfortunately, it wasn't the huge problem when DOCSIS was designed, so
the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of the technology don't address it, certainly
not as well as Full-Duplex Ethernet, 802.11e WiFi, and DSL do.

Some may argue that the Internet doesn't need a fairness system as it's
mostly a local problem, and I have some sympathy for that point of view.
But in the final analysis, we all know that some of our bits are more
important than others, and the network will work better if the layer 3
and layer 2 parts can communicate that sort of information between each
other.

I don't view this as a moral problem as much as an engineering problem.
Moral philosophy is certainly a fascinating subject (as is video
coding), but it's outside the scope of the current discussion.

RB

David Farber wrote:
> ________________________________________
> From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2 () bobf frankston com]
> Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2008 1:01 AM
> To: David Farber; 'ip'
> Subject: RE: [IP] Re:     F.C.C. to Look at Complaints Comcast Interferes With Net - New York Times
>
> Moral court again ...
>
> Does this mean I can't share files with my neighbor because of the cost of peering with a remote provider? Will 
> someone judge that backing up over the net is not an appropriate use of the network? Am I not allowed to backup to 
> peers?

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